Policy vacuum fear as Pickles tells councils to ignore housebuilding targets

Planning authorities can forthwith ignore the house building totals set for their areas in regional spatial strategies, communities and local governments secretary Eric Pickles has said.

In a letter to all chief planners he said the government would soon formally abolish the strategies and return powers over housing and planning to local councils. Meanwhile, they could treat the intention to abolish the strategies as “a material planning consideration” in reaching decisions. The same would apply to planning inspectors, Pickles said.

This means that councils that object to the volume of new building designated for their area need no longer allocate land or give planning permission to meet these goals.

But the government is yet to say what planning system it will put in place of the regional strategies. Fears that this will lead to a policy vacuum have driven planners and housebuilders to a rare show of unity.

In a joint statement, Royal Town Planning Institute president Anne Skippers and Planning Officers Society president David Hackforth warned:  “Dynamic and positive strategic planning is one of the keys to economic recovery and deficit reduction – not a barrier to them.

“It co-ordinates housing and economic growth, investment and infrastructure and environmental conservation across the broad areas necessary to meet both local and wider needs- it is hard to see, for example, how the Coalition Agreement’s commitment to maintaining the green belt could be achieved without strategic planning.”

They said the future of regional planning bodies needed consideration and proper management or else “the expertise, relationships, skills, commitment and positive examples of joint approaches built up at the regional level over a period of many years will be lost”.

The Home Builders Federation said Pickles’ letter had, “in effect given a green light to local authorities to halt decisions on development plans and planning applications”. It added: “With no details in place as to how a new system is going to work, the vacuum in guidance has obvious potential to disrupt house building for the foreseeable future and poses serious concerns for all those to whom housing matters.”

Executive chairman Stewart Baseley expressed alarm that South Oxfordshire District Council had said, the day after Pickles sent his letter, that it would suspend work on its core strategy. He feared other councils would follow suit.

“Scrapping the existing system without a replacement is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

South Oxfordshire leader Ann Ducker said: “I have long argued that decisions about housing numbers are best made at a local level and at long last it looks as if we will get the opportunity to do this.”

Denton Wilde Sapte real estate consultant Stephen Ashworth said it was unclear whether the RSSs had been abolished yet, and also what the status would be of those parts hat deal with non-housing matters such as transport and infrastructure. “What will happen to adopted local development framework documents that were prepared on the basis of the housing numbers in an abolished RSS?” he asked.

He added: “With [devolved] power should come responsibility, and the approach on this is far less clear. Local government and local communities will have to take responsibility for making sure that they meet housing, commercial and social needs – but the way that this will be managed is opaque, at best.”