DCLG publish criteria for determining very poor planning authority performance

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Performance to be measured over two years

We intend to set these thresholds so that only very poor performance  would result in an authority being designated: where 30% or fewer major applications have been determined within the statutory period or more than 20% of major decisions have been overturned at appeal….

the designation process would follow  automatically, following the publication of the relevant statistics on processing speeds and appeal outcomes for the year, were an authority to appear below the thresholds that have been set. For the first year, before any initial designations are made, authorities will be given an opportunity to correct any gaps or errors in the existing data [&]; cases that were subject to environmental impact assessment will also be taken into account.

The first designations made would be in October 2013.

The funniest section is on how you get out of special measures

Designated authorities will not necessarily be dealing with a significant number of applications for major development, so we propose that any assessment of improvement should be based on a range of other considerations that we will set out in policy

 

Nick Clegg’s Garden Cities Speech in Full

Cabinet Office

Right now, the numbers are not looking good. We’re already building 100,000 fewer houses than we need each year. Over the next decade, each year, the UK’s going to grow by around 230,000 households. Last year we managed to complete 117,000 – just over half. The credit crunch has certainly exacerbated the problem – with mortgages and deposits harder to come by. But this housing crisis has been a long-time in the making: we’ve been under-building for decades.

Unless we take radical action we will see more and more small communities wither, our big cities will become ever more congested as we continue to pile on top of each other and the lack of supply will push prices and rents so high that – unless you or your parents are very rich – for so many young people living in your dream home is going to be a pipe dream. We’re already at the point where, on average, if you don’t get help from your parents, you can’t afford to buy your first home until you’re thirty five. The risk is that’s going to get even worse.

…

And what’s most staggering about all of this is that everybody knows it. Every political party agrees this is a problem, every Government promises to fix it. But, until now, the political establishment has been overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, tinkering round the edges and responding with timidity, where only ambition will do.

It’s not hard to understand why. The local politics of new development can be very tricky.
And we face some challenging misperceptions. A few years ago the Barker Review found that, if you ask people how much of the country they think is built-up, most say over half. The same study found that it’s actually more like 13. 5%. And now, with very little money around, it’s an even bigger challenge to work out how to build more homes at a time of fiscal restraint.

But the hard realities can no longer be ignored. There’s only one way out of this housing crisis: we have to build our way out. And, just as the urgency should propel us to act, the politics of housebuilding is, in my view, shifting – and that should embolden us too.

New development will always make some people uncomfortable. Its absolutely right that we are vigilant against environmental damage and we always strive for development that is sympathetic to its surroundings. That’s why, when the Government reformed planning law last year, we listened to campaigners and made sure important protections were kept in place.

But we’re also witnessing a kind of generational shift in this debate. The babyboomers of the ‘50s and ‘60s, people who were largely catered for by the massive housing expansion after the Second World War, are now watching their children struggle. The plight of the next generation is making what was an abstract housing shortage increasingly tangible and real.

Parents want their sons and daughters to have good, safe, affordable options, close to work, close to public transport, close to hospitals and schools. Rural areas want young families to stay in the area to help keep the community alive. And as we, as a society, become more open to development that creates the space for politicians to be bold.

So now is the moment for politicians of all stripes to get behind a major housing push. This will need to span more than one parliament. We need to work together; and we need to be ambitious in our approach.

…

We looked and we couldn’t find any records of a single new development of over 13,500 homes in this country since the 1970s. We simply don’t have the right incentives and levers to drive sustainable development at scale – that needs to change. When the need for houses is so great, it’s not enough to have a planning system. You have to have a plan – and you have to think big.

So, I can announce that the Coalition has identified major housing projects that have hit a wall – and we are intervening directly to unblock them. We are working with a number of large locally-led schemes, ranging from 4000 to 9,500 units in size which, in total will deliver up to 48,600 new homes.

The sites have been held up for various reasons: cash-flow problems following the banking crash; bureaucracy and licensing issues, a lack of upfront investment for infrastructure. Some for up to ten years. And while all of them have strong local supporters, their communities are, understandably, becoming frustrated by these delays.

So we will unlock the barriers to investment. We will make sure that bureaucracy does not hold back these developments: bringing partners together to get action on the ground. And, where investment is required, I can announce new funding. We will provide £225m of government money which will also leverage private investment to effectively de-risk these or similar projects and get them moving.

We will work with prospective developments and ensure that any public sector investment secures value for money from the taxpayer and once these developments are complete, the taxpayer will get that money back.

…

That’s a first step. But we need to go further. We need to go back to our roots.

In the early 20th Century the great planners of the time – Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin were tasked with housing Britain’s workers following industrialisation and they realised they would have to build anew.

As the Victorian slums were cleared away, they drew up plans for modern, self-contained, green cities. Places which offered the dynamism and opportunity of urban living, but maintained the harmony and natural beauty of country life as well, where industrial hubs, green spaces and residential areas would be carefully connected by cutting edge transport and infrastructure – everything meticulously thought through. Garden cities: the town in the country; the best of both worlds.

Letchworth was the first in 1903; then Welwyn. Then came garden suburbs – extensions to established urban centres which followed the same principles. Like Hampstead Garden Suburb – not far from here. A movement was born, and it swept across the world. You can still see its influence in America, South Africa, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, Hong Kong, Brazil. Here in the UK, post-war governments were guided by the garden city philosophy as they sought, literally, to rebuild Britain following the ravages of war. In 1946 the New Towns Act was passed, and dozens of New Towns and urban extensions followed: from Corby to Cumbernauld; from Basildon to Bracknell.

It’s time to rediscover that proud tradition of creating new places. We can either condemn ourselves to haphazard urban sprawl – the surest way to damage the countryside, we can cram ever more people into existing settlements, concreting over gardens and parks – and bear in mind we already build the smallest homes in Western Europe, or we can build places people want to live. Places which draw on the best of British architecture and design, which have their own identity and character, which – rather than destroy the countryside, actually have a crucial role in keeping it intact. Places put together in a way that makes sense for modern British families. People who want gardens; who want to live sustainably; no need to be able to move easily between work and home. Garden Cities and Suburbs for the 21st Century.

Stevenage, Peterborough, Milton Keynes – these places didn’t spring up of their own accord. People got together and made them happen: through imagination; ambition; leadership. Not every New Town was been perfectly designed – but the fact is, people like living in these places. More people now commute into Milton Keynes than out of it: it’s economically independent and still growing strong. It’s time to learn from the success stories and replicate them once more.

So while the Coalition won’t deliver whole new cities overnight, in the Housing Strategy that the Prime Minister and I launched last year, we committed to running a competition to promote a wave of larger-scale projects, where there’s clear local support and private sector appetite. We committed to publishing a prospectus setting out more detail on what we expect from local authorities and developers, and what we can offer in return. We’re hammering out the detail of that now – and there’s some fairly lively debate happening in government about how to do this. But I’m very clear: I want the prospectus to offer real and meaningful incentives so that it encourages projects that are big and bold.

Government needs to get better at encouraging these kinds of long-term developments, which, by definition, take time and need certainty. Departments aren’t used to thinking beyond the next Spending Review, let alone the next Parliament – but we need to shift our sights. Of course, we can’t start making decisions for the next spending round now and we need to be realistic about the pressure on the public finances, which will continue for some time. But we can and we must ensure local areas have the time and the direction to prepare their bids.

I want us to make the best offers to the most ambitious proposals. So not just 5000 new homes; but fifteen thousand, twenty-five thousand.

I want us to encourage projects which are sustainable and socially diverse. Where it makes sense I want us to designate more, new greenbelt around new settlements– that’s something no government has really done for a generation.

We’ll need to find ways to create more certainty for large scale projects. And, in general, I think we need to move to longer timeframes in the way we budget for capital.

And I want us to offer these projects and communities real financial freedoms. The Coalition has created a new power for local areas to borrow against future business rate revenues– tax increment financing, or ‘TIF’. Councils tell me that is a massive help in raising investment for local infrastructure. And, personally, I’m very keen that we look at these kinds of financial freedoms in the context of new garden cities and suburbs too.

So we’ll be saying more shortly, setting out the precise process. And, what will be crucial in all of this is that, while central government provides support, incentives and encouragement, that process will be locally-led. I lead a party that is localist to its core. We now have a chance to show that localism can deliver in a big way.  I want us to prove that, when it comes to major development, we don’t need to revert to central planning, we can embrace a new era of community planning instead.

So I urge the people in this room to help make this a success. Garden Cities and Suburbs for the 21st Century. We can rise to this challenges, but only if we see the opportunity too. This isn’t just about bricks and mortar, it’s about giving British families the homes they need, giving children new communities to grow up in, creating places that will grow and thrive and become part of the fabric of this great country. This is the moment to revive the ambition of those who came before us, in order to create a better future for those who will follow us. In keeping with our great British traditions: it’s time to think big.

Ecotowns Mark 2 as Clegg to Announce Competition for New Garden Cities and Suburbs

Guardian

[In a speech Thurs Clegg will]  detail the government’s plans for a competition to build new “garden cities and suburbs”, modelled on the more ambitious new towns such as Letchworth and Welwyn, built in the early 20th century, and Corby, Basildon and Milton Keynes, created after the second world war.

“Unless we take radical action we will see more and more small communities wither, our big cities will become every more congested as we continue to pile on top of each other and the lack of supply will push prices and rents so high that – unless you or your parents are very rich – for so many young people living in your dream home is going to be a pipe dream,” the draft of Clegg’s speech says. “There’s only one way out of this housing crisis: we have to build our way out.”

Statistics released last week show that in the 12 months to the end of September, new housing starts fell 9% to less than 100,000, though completions rose by 6% to 117,190.

The government is also competing with half a century of under-building of new homes, and the failure of the Labour government’s ambitious “eco-towns” project which, similar to the coalition’s new towns programme, had intended to construct new settlements of up to 20,000 homes.

Clegg will argue that the “politics of housebuilding is shifting” as parents are increasingly worried about how their children will get on to the housing ladder – potentially counterbalancing a long history of local opposition to new developments. The average age at which people can now afford their first home has risen to 35.

“As we, as a society, become more open to development that creates the space for politicians to be bold,” say extracts of Clegg’s speech.

Clegg will announce that the government has found “a number of large locally-led schemes” – of between 4,000 and 9,500 homes – which had “hit a wall” and pledge to “intervene directly”, including providing funding in the form of loans which would be repaid when the homes were sold. If all the schemes went ahead, they would build 48,600 new flats and houses, he adds. All were ready to start building new year if they could be helped, said sources close to Cameron.

However the deputy prime minister is set to disappoint housing experts who have called on the government to release public land to speed up new developments by only demanding payment once the homes were built and sold, signalled sources.

How will this be different from Ecotowns, except perhaps the subtle dropping of any reference to exemplary standards of sustainability and the addition of a reference to being ‘locally led’.  Garden Cities and Suburbs are a good thing the problem of course is that without a strategic planning exercise they are unlikley to be built as the localities most in need of new housing and with the greatest shortage of of brownfield sites are in the greatest denial (look at Herforshire and West Sussex for example).  So it is difficult to see any new candidates other than those that survived the Ecotowns process and a couple of possible new sites that have been released since.  Is the government hoping that the private and voluntary sectors will bring forward new schemes and then try to ‘bring around’ their local planning authorities later?  If so the lesson of the Ecotowns competition is that full out opposition pays off, because then the development goes ‘eslewhwere’ even though in many cases the housing need remains unresolved (there were of course honorable exceptions uch as Norwich where the local authorities came up with a batter site).  A much better way of organising such a competition is to challenge those local authorities with the greatest housing shortage and furthest off from delivering a sound plan to come up with bold ideas, in whatever form, to sole the shortage or face action.