Earlier this year, an article by Tom Calver (the Times’ data editor) revealed that the average deposit for a house in London has reached £125,000. The chronic undersupply of housing in the UK is an inter-generational crisis, and four years on from the winning Conservative manifesto which pledged "300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s”, the tide has not turned.

After former cabinet minister and MP for Chipping Barnet (with a wafer-thin majority) Theresa Villiers led a 100-strong rebellion against mandatory housebuilding targets in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill in November 2022, Michael Gove - Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities - was left reeling.

On 22 December, the compromise was unveiled: an open consultation on ‘reforms to national planning policy’. The purpose of the consultation was to gauge the public’s view of fresh amendments to the National Planning Policy Framework – the NPPF for short.

The NPPF, which was rolled out by the coalition government in 2012, sets the general direction and tone for local plans produced by local planning authorities. As originally drafted, it contains key commitments to boost housing supply.  

The second sentence of the ‘new and improved’ NPPF, which formed the subject of the public consultation, signalled the change of direction quite clearly: the statement of intent for local plans to provide for housing has been softened to ‘sufficient’ housing that can be produced ‘in a sustainable manner’. This sort of qualifying and restrictive language appeared throughout the text.

• Housing needs assessments were framed as an ‘advisory starting point’, which can be overlooked if out of keeping with ‘particular characteristics of an authority’.
• Local plans need not accommodate objective housing need if ‘there is clear evidence of past over-delivery’ or doing so ‘would mean building at densities significantly out of character with the existing area’.
• Agricultural land should generally be reserved for ‘food production’.
• The circumstances in which the presumption of sustainable development may be rebutted were widened – for example, it would no longer be necessary for the local planning authority to have at least a three-year supply of deliverable housing sites or to have delivered at least 45% of its housing supply requirement over the previous three years.
• Meeting an area’s ‘objectively assessed needs’ was no longer expressed as a ‘minimum’ requirement, but the general destination for local plans – reference to helping neighbouring authorities meet their needs was removed entirely.
• Green belt boundaries were described as absolute red lines, not to be ‘reviewed and altered’ for any purpose.
• The requirement for local planning authorities, in certain circumstances, to overshoot (‘buffer’) their minimum five-year supply of deliverable sites was also removed.

Some of the proposed changes were more subtle. When discussing the diversity of the country’s housing need, the only types of properties given specific mention were ‘retirement housing, housing-with-care and care homes’ – and the Housing Delivery Test, which measures the delivery of sites against local housing requirements, was amended to count homes for which permission has been granted, even if those homes have yet to be delivered. This latter, technical change is crucial, because it determines whether authorities are under-delivering and need to produce action plans.

At the same time as giving local authorities greater discretion to refuse planning permission for residential developments, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities was very concerned with appearances – not only were local planning authorities prompted to prepare ‘local design codes, in line with the National Model Design Code’, but, between them, the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘beauty’ were given five extra mentions. Alongside health and safety, planning policies should aim to achieve ‘beautiful buildings’; pedestrian and cycle routes should no longer be ‘attractive’, but ‘beautiful’; strategic policies should ‘support beauty and placemaking’. In fact, by far the longest amendment to the body of the NPPF was an incongruous seven-and-a-half-line discussion of the finish of ‘mansard roof extensions’.

It should be noted that not everything in the revised NPPF was tilted against development. The assessment of housing requirements for the ‘20 most populated cities and urban areas’ would be uplifted, with ‘brownfield and other-utilised urban sites’ to be reserved for higher density development; although it is unrealistic for such a limited uplift to make a meaningful dent in the housing shortage that spans the entire country. There were also some positive gestures with respect to environmental sustainability, with a renewed openness to the ‘wind energy development’, ‘repowering and life-extension of existing renewables sites’ and ‘energy efficiency improvements through the adaptation of existing buildings’.

Taken in aggregate, the proposed changes to the NPPF suggest a policy shift away from residential and economic development, and they muddy otherwise clear and direct guidelines for decision making by local planning authorities. In direct response to the consultation, over a dozen local planning authorities have withheld or delayed their local plans. For now, we will need to wait and see how the proposed changes are received by the wider public.