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And now for the good news: two appeal decisions confirm status of protected countryside

Posted 4th Feb 22, filed under Planning

The ‘presumption’ penalty does not apply in the Kent Downs AONB (pic Dimitry, flickr)

While the recent Housing Delivery Test results might have brought despair to CPRE Kent, this week brings far better news for those who care about the county’s countryside, with two extremely significant appeal decisions being handed down.
On Monday (January 31) the Planning Inspectorate dismissed an appeal for 800 homes in the Green Belt at Broke Hill, north of Sevenoaks. Then on Wednesday we had an appeal for 374 homes, a care home and relief road dismissed for a site within the AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) at Hawkhurst Golf Club.
Common to both appeals was confirmation that, where planning policies protect areas of particular importance and provide a clear reason for refusing the development, the so-called ‘tilted balance’ presumption in favour of granting planning permission does not apply.
For Broke Hill, the policies of particular importance related to protection of the Green Belt. For Hawkhurst, it was protection of the High Weald AONB that was important. For both relevant councils – Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells – the presumption in favour of granting planning permission is otherwise engaged (as reported last week).
This is to be welcomed as there has been erosion of this protection over recent years, with inspectors increasingly finding the need for housing more important than Green Belt or AONB protection.
These appeals, however, reaffirm that within Kent’s Green Belt and AONBs the ‘presumption’ penalty does not apply while also providing precedent that the need to provide housing does not automatically override this protection.
This is good news.
There is always a flip side, though. And that is the continued pursuit of housing numbers over all else only increases pressure on those areas of countryside without Green Belt and AONB protection. Here it can be expected that the ‘presumption’ penalty will be imposed with even more vigour.
That is why CPRE Kent will continue to support calls for the presumption penalty to be scraped and a refocus on housing quality over quantity.
Nigel Britten, CPRE Kent’s Sevenoaks chair, made representations and spoke at the Broke Hill appeal, while the Tunbridge Wells committee made written representations to the Hawkhurst appeal.

The Broke Hill appeal decision can be viewed here
The Hawkhurst Golf Club appeal decision can be viewed here

Friday, February 4, 2022

Enough is enough! Scrap the Housing Delivery Test and stop rewarding developers’ failure to build homes already approved

Posted 26th Jan 22, filed under Planning

*There are already enough houses with planning permission or allocated within an adopted Local Plan for “another Maidstone” to be built in Kent in the next five years*

Richard Thompson, CPRE Kent planner, lays out how disastrous governmental planning policy is desperate news for Kent

The publication of the 2021 Housing Delivery Test results, combined with existing lack of five-year housing supplies, now puts Kent in the frankly ridiculous position where 11 out of its 13 councils are being punished for developers’ failure to build homes already approved.
The Housing Delivery Test is a backwards-looking assessment that compares how many houses having been built in a council’s area over the last three years against the government-set housing number for that area. The result is given as a percentage of homes built against this target, with increasingly severe punishments the lower this percentage is.
The National Planning Policy Framework five-year supply test is a forward-looking assessment of whether enough houses have been granted planning permission, or are allocated within a Local Plan, to ensure this same government-set housing requirement is likely to be built.
The point is, both tests see the imposition of a housing target on a council and then punishes it for not meeting this target. However, the reasons the targets are missed are largely factors completely outside of their control. That is, it can grant as many planning permissions and allocate as much land as it can, but unless it starts physically building the houses itself, it is at the mercy of market forces.
Private housebuilders will, however, only ever build at a rate that the local housing market can absorb. They are not going to build at a level that over-supplies a local housing market as this would force them to reduce prices and lower profits. They are also currently subject to practical constraints such as labour and material shortages.
As of March 31, 2020, (from when the most up-to-date Kent-wide numbers available) some 64,611 new houses either had planning permission or were allocated within an adopted Local Plan and were expected to be built within the next five years. For context, that’s already enough houses for another Maidstone planned for Kent over the next five years.
Yet this is not deemed enough.
Because of either the Housing Delivery Test or the five-year supply test, nine of Kent’s councils are subject to the most severe of punishments: an automatic presumption that speculative planning applications will be granted, even if they are contrary to democratically adopted Local Plans.
Of the remaining four councils, two must produce action plans setting out how they are to increase housebuilding in their areas. The full 2021 Housing Delivery Test results, along with the last published five-year supply figures, are shown below:

Area Name	Housing Delivery Test: 2021 measurement	Current five-year supply (years)	Consequence
Ashford	118%	4.54	Presumption
Canterbury	65%	5.13	Presumption
Dartford	105%	5.63	None
Dover	88%	5.56	Action plan
Folkestone and Hythe	85%	5	Action plan
Gravesham	57%	3.27	Presumption
Maidstone	170%	5.6	None
Medway	67%	1.78 – 3.03	Presumption
Sevenoaks	62%	2.89	Presumption
Swale	78%	4.6	Presumption
Thanet	78%	4.23	Presumption
Tonbridge and Malling	63%	2.89	Presumption
Tunbridge Wells	97%	4.83	Presumption

The real-world consequences for Kent of this absurd policy are stark. Councils across Kent are rushing through ever-increasingly unsustainable Local Plans in a fruitless endeavour to beat the presumption punishment. In Kent, this often entails allocating ever-increasing housing numbers on greenfield land, which is more profitable and hence more likely to developed quicker, making them more attractive to councils needing to boost housing delivery in the short term to meet the five-year supply test.
In the meantime, speculative applications are being allowed either by councils or at appeal (because of the current presumption punishment), causing anger and disenfranchisement among local communities.
And it is not just us saying this. In calling for the Housing Delivery Test to be suspended, Canterbury City Council chief executive Colin Carmichael has stated “it cannot be right to punish councils that are working hard to do what the government asks even when most of the levers councils need to pull are out of their control”.
We agree. Only it’s not just the councils that are being punished, it’s the people of Kent who have lost a democratic voice to oppose speculative development. It is Kent’s special countryside that is being sacrificed to this developer’s charter.
And the government wonders why the people of Kent are so angry with the current planning system.

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Surprise, surprise! Kent’s environment suffers the failings of flawed government planning policy

Posted 12th Feb 21, filed under Planning

The diggers and cement-mixers could be coming your way… but only if it suits the developers

Richard Thompson, CPRE Kent planner, shows how developers benefit from their own failure to build houses while our communities lose ever more green space

While the Housing Delivery Test might seem a dull and dry topic, often buried in the darkest, deepest recesses of a council’s website, its consequences should not be ignored.
When CPRE Kent reported on the 2019 Housing Delivery Test results, it was a bleak picture. Well, last month the 2020 Housing Delivery Test results were published. And the situation for Kent has worsened yet further.
The test works by comparing how many homes have been built in each council district against how many homes the district is deemed to have needed over a three-year period (though reduced this year for a month to allow for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic).
These homes-needed figures will either come from a council’s Local Plan if it was adopted within the last five years or, more commonly for Kent, be based on the government’s ‘top-down’ standard method formula for calculating housing numbers.
If at least 95 per cent of the homes deemed needed have been built within a council’s district over that period, the council is regarded as having passed the test.
More than 85 per cent though less than 95 per cent, the council is put on the naughty step and has to write an ‘action plan’ in which it promises to try harder.
If less than 85 per cent though more than 75 per cent, the consequences become serious as an extra 20 per cent is added to the number of homes that will need to be built in that district. This makes it increasingly hard for councils to demonstrate they have a five-year supply of houses – and where a council cannot demonstrate a five-year supply it becomes subject to the “presumption in favour of sustainable development”.
If fewer than 75 per cent of homes deemed needed have been built, that council area automatically becomes subject to the “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. This means that if a site can be considered to deliver ‘sustainable development’, then planning permission should be granted, even if there is no support from the council for housing in that location or the site sits outside the Local Plan.
As set out in the table below, the combination of the 2020 Housing Delivery Test results and accepted lack of five-year supply by councils now means the majority of Kent is subject to the presumption.
Further, Canterbury, Dover and Folkestone and Hythe are all in precarious positions should developers seek to challenge the five-year supply position (note that both Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells only just avoided falling into the 20 per cent buffer requirement because of the Covid adjustment).

What does this mean in practice? Only that the majority of Kent is now at increased risk of speculative planning applications for developer-led interpretations of ‘sustainable development’.
CPRE Kent has long campaigned that the standard method for calculating the number of homes is a blunt instrument that fails to recognise local constraints and actual housing needs. Yet the revision made to the standard method in December 2020 is likely to further increase pressure on Kent to take some of London’s deemed increase in housing need.
It is also our view that the Housing Delivery Test and five-year supply requirements are fundamentally flawed.
The reality is that the supply of homes is all but controlled by the housebuilders, who clearly will only build what the local market will absorb. Yet if this building rate falls below these unreasonable targets, often the only response a local authority can have is to grant yet more planning permissions or allocate yet more land for increasingly unsustainable development.
And so the cycle continues.
Or, put another way, while the development industry is rewarded for failure to build houses with an increasing suite of sites where ever-greater profits may be made, communities suffer the real-world consequences of yet more precious green spaces being allocated for development.

Friday, February 12, 2021

Overwhelmed by the development onslaught? This piece sheds a little light on what’s going on…

Posted 15th May 19, filed under Planning

A countryside under siege (pic Susan Pittman)

Many of us are aware that our natural environment is threatened like never before. We experience it through the constant grind of cement-mixers and bulldozers, but sometimes the bureaucratic process is not so clear. Here planning expert and CPRE supporter Michael Hand casts some light on what is driving the current onslaught.

We are under relentless and unparalleled pressure to accommodate significant growth, in particular to meet the demand for new housing.
However, many developments are concentrating on three- and four-bedroom executive homes and not enough ‘affordable’ housing is being delivered.
Much of the South East is experiencing pressure for this unprecedented growth in housing, driven by the ‘housing crisis’ and associated government policy to increase the delivery of new homes by setting higher targets for local authorities to meet.
As guardians of the countryside, local members of CPRE Kent have a key responsibility in upholding the core values of the organisation and defending the beauty of the county against poor-quality and inappropriate new developments.
There are 13 Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) in Kent and in many Local Plans have not been adopted.
This void in the planning framework has resulted in opportunistic and speculative applications (by companies such as Gladman Developments Ltd) seeking to exploit councils’ inability to demonstrate a five-year supply of housing land.
The effect, already adverse, has been exacerbated by a recent change by the government to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) through publication of a revised version on February 19.
Key changes include an amendment to specify that 2014-based population projections will provide the demographic baseline for the standard method of calculating local housing need rather than the lower 2016-based household projections, which could be used as a reason to justify lower housing need.
This clarification followed the publication of a major revision of the NPPF on July 24, 2018, which, inter alia, clarified the definition of ‘deliverable’.
To be considered deliverable, sites for housing should be available now, offer a suitable location for development now and be achievable with a realistic prospect that housing will be delivered on the site within five years.
As a consequence, it may be harder for LPAs to provide a five-year housing-land supply, as for example Local Plan allocations cannot generally be used in the calculation, except where “clear evidence that housing completions will begin on site within five years” exists.
The 2018 revision also introduced the Housing Delivery Test for LPAs, a failure in delivery of which kick-starts the “presumption in favour of sustainable development”.
The first round of Housing Delivery Test results was published in February this year, with 108 councils falling short and 86 required to add more land for housing to Local Plans as a result.
For a number of authorities, this confirms the need to apply a 20 per cent buffer to their housing requirement, with potential ramifications for their ability to demonstrate a five-year housing land supply.
A result of these changes is that speculative applications will still be common practice in the future – and that is why CPRE Kent needs to keep building a strong presence to monitor and respond to inappropriate development proposals.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019