Policy Exchange – NPPF not Pro-Sprawl Enough!

Alex Morton of the Policy Exchange comments on the practitioners draft of the NPPF at Planning Resource

He perceptively argues that the draft takes planning back to the late 1990s, I would argue further 1980 is more like it.

the NPPF continues to endorse development planning by councils, the system created by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 that substitutes public sector planning for market demand. The framework mentions plan or planning 453 times. It mentions price or pricing four times. It requires councils to set out the scale and location of development.

The Government needs to use the NPPF to move away from this system, as other reforms are doing, not endorse it. For instance, the coalition wants a presumption in favour of sustainable development. Given that developers build homes because there is demand, a planning application is proof of demand. So we should require councils to scrap the “predict and provide” model that invariably underestimates demand.

If the NPPF is confirming the abolition of national targets, thus allowing developers to respond to demand and provide what people want to buy, it should prevent councils from imposing targets of their own on issues such as density. It should require councils to respond to growth, not control it.

It should be no surprise Alex that a planning document mentions the word plan a lot. Similarly an Argos catalogue will mention the word price a lot.

So planning should move away from setting out the scale, location or density of development – anything else left – did you forget to leave out design? Yes im sure that was an oversight.

This is the increasingly way out ‘think tank’ that argues we should convert all our employment land to housing, pro-growth eh. A policy that would simply lead to no planning authority allocating land for employment because it would go to housing. Perhaps realising the planet size logic in their scheme he wants to do away with plans at all. So developers could build where and when they wanted, irrespective of infrastructure or transport, providing they could pay off the locals. If we had had this system in 1947 today ranch style housing would spread from London to Brighton, London would be built at Houston densities – it would be four times bigger.  The Policy Exchange has already argued for a doubling of the size of the Motorway network which this uncontrolled sprawl would require, such a good use of public funding which our public services are being cut.It has also argues in 2008 that northern cities should close down and the unemployed should move to the South.  What about the Green Belt, well it wants rid of that as well.

The Policy Exchange was founded in 1991 by Archie Norman, formally head of Chartwell Land and Asda, and its extreme and American Hard Right anti-planning agenda is little more than a front for the interests of the city firms, landowning and property interests of those that fund it.  Following Newsnight and other exposes it has gained a reputation for research backed by ideology rather than evidence.

It is a member of the European Wide network of right wing think tanks The Stockholm Network, a group with close links to climate change deniers, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and receives funding it receives from industry giants such as Exxon Mobil as well as many big pharma firms.

It is time to throw away the sham.  Rather than being a liberal and progressive think tank on environmental and planning issues the Policy Exchange has almost exactly the same ideological position as extreme US think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where I have argued on here that originated the ideas of ‘localism’ and ‘neighbourhood planning’ over a decade ago as a veil for unrestricted exercise of property rights.

Alex with that position dont expect anyone in UK planning or local government to take you bunch of sprawl loving clowns seriously.