Housing and Planning Minister reveals during committee grilling that Government has no timeline for implementation of NPPF changes

The Government does not know when its response to the consultation on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) will be released, the Minister of State for Housing and Planning and a senior civil servant have confirmed.

Speaking to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee on Monday (24 April), the minister, Rachel Maclean, and the Director General for Regeneration at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Emran Mian, told MPs that they were not sure how long it would take to consider the 26,000 responses the Government received to the consultation.

They added that detailed guidance on the raft of changes set to be implemented under the new NPPF would not be published until the end of the consultation process.

The committee's chair, Clive Betts MP, raised concerns about the timeline, noting that "[There is] going to be an awful lot of uncertainty for the next two years while these changes are thought about before they are implemented."

The consultation proposed a long list of changes to the NPPF, including the removal of the requirement for councils to continually demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, new lines that stress councils are not required to revise Green Belt boundaries or build at densities out of character even if they are set to miss their house building targets, and the ability to include past over-delivery in their housing numbers.

It also included an amendment emphasising that: "The outcome of the standard method is an advisory starting-point for establishing a housing requirement for the area."

In the course of the two-and-a-half-hour committee meeting, Betts pressed Maclean on a number of proposals.

On the “Urban Uplift”, a policy that establishes a 35% uplift in housing target for the 20 largest urban authorities, Betts suggested that the number "was plucked out of thin air".

Maclean said: "We're committed to urban uplift figure because we think it's the right thing to do, and we know that those urban areas - 20 of them - based on the analysis we've done, we do think it's right that they absorb more housing."

But in response, Betts commented: "Well, I think if I was a local authority and I had got some good lawyer behind me, I would challenge a figure of 35% where there's absolutely no justification for that you can show.

"The last time when Emran came to the committee, he accepted that it was plucked out of thin air, the figure. There's no assessment of need on each local authority."

Elsewhere, Kate Hollern MP questioned provisions that would hand local authorities powers to scrutinise poorly performing developers, noting that it "will open LAs to legal challenge".

Maclean said that the Government's counsel had legally analysed and tested the policy, "and that would have been taken into account".

On this point, Mian noted that he would expect local authorities to use the powers only where they are "pretty sure of their ground".

Mian and Maclean were later quizzed on more recent proposed changes to planning policy – separate from the NPPF consultation – on the way planning permission for development on Crown land is permitted.

Just last week, the Home Office was subject to a judicial review challenge over its use of permitted development rights to avoid the need to obtain planning permission for its plan to accommodate 1,700 asylum seekers on Wethersfield Airfield.

Current legislation allows the Secretary of State to permit development on crown land in the case of emergency. However, the proposed changes are intended to make the powers clearer, according to Mian.

In detailing the circumstances in which emergency permission should be given without consulting, Mian said: "If there wasn't a public consultation, the Government would have to be very very clear on why it's so urgent that there isn't a possibility to build in time for public consultation.

"The only kind of circumstances where we envisage that might be needed is, for example, in response to a health emergency or a pandemic where you need to ensure very, very quickly ensure that on Crown land, you have facilities, for example, testing."

"That would be a case where you possibly have to stand that up within a matter of days, and there wouldn't be necessarily the time to be able to carry out consultation. If that kind of case for urgency was not made, then the way in which we laid out the provisions in the bill is that it would go down the regular route rather than the urgent route, and then there would have to be public consultation."

Betts then questioned whether housing asylum seekers on a piece of Government land would be counted as urgent, to which Maclean replied: "Not necessarily – it would be very much for the Home Secretary at the time to come forward with the need - the evidence need - for that, and then it would be..... for the Secretary of State who is accountable to Parliament of course to determine the application."

Other points made during the session included:

• The Government will use the projections of the 2021 census, which will be released in 2024, to "look again at those numbers and we will look again at [the standard method for calculating housing need] and see if any changes need to be made to it."
• Plans to replace the duty to cooperate with an "alignment test" have not been fleshed out, and there is currently no proposal as to what that alignment test will look like.
• Further consultations are planned, specifically on environmental, net zero and climate change commitments. These will be launched after Royal Assent of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.

Adam Carey