Monday and Tuesday this week saw me at the 2nd UK Passivhaus Conference at the Barbican Centre in London.
There were around 250 attendees consisting of a fair smattering of old AECB-heads, a fair few BRE types, a sprinkling of academics and a good gaggle of "people who had come to learn." Consequently, the conversations ranged from the basic "This is what a Passivhaus is" through to the arcana of extreme building physics. The Passivhaus Trust itself would seem to be in rude health, energised by the fusing of the AECB's enthusiasm with the BRE's clout and professionalism.
Not everyone in the sustainable building arena buys into Passivhaus as a concept. Some decry its enforcement of MVHR (mechanical ventilation), others are suspicious of its cult-like qualities — it's very much the brain child of Wolfgang Feist and he gets to decide who and what gets certified, as well as remaining the owner of the PassivHaus Institute. But the beauty of PassivHaus is that it's a relatively simple standard, it appears to be based on solid building science, it's been shown to deliver what it says on the tin, and it's an internationally recognised standard, thanks mostly to the tireless promotional work of Feist himself. And in the UK in particular, Passivhaus still represents a giant leap forward on current building standards, even low energy ones, so it's not hard to see why the green building movement (OK some of it!) is so keen to promote it.
Day Two was for me the more interesting. It delved into a variety of technical topics and it would have been good to be able to sit in on them all, but the nature of the breakout sessions was that you had to choose one from three. Mark Siddall was particularly impressive on the subject of thermal by-passes and wind washing, a topic that lies beyond the confines of Passivhaus, but goes a long way towards explaining why low U value walls and roofs don't perform as designed. I also sat in on a good session given by Paul Tuohy (Strathclyde Uni) and Prof Chis Tweed (Cardiff) about the problems of post-occupancy monitoring. Everybody and their aunt calls for more of it, but the process is fraught with difficulties and the results are sometimes meaningless because there are so many incidental factors at work. Co-heating, in particular, was singled out as being hugely unreliable which is interesting because the practice involves keeping the temperature in a building constant over a long period and measuring the resultant heat loss, which reminds me of the tests run all those years ago by Actis to show that their multifoil was the equal of 250mm mineral wool.
Another observation was the ever growing interest in natural building materials and breathable fabrics. This is another area on which Passivhaus is silent: it emphasises airtightness above almost everything else, but has nothing to say on vapour permeability or embodied energy. Should these be included? Is there good practice to be passed on here or is it just getting too complicated?
And, more than once, the subject of quality control came up. Much of the success of Passivhaus is down to ensuring that the building is designed right and built right and the official or certified Passivhauses have to go through an expensive (like £2,000) and fairly rigorous auditing process. The materials need to be checked off, invoices examined, photographs taken. All very anal and tedious but critical in delivering quality. Some people are of the opinion that the certification process lies at the very heart of Passivhaus and is the main reason for its monitored success, but others feel that it's much too expensive and the certification cost needs to be reduced. It's a political point as well because Feist's PassivHaus Institute is resolute in insisting that they remain the police force here and they fear that any move away from this will inevitably lower standards. The UK Passivhaus Trust is firmly in Feist's camp but other countries (notably the USA) are taking a more relaxed view, claiming that the standards should be open and usable by all.
In one sense they already are. Anybody can look up what the Passivhaus standards are, anyone can purchase the design package (the Passivhaus Planning Package), anyone can claim to build to these standards. But where is the quality control? Without some form of rigorous certification process, how can you really know you have built a genuine Passivhaus and not a pale imitation that doesn't deliver energy savings as designed? It's a big issue, arguably the biggest one surrounding the Passivhaus movement. And it's interesting to note that of the 30,000 Passivhaus buildings constructed to date around the world, only about 10% have been through the official certification process.
Which brings me onto my final point, if it's the certification process which is the BIG THING, then maybe there's nothing much wrong with our building regs as they now stand, if only we built them properly.
27 Oct 2011
3 Oct 2011
Brownfields, no gardens
Last Wednesday evening (actually Sep 21, the day before I locked horns with the National Trust), I attended a talk put on by Cambridge Architectural Research and presented by David Birkbeck, who runs Design for Homes, and, incidentally, someone I have known for many years, having once written for Building Homes which David once edited. David is also a selfbuilder and I have written about his exploits here and here.
But he wasn't in Cambridge to talk about selfbuild, he was instead chewing over the Housing Design Awards and how the styles and fashions have changed over the years. He covered the last 15 years, the time that marked the end of the cul-de-sac style developments of the 80s and 90s, and the move into brownfields, Georgian densities, and flats. And Poundbury-style site layouts.
He was interesting on Poundbury, and quite critical of the tortuous road layouts it uses (all curvy and wiggly and seemingly chaotic). Much better to go the whole hog and build squares and streets, like the Georgians, and indeed he showed that the current crop of award winning schemes all tend to do this. (I'd pepper you with examples but, of course, I wasn't taking notes and I have trouble remembering stuff a week ago. In any event, you can access them at the Housing Awards Website.)
But towards the end of the presentation, the subject of gardens came up. Or rather, the lack of them. The current trend is to move away from simple balconies towards roof terraces which aren't overlooked, so you get a bit of decking and a planting bed or two, next to which you can place your sunlounger and pretend you are somewhere else. Often, these areas are situated at first or second floor level and have someone else's home underneath, so they are in fact variations on the intensive green roof. David mentioned that there are already a few claims coming in for water penetration through these green roofs into the homes below and he suspected that we would see more of this over the coming years. It's not altogether easy or practical to build a roof garden, but that's one of the consequences of our predilection towards building at Georgian densities (although I don't recall the Georgians' going for roof gardens!)
I like a bit of irony, so I couldn't help thinking that the current National Trust anti-NPPF campaign, if successful, will continue this urban cramming trend we have embarked upon (otherwise known as the brownfield first policy). The flipside of "Protect Our Countryside" is "Ban the Garden."
But he wasn't in Cambridge to talk about selfbuild, he was instead chewing over the Housing Design Awards and how the styles and fashions have changed over the years. He covered the last 15 years, the time that marked the end of the cul-de-sac style developments of the 80s and 90s, and the move into brownfields, Georgian densities, and flats. And Poundbury-style site layouts.
He was interesting on Poundbury, and quite critical of the tortuous road layouts it uses (all curvy and wiggly and seemingly chaotic). Much better to go the whole hog and build squares and streets, like the Georgians, and indeed he showed that the current crop of award winning schemes all tend to do this. (I'd pepper you with examples but, of course, I wasn't taking notes and I have trouble remembering stuff a week ago. In any event, you can access them at the Housing Awards Website.)
But towards the end of the presentation, the subject of gardens came up. Or rather, the lack of them. The current trend is to move away from simple balconies towards roof terraces which aren't overlooked, so you get a bit of decking and a planting bed or two, next to which you can place your sunlounger and pretend you are somewhere else. Often, these areas are situated at first or second floor level and have someone else's home underneath, so they are in fact variations on the intensive green roof. David mentioned that there are already a few claims coming in for water penetration through these green roofs into the homes below and he suspected that we would see more of this over the coming years. It's not altogether easy or practical to build a roof garden, but that's one of the consequences of our predilection towards building at Georgian densities (although I don't recall the Georgians' going for roof gardens!)
I like a bit of irony, so I couldn't help thinking that the current National Trust anti-NPPF campaign, if successful, will continue this urban cramming trend we have embarked upon (otherwise known as the brownfield first policy). The flipside of "Protect Our Countryside" is "Ban the Garden."
29 Sept 2011
The National Trust plays its hand
Following on from last week's blogger's briefing, The National Trust has now published its promised Planning for People manifesto which sets out an alternative vision for NPPF. I wish I had had this to hand before attending their meeting because they all knew what was in it and I was shooting in the dark.
First of all it's short. Even shorter than the NPPF (which if nothing else is winning plaudits for its brevity.) In fact its only 4 pages long and the only page you need read is page 4, which sets out its 10-point list.
Let's look at the juicy ones:
Planning should promote genuinely sustainable development. In particular, the presumption in favour of sustainable development should only apply when plans or proposals can be shown to deliver multiple positive outcomes for people and the environment as well as economic growth.
Essentially this a moan about there being no definition of what sustainable means in NPPF. It's a fair point, but I think the idea is that local authorities are the best judge of this and what may be sustainable in Norfolk may not be in Merseyside, so a blanket national definition would be counterproductive. Although many have criticised the inclusion of the s-word here, it's worth pointing out that previously presumption had always been in favour of plain old vanilla development and you could therefore argue that the inclusion of the word sustainable is a move towards environmental protection - i.e. NPPF is more weighted to the environment than the old system. I'm not altogether convinced this is true, it's hard to pin anything down in NPPF, but my hunch is that adding the word sustainable to the palette is a very powerful tool and would enable, for instance, small towns to resist encroachment by supermarkets on the grounds that it is unsustainable for other local businesses.
So all in all, I think it's probably a good thing that there is no definition of what sustainable means at a national level.
Clause 130 of the Localism Bill should be removed. We are opposed in principle to a provision that privileges financial inducements within the decision making process.
Having sorted out my confusion about where Clause 130 resides (actually clause 130 of the NPPF just happens to be relevant to all this, but that appears to be a coincidence), I think this is alluding to the cash for sprawl option, which obviously the Trust don't like. Now I've read and re-read this Clause and it's very hard to see exactly what it's on about and how it differs from the shenanigans that all developers now face over S106 payments and Community Infrastructure Levies. If the locals get to decide where and how the developer's bribe is spent, then methinks this is a move for the better, because developer's bribes are nothing new and the old system has now institutionalised them. I guess what they are worried about is that under the new system, a developer will be able to simply buy planning permissions, or at least overrule the local planning authority by throwing goblets of dosh at everyone.
It sounds like the very worst of big business nightmares, where rich industrialist can ride roughshod over the wishes of the local population in order to build something horrible (think Donald Trump in Aberdeenshire). But the truth is this is pretty much what happens at the moment. Methinks the localism approach may be no worse and may even be better.
The NPPF should act in everyone’s interest to safeguard the things we value. There should be no weakening of protection for the designated natural and the historic environment. The countryside has value for its own sake. Development of the best and most versatile agricultural land should be strongly resisted on grounds of food security and landscape protection.
This is all code for "hand's off non-greenbelt farmland." Or "don't touch the village envelope boundaries." Again it's not clear that NPPF does ditch the village envelope boundaries - it asks local authorities to prepare a five-year plan which indicates which land should and shouldn't be built on, which is exactly what happens now. There does seems to be some sort of gap where a plan isn't current or in operation, but there's nothing to stop a local authority re-introducing much the same plan as it has now. The best and most productive land has always been protected: it seems most unlikley that that is going to change.
The NPPF should adopt an explicit ‘brownfield first’ approach. It should be clear that developers should seek to use previously developed land before green field sites are considered. There should be exemptions for brownfield sites of the highest public interest, including for nature and heritage.
Why? We've had nearly twenty years of brownfield development and it hasn't been a great success. Well, it has in some parts, but in others it's led to an over-supply of flats in areas where there is now very little demand. In London, for instance, there is really only brownfield development, but in Cambridge, where I live, there is very little brownfield to be developed and so the planners are now using greenfield sites with abandon. Surely, the principle should be that development should take place where it is best suited — and most sustainable. The previous use of the land is an irrellevance.
The default ‘yes’ and requirement to grant permission where a plan is out-of-date, indeterminate or silent is irresponsible and must be removed. Local authorities should have the ability to refuse development proposals where they would cause harm.
Well, surely the addition of the word sustainable provides local authorities with the power to do exactly this, in a way that they can't now. I.E. the out-of-town supermarket debate. If a local authority says it's unsustainable, then can say no to anything.
Localism should be real: communities should be given genuine power to shape their area for the better. It should be clear that neighbourhoods can opt for less development as well as more than in the local plan, and that local authorities who wish to set high standards for development are free to do so through the use of supplementary guidance.
Now, here I agree entirely with the Trust. If this isn't explicit in NPPF, then it should be.
It is fundamentally wrong that neighbourhood plans should be led and funded by business. It should be a core principle of the reforms that any plans whether at neighbourhood or local authority level should be genuinely community led.
Are they? This is news to me. Where does it say this?
There should be a limited right of appeal for communities, in circumstances where consent is granted for development that is inconsistent with the plan. This should be guaranteed by the Localism Bill.
Maybe. In an ideal world. But I am opposed to 3rd party right to appeal (as it gets called) because I can see it means that nothing would ever get built anywhere and the whole planning process would tend to grind to a halt. It's often forgotten that there are only really ever two parties involved in planning decisions in any event. One is the land owner/scheme proposer, who is always looking for a positive outcome. The other is the community/local authority/state who have, via the planning system, the right to say Yes or No to the proposals. It's only when the authorities say No that the whole appeal process winds into action, and then an independent bod is called in to examine the reasons why the scheme was refused, and decides whether the authority was acting fairly. It's pretty tortuous as it is, and another round of appeals, which would presumably contest a decision overturned by the appeal, would add what? More confusion? More protection? Certainly, loads more red tape.
It seems to me that once again, the addition of that word sustainable is critical to all this because a local authority will be able to use this to turn down applications it doesn't like without reference to any wider local plan or to the NPPF. I can see all hell breaking loose as the arguments rage over what is meant by sustainable, and I can see appeals inspectors getting into a right tizz about it.
First of all it's short. Even shorter than the NPPF (which if nothing else is winning plaudits for its brevity.) In fact its only 4 pages long and the only page you need read is page 4, which sets out its 10-point list.
Let's look at the juicy ones:
Planning should promote genuinely sustainable development. In particular, the presumption in favour of sustainable development should only apply when plans or proposals can be shown to deliver multiple positive outcomes for people and the environment as well as economic growth.
Essentially this a moan about there being no definition of what sustainable means in NPPF. It's a fair point, but I think the idea is that local authorities are the best judge of this and what may be sustainable in Norfolk may not be in Merseyside, so a blanket national definition would be counterproductive. Although many have criticised the inclusion of the s-word here, it's worth pointing out that previously presumption had always been in favour of plain old vanilla development and you could therefore argue that the inclusion of the word sustainable is a move towards environmental protection - i.e. NPPF is more weighted to the environment than the old system. I'm not altogether convinced this is true, it's hard to pin anything down in NPPF, but my hunch is that adding the word sustainable to the palette is a very powerful tool and would enable, for instance, small towns to resist encroachment by supermarkets on the grounds that it is unsustainable for other local businesses.
So all in all, I think it's probably a good thing that there is no definition of what sustainable means at a national level.
Clause 130 of the Localism Bill should be removed. We are opposed in principle to a provision that privileges financial inducements within the decision making process.
Having sorted out my confusion about where Clause 130 resides (actually clause 130 of the NPPF just happens to be relevant to all this, but that appears to be a coincidence), I think this is alluding to the cash for sprawl option, which obviously the Trust don't like. Now I've read and re-read this Clause and it's very hard to see exactly what it's on about and how it differs from the shenanigans that all developers now face over S106 payments and Community Infrastructure Levies. If the locals get to decide where and how the developer's bribe is spent, then methinks this is a move for the better, because developer's bribes are nothing new and the old system has now institutionalised them. I guess what they are worried about is that under the new system, a developer will be able to simply buy planning permissions, or at least overrule the local planning authority by throwing goblets of dosh at everyone.
It sounds like the very worst of big business nightmares, where rich industrialist can ride roughshod over the wishes of the local population in order to build something horrible (think Donald Trump in Aberdeenshire). But the truth is this is pretty much what happens at the moment. Methinks the localism approach may be no worse and may even be better.
The NPPF should act in everyone’s interest to safeguard the things we value. There should be no weakening of protection for the designated natural and the historic environment. The countryside has value for its own sake. Development of the best and most versatile agricultural land should be strongly resisted on grounds of food security and landscape protection.
This is all code for "hand's off non-greenbelt farmland." Or "don't touch the village envelope boundaries." Again it's not clear that NPPF does ditch the village envelope boundaries - it asks local authorities to prepare a five-year plan which indicates which land should and shouldn't be built on, which is exactly what happens now. There does seems to be some sort of gap where a plan isn't current or in operation, but there's nothing to stop a local authority re-introducing much the same plan as it has now. The best and most productive land has always been protected: it seems most unlikley that that is going to change.
The NPPF should adopt an explicit ‘brownfield first’ approach. It should be clear that developers should seek to use previously developed land before green field sites are considered. There should be exemptions for brownfield sites of the highest public interest, including for nature and heritage.
Why? We've had nearly twenty years of brownfield development and it hasn't been a great success. Well, it has in some parts, but in others it's led to an over-supply of flats in areas where there is now very little demand. In London, for instance, there is really only brownfield development, but in Cambridge, where I live, there is very little brownfield to be developed and so the planners are now using greenfield sites with abandon. Surely, the principle should be that development should take place where it is best suited — and most sustainable. The previous use of the land is an irrellevance.
The default ‘yes’ and requirement to grant permission where a plan is out-of-date, indeterminate or silent is irresponsible and must be removed. Local authorities should have the ability to refuse development proposals where they would cause harm.
Well, surely the addition of the word sustainable provides local authorities with the power to do exactly this, in a way that they can't now. I.E. the out-of-town supermarket debate. If a local authority says it's unsustainable, then can say no to anything.
Localism should be real: communities should be given genuine power to shape their area for the better. It should be clear that neighbourhoods can opt for less development as well as more than in the local plan, and that local authorities who wish to set high standards for development are free to do so through the use of supplementary guidance.
Now, here I agree entirely with the Trust. If this isn't explicit in NPPF, then it should be.
It is fundamentally wrong that neighbourhood plans should be led and funded by business. It should be a core principle of the reforms that any plans whether at neighbourhood or local authority level should be genuinely community led.
Are they? This is news to me. Where does it say this?
There should be a limited right of appeal for communities, in circumstances where consent is granted for development that is inconsistent with the plan. This should be guaranteed by the Localism Bill.
Maybe. In an ideal world. But I am opposed to 3rd party right to appeal (as it gets called) because I can see it means that nothing would ever get built anywhere and the whole planning process would tend to grind to a halt. It's often forgotten that there are only really ever two parties involved in planning decisions in any event. One is the land owner/scheme proposer, who is always looking for a positive outcome. The other is the community/local authority/state who have, via the planning system, the right to say Yes or No to the proposals. It's only when the authorities say No that the whole appeal process winds into action, and then an independent bod is called in to examine the reasons why the scheme was refused, and decides whether the authority was acting fairly. It's pretty tortuous as it is, and another round of appeals, which would presumably contest a decision overturned by the appeal, would add what? More confusion? More protection? Certainly, loads more red tape.
It seems to me that once again, the addition of that word sustainable is critical to all this because a local authority will be able to use this to turn down applications it doesn't like without reference to any wider local plan or to the NPPF. I can see all hell breaking loose as the arguments rage over what is meant by sustainable, and I can see appeals inspectors getting into a right tizz about it.
26 Sept 2011
Is NPPF really a "developer's charter?"
On Thursday, I was invited to a blogger's briefing the offices of the National Trust in London, from where they are masterminding the campaign against the government's planning reforms. I'd never been to a blogger's briefing before and I was curious enough to take the bait.
"It's Day 57 of our campaign and we've only failed to get on the front page of a national daily twice" announced Andrew Lainton, who I was seated next to. He doesn't work for the National Trust but seems to be an embedded blogger working on "the campaign." Hell, I hadn't even realised there was a campaign before this briefing so I felt I was beginning to get up to speed. Lainton and the National Trust bods were quietly purring away because their campaign is being so successful and they had even elicited a letter from David Cameron earlier in the week, saying some soothing words.
I think the purpose of the meeting was whip up even more disquiet on the blogoshere (how I hate that word!) which is why I was there. But soon I found myself getting antagonised by the whole tone of the meeting, and started questioning them on what they were trying to achieve. I wasn't a lone dissenting voice: I was joined by the eloquent observations of David Brock, a planning lawyer, who pointed out that a presumption in favour of development (whether sustainable or not) was not new and had, in fact, has always been at the heart of the planning system. He produced evidence that it had been in place as far back as 1923. Cripes, I was getting a history lesson now.
Together, David Brock and I started chipping away at the National Trust attack dogs. "What are you hoping to achieve in your campaign. You've frightened the horses in the shires, but to what purpose. Do you want the goverment to abandon NPPF?"
NT: "Oh no, we are not against development and we like the idea of reforming the planning system. But we think it's now swung too far in favour of developers and that we want to reign it in a little."
"Isn't that down to finessing a few clauses then? Why the need for such a fear-inducing campaign?"
NT: "Because NPPF as it stands is fundamentally flawed."
"But you just said you are happy with the idea of NPPF and think just a few clauses need amending."
NT: "That's right. And it's fundamentally flawed, it's a developer's charter, and England will disappear under concrete from Stonehenge to Flatford Mill."
And so it went around in circles. 90 minutes into the blogger's briefing and I was by now feeling sorry for the government, because this lot are like a pack of well-heeled wolves, and it seems to me they have now got the Coalition on the run. Some of them (Wolfson, Pickles, Osborne) are trying to tough it out, defending the pro-development aspects of NPPF, saying its high-time Britain got building again as if a planning document is going to start a housebuilding boom (fat chance), whilst others (Cameron, Clark) are coming on like soft cops, being all reasonable and placatory. But it's the National Trust-led campaign against NPPF which is definitely setting the agenda. Planning isn't exactly the natural territory of the National Trust and some question what on earth the Trust is doing organising such a campaign, the stamping ground of the likes of the CPRE (who have been left miles behind in all this), especially as the Trust gets involved in a small way with housing developments of its own (but then they will be sensitive middle-class ones, the kind that don't count in this debate).
What really troubles me, and I didn't really express this coherently at the briefing, is that I think the existing planning regime is already a developer's charter and not a very good one at that. It's delivered millions of tiny, crap homes, designed by morons, built by penny-pinching spec housebuilders, and located on dreadful sites next to motorways and by-passes. And I feel almost any attempt at shaking up our present diabolical system has to be welcomed.
The problem is that the NPPF is a leap in the dark. With its emphasis on localism, and neighbourhood plans (hardly anyone knows what these are), not to mention "sustainable development", it asks more questions than it answers. But just to assume, as the Trust have done, that its very looseness will be an excuse to build anything everywhere strikes me as highly unlikely. It might have been, twenty or thirty years ago, but now we are in a very different era. Barratt's are not going to pitch up, all of a sudden, and build a 50-home estate in every village between Somerset and Suffolk just because NPPF calls the existing village envelope boundary system into question. There's no demand, and there's no money.
The clause that really freaks out the National Trust is 130. It states:
130. Local communities through local and neighbourhood plans should be able to identify for special protection green areas of particular importance to them. By designating land as Local Green Space local communities will be able to rule out new development other than in very special circumstances. Identifying land as Local Green Space should therefore be consistent with the local planning of sustainable development and complement investment in sufficient homes, jobs and other essential services. Local Green Spaces should only be designated when a plan is prepared or reviewed, and planned so that they are capable of enduring beyond the end of the plan period.
If I read this right, it means that the old village boundaries will be consigned to the dustbin and, in their place, villages will be able to have their own mini-green belts, decided locally. I see this as a really interesting development, and one that is of great potential interest to selfbuilders. For those of us who support good, appropriate building and not just the current craze for town cramming, I see this as a really positive step. And I feel an urge to criticise the National Trust for being so ideologically hidebound that they can't or won't see this. A return to the status quo (which seems to be what they want) is to ignore the damage that has been done by our planning system which encourages big land deals between developers and planners, and shuts out the little people. At least NPPF is making a stab at turning this on its head.
If their campaign to neutralise NPPF turns out to be as successful as they hope, it will set back the cause of sustainable building in this country for decades to come.
Calm down, Brinkley. No need to rant. It was only a blogger's briefing.
"It's Day 57 of our campaign and we've only failed to get on the front page of a national daily twice" announced Andrew Lainton, who I was seated next to. He doesn't work for the National Trust but seems to be an embedded blogger working on "the campaign." Hell, I hadn't even realised there was a campaign before this briefing so I felt I was beginning to get up to speed. Lainton and the National Trust bods were quietly purring away because their campaign is being so successful and they had even elicited a letter from David Cameron earlier in the week, saying some soothing words.
I think the purpose of the meeting was whip up even more disquiet on the blogoshere (how I hate that word!) which is why I was there. But soon I found myself getting antagonised by the whole tone of the meeting, and started questioning them on what they were trying to achieve. I wasn't a lone dissenting voice: I was joined by the eloquent observations of David Brock, a planning lawyer, who pointed out that a presumption in favour of development (whether sustainable or not) was not new and had, in fact, has always been at the heart of the planning system. He produced evidence that it had been in place as far back as 1923. Cripes, I was getting a history lesson now.
Together, David Brock and I started chipping away at the National Trust attack dogs. "What are you hoping to achieve in your campaign. You've frightened the horses in the shires, but to what purpose. Do you want the goverment to abandon NPPF?"
NT: "Oh no, we are not against development and we like the idea of reforming the planning system. But we think it's now swung too far in favour of developers and that we want to reign it in a little."
"Isn't that down to finessing a few clauses then? Why the need for such a fear-inducing campaign?"
NT: "Because NPPF as it stands is fundamentally flawed."
"But you just said you are happy with the idea of NPPF and think just a few clauses need amending."
NT: "That's right. And it's fundamentally flawed, it's a developer's charter, and England will disappear under concrete from Stonehenge to Flatford Mill."
And so it went around in circles. 90 minutes into the blogger's briefing and I was by now feeling sorry for the government, because this lot are like a pack of well-heeled wolves, and it seems to me they have now got the Coalition on the run. Some of them (Wolfson, Pickles, Osborne) are trying to tough it out, defending the pro-development aspects of NPPF, saying its high-time Britain got building again as if a planning document is going to start a housebuilding boom (fat chance), whilst others (Cameron, Clark) are coming on like soft cops, being all reasonable and placatory. But it's the National Trust-led campaign against NPPF which is definitely setting the agenda. Planning isn't exactly the natural territory of the National Trust and some question what on earth the Trust is doing organising such a campaign, the stamping ground of the likes of the CPRE (who have been left miles behind in all this), especially as the Trust gets involved in a small way with housing developments of its own (but then they will be sensitive middle-class ones, the kind that don't count in this debate).
What really troubles me, and I didn't really express this coherently at the briefing, is that I think the existing planning regime is already a developer's charter and not a very good one at that. It's delivered millions of tiny, crap homes, designed by morons, built by penny-pinching spec housebuilders, and located on dreadful sites next to motorways and by-passes. And I feel almost any attempt at shaking up our present diabolical system has to be welcomed.
The problem is that the NPPF is a leap in the dark. With its emphasis on localism, and neighbourhood plans (hardly anyone knows what these are), not to mention "sustainable development", it asks more questions than it answers. But just to assume, as the Trust have done, that its very looseness will be an excuse to build anything everywhere strikes me as highly unlikely. It might have been, twenty or thirty years ago, but now we are in a very different era. Barratt's are not going to pitch up, all of a sudden, and build a 50-home estate in every village between Somerset and Suffolk just because NPPF calls the existing village envelope boundary system into question. There's no demand, and there's no money.
The clause that really freaks out the National Trust is 130. It states:
130. Local communities through local and neighbourhood plans should be able to identify for special protection green areas of particular importance to them. By designating land as Local Green Space local communities will be able to rule out new development other than in very special circumstances. Identifying land as Local Green Space should therefore be consistent with the local planning of sustainable development and complement investment in sufficient homes, jobs and other essential services. Local Green Spaces should only be designated when a plan is prepared or reviewed, and planned so that they are capable of enduring beyond the end of the plan period.
If I read this right, it means that the old village boundaries will be consigned to the dustbin and, in their place, villages will be able to have their own mini-green belts, decided locally. I see this as a really interesting development, and one that is of great potential interest to selfbuilders. For those of us who support good, appropriate building and not just the current craze for town cramming, I see this as a really positive step. And I feel an urge to criticise the National Trust for being so ideologically hidebound that they can't or won't see this. A return to the status quo (which seems to be what they want) is to ignore the damage that has been done by our planning system which encourages big land deals between developers and planners, and shuts out the little people. At least NPPF is making a stab at turning this on its head.
If their campaign to neutralise NPPF turns out to be as successful as they hope, it will set back the cause of sustainable building in this country for decades to come.
Calm down, Brinkley. No need to rant. It was only a blogger's briefing.
9 Sept 2011
The Portuguese Approach to Planning
I've just returned from a week in Portugal, staying with friends in a piece of the Western Algarve which has seen a lot of haphazard development over the past twenty years. It's pertinent to our ongoing debate about NPPF because the Algarve is a good example of what the National Trust/CPRE fear might happen to England if the new planning regime comes into force.
It's not that there is no planning permission in Portugal. I was hearing stories of people being evicted from land they owned on which they thought they had a right to build and didn't, so manifestly there are planning controls. But it's also obviously not a zoned system like we have in the UK, because there a lots of examples of new houses being built in isolated spots in the countryside. Quite why some houses should gain permission whilst others don't looks, to the casual observer (me) to be unfathomable.
As you travel around the highways and byways between Lagos and Sagres, at the very south-western tip of the European continent, what strikes you isn't the fact that the countryside has been "ruined" by haphazard development, but that some of the building is awful whilst other bits look just fine. Maybe I'm biased, but to me the catalogue homes which seemed to have been speculatively built for profit looked mostly dreadful, whilst the owner built houses sit quite comfortably in the landscape and don't blight it in any way. It's not black and white, not by any means, but there are some stunning new homes built in this area which really add to the landscape. And generally, the people who build them live there all year round and don't just use them as a holiday homes.
This area is interesting in other ways. Parts of it (the West Coast) are protected by National Park status and there is no new building allowed at all. It's a semi wilderness for horseriding, cycling, beachcombing and surfing. Just inland, there are a series of windfarms covering all the higher windy ground. Disfiguring? Possibly. But to me it just looks like pieces of machinery in working countryside, little different to power lines, telegraph poles and tractors. There are quarries too, the odd piece of woodland, and sheep grazing. Some very small towns and villages, and a scattering of small farms. It doesn't look like it's ever been particularly pristine, and so the addition of new houses or wind turbines (the sort of thing to give the CPRE kittens) doesn't stand out at all. The countryside doesn't look ordered like it does in England, but that's not a failure of the planning system - it's more like the way it's always been.
To suggest that Portugal is in trouble because of lax planning, as George Monbiot has done recently, seems just a tad bizarre. After all, we are not exactly rolling in it as the moment, are we? And one of the countries we aspire to in terms of economic well being — Germany — has a much more relaxed planning system than we do. Building in the countryside is something the Germans specialise in - last year they built 92,000 mostly rural selfbuilds — yet somehow I don't think the Germans are complaining about urban sprawl or mickey mouse planning.
It's not that there is no planning permission in Portugal. I was hearing stories of people being evicted from land they owned on which they thought they had a right to build and didn't, so manifestly there are planning controls. But it's also obviously not a zoned system like we have in the UK, because there a lots of examples of new houses being built in isolated spots in the countryside. Quite why some houses should gain permission whilst others don't looks, to the casual observer (me) to be unfathomable.
As you travel around the highways and byways between Lagos and Sagres, at the very south-western tip of the European continent, what strikes you isn't the fact that the countryside has been "ruined" by haphazard development, but that some of the building is awful whilst other bits look just fine. Maybe I'm biased, but to me the catalogue homes which seemed to have been speculatively built for profit looked mostly dreadful, whilst the owner built houses sit quite comfortably in the landscape and don't blight it in any way. It's not black and white, not by any means, but there are some stunning new homes built in this area which really add to the landscape. And generally, the people who build them live there all year round and don't just use them as a holiday homes.
This area is interesting in other ways. Parts of it (the West Coast) are protected by National Park status and there is no new building allowed at all. It's a semi wilderness for horseriding, cycling, beachcombing and surfing. Just inland, there are a series of windfarms covering all the higher windy ground. Disfiguring? Possibly. But to me it just looks like pieces of machinery in working countryside, little different to power lines, telegraph poles and tractors. There are quarries too, the odd piece of woodland, and sheep grazing. Some very small towns and villages, and a scattering of small farms. It doesn't look like it's ever been particularly pristine, and so the addition of new houses or wind turbines (the sort of thing to give the CPRE kittens) doesn't stand out at all. The countryside doesn't look ordered like it does in England, but that's not a failure of the planning system - it's more like the way it's always been.
To suggest that Portugal is in trouble because of lax planning, as George Monbiot has done recently, seems just a tad bizarre. After all, we are not exactly rolling in it as the moment, are we? And one of the countries we aspire to in terms of economic well being — Germany — has a much more relaxed planning system than we do. Building in the countryside is something the Germans specialise in - last year they built 92,000 mostly rural selfbuilds — yet somehow I don't think the Germans are complaining about urban sprawl or mickey mouse planning.
16 Aug 2011
Cash for Sprawl
I last wrote about the Green Belt on June 2nd, before the Draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) had been published. I identified it then as a very Tory problem because the Tories in the government want it loosened, whilst the Tories in the shire counties want it maintained - strengthened even.
The NPPF appeared at the end of July, and most of the mainstream press coverage since then has been expressing the widespread fear that the countryside is about to be concreted over and that we are all about to be engulfed in urban sprawl. The usual suspects are behind this, notably the CPRE and The National Trust, and big names such as Griff Rhys Jones and Simon Jenkins have been persuaded to write eloquent pieces in the Times and the Guardian. They are trying to whip up a fear, a hysteria, along the lines of campaign to save our forests which resulted in a Government U turn earlier this year. They want to "turn back the tide" of development which the NPPF vaguely hints at.
In fact the NPPF is a wonderfully vague document. You'd think in managing to trim planning guidance down from 1,000 pages to 50-odd, it would now read like a concise cinema listing or a menu, but most of theses pages are taken up with aspirational statements and rather woolly policy indicators, so it's quite hard to figure out what the NPPF is actually on about.
The thing that these objectors object to is this tell-tale phrase (oft repeated, it must be said) that there should be a presumption in favour of sustainable development. Jenkins, in particular, tore into the S word, accusing the government of using it as a smokescreen to push through any development, but as far as I can work out, there is little if any guidance in the NPPF on what is meant by sustainable development. My guess is that, in the spirit of localism, the definition will be left to individual councils to work out.
But it remains an important adjective because presumably if there is no national definition of sustainable, then each council can more or less tinker with the definition to encourage or discourage development. What NPPF doesn't offer is clarity: I can see years of ugly planning battles ahead with expensive QCs discussing whether or not Development X is sustainable. "Not in Berkshire, m'lud."
Jenkins's assumption that it is a weightless word, a shim-sham put there to dress any development as good development, is probably a little off the mark.
The next point to consider is the status of the Green Belt. It appears to hold two separate meanings. The first is the technical one, the one planners recognise, of land specifically delineated as Green Belt (or as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), which in fact is a surprisingly small amount of the countryside. The second is the idea that all open countryside is green belt, which is the perception that most of the public has. In fact most of the UK is designated in planning terms as farmland and for the past 50-odd years you haven't been able to build on it. Not because it's green belt, but because the planning system has chosen to restrict building to existing settlements.
Now what's at risk, if presumption in favour of sustainable development becomes the norm, is the status of this non-green belt farmland. This explains how supporters of the NPPF can say that Green Belts (and AONB) remain as protected as they ever have been, whilst those railed against the changes claim that the countryside is about to be concreted over.
But NPPF doesn't say anything as simple as this. It doesn't state that concepts such as village envelopes should be shredded or that all non-green belt farmland is now up for grabs. Rather it frames the whole issue around the proposals being judged to be suitably sustainable and leaves the locals to figure out what to do.
Which brings us onto the thorny issue of Cash for Sprawl, which is slowly simmering away in the background. This is the libertarian concept that current planning restrictions have a monetary value which is expressed in the difference between the cost of non-developable farmland (peanuts) and land with building permission (squillions). An individual may own a piece of land but, the way things stand, the right to develop it is something vested in the surrounding community. The argument goes that, as the ability to turn a field into a building plot (and thus perhaps £10,000 into £1million) rests with the neighbours, it is the neighbours who should benefit - especially as it's the neighbours who will be inconvenienced by a) the building work) b) the loss of a nice view and c) maybe lower house prices as a result. If you like, it's compensation money. Or, as I have seen in succinctly summarised by anti-campaigners, Cash for Sprawl.
Needless to say, there is nothing about any of this in NPPF. The concept of planning gain is nothing new - in fact our social housing budget has been based on little more for decades. But up until now, there has been a very clear distinction between community gain (i.e. more playgrounds, cycle paths, new schools, etc) and individual gain (via rate rebates or even cash payments). The thought of crossing this dividing line makes many people very uncomfortable because it's beginning to feel less like big society stuff and more like greed or bribery. So to date this sort of debate has been going on away from the glare of mainstream media, and hasn't really entered the public realm.
But that too may be changing, if this week's Sunday Times is anything to go by. It carries two pieces on the planning debate. The first, by Jenni Russell, Throwing the Countryside to the Developer Wolves, is a call to arms to all national Trust/CPRE types, very much in the Simon Jenkins mould. But two pages further on, in a Think Tank piece, an article by Neil O'Brien of the Policy Exchange is entitled Get Paid to loosen the Green Belt. Unfortunately, the articles are paywalled so I can't provide a link. But if you've followed this piece so far, you will have a pretty good idea of what is in them. O'Brien's killer paragraph goes thus:
A better solution would be to let communities keep more of the planning gain and concentrate the money on those nearby who are most affected by development. Cash should go directly to households, rather than just councils or neighbourhoods. A big cheque in the post might prove some consolation for having development nearby.
No one has got as far as outlining a mechanism by which this might happen. Who would decide who would be eligible, and how much each household might receive? You don't have to think about this very long and to see that you might be opening a can of worms here, setting neighbour against neighbour in a pro-development gold rush. But if it "worked", suddenly every village in England might be falling over themselves to climb aboard this particular bandwagon - precisely what the CPRE fear. NPPF is no help here. It's simply left to local councils to decide how to handle it, and to decide what is or what isn't sustainable.
And this is perhaps the nub of the problem. NPPF doesn't really make it clear how much power the local councils will have in future. Are they still going to remain the sole arbiters of where development can or cannot take place? Or are developers (be they individuals, groups or professionals) going to be able to bring forward their own schemes on any bit of farmland that takes their fancy, in return for some form of "community cashback." You can't really have both. Either the planning system remains top-down, council led, or it becomes bottom-up, developer pushed, with the role of the council reduced to protecting specific areas, and arbitrating on whether the proposals are sustainable or not.
The NPPF appeared at the end of July, and most of the mainstream press coverage since then has been expressing the widespread fear that the countryside is about to be concreted over and that we are all about to be engulfed in urban sprawl. The usual suspects are behind this, notably the CPRE and The National Trust, and big names such as Griff Rhys Jones and Simon Jenkins have been persuaded to write eloquent pieces in the Times and the Guardian. They are trying to whip up a fear, a hysteria, along the lines of campaign to save our forests which resulted in a Government U turn earlier this year. They want to "turn back the tide" of development which the NPPF vaguely hints at.
In fact the NPPF is a wonderfully vague document. You'd think in managing to trim planning guidance down from 1,000 pages to 50-odd, it would now read like a concise cinema listing or a menu, but most of theses pages are taken up with aspirational statements and rather woolly policy indicators, so it's quite hard to figure out what the NPPF is actually on about.
The thing that these objectors object to is this tell-tale phrase (oft repeated, it must be said) that there should be a presumption in favour of sustainable development. Jenkins, in particular, tore into the S word, accusing the government of using it as a smokescreen to push through any development, but as far as I can work out, there is little if any guidance in the NPPF on what is meant by sustainable development. My guess is that, in the spirit of localism, the definition will be left to individual councils to work out.
But it remains an important adjective because presumably if there is no national definition of sustainable, then each council can more or less tinker with the definition to encourage or discourage development. What NPPF doesn't offer is clarity: I can see years of ugly planning battles ahead with expensive QCs discussing whether or not Development X is sustainable. "Not in Berkshire, m'lud."
Jenkins's assumption that it is a weightless word, a shim-sham put there to dress any development as good development, is probably a little off the mark.
The next point to consider is the status of the Green Belt. It appears to hold two separate meanings. The first is the technical one, the one planners recognise, of land specifically delineated as Green Belt (or as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty), which in fact is a surprisingly small amount of the countryside. The second is the idea that all open countryside is green belt, which is the perception that most of the public has. In fact most of the UK is designated in planning terms as farmland and for the past 50-odd years you haven't been able to build on it. Not because it's green belt, but because the planning system has chosen to restrict building to existing settlements.
Now what's at risk, if presumption in favour of sustainable development becomes the norm, is the status of this non-green belt farmland. This explains how supporters of the NPPF can say that Green Belts (and AONB) remain as protected as they ever have been, whilst those railed against the changes claim that the countryside is about to be concreted over.
But NPPF doesn't say anything as simple as this. It doesn't state that concepts such as village envelopes should be shredded or that all non-green belt farmland is now up for grabs. Rather it frames the whole issue around the proposals being judged to be suitably sustainable and leaves the locals to figure out what to do.
Which brings us onto the thorny issue of Cash for Sprawl, which is slowly simmering away in the background. This is the libertarian concept that current planning restrictions have a monetary value which is expressed in the difference between the cost of non-developable farmland (peanuts) and land with building permission (squillions). An individual may own a piece of land but, the way things stand, the right to develop it is something vested in the surrounding community. The argument goes that, as the ability to turn a field into a building plot (and thus perhaps £10,000 into £1million) rests with the neighbours, it is the neighbours who should benefit - especially as it's the neighbours who will be inconvenienced by a) the building work) b) the loss of a nice view and c) maybe lower house prices as a result. If you like, it's compensation money. Or, as I have seen in succinctly summarised by anti-campaigners, Cash for Sprawl.
Needless to say, there is nothing about any of this in NPPF. The concept of planning gain is nothing new - in fact our social housing budget has been based on little more for decades. But up until now, there has been a very clear distinction between community gain (i.e. more playgrounds, cycle paths, new schools, etc) and individual gain (via rate rebates or even cash payments). The thought of crossing this dividing line makes many people very uncomfortable because it's beginning to feel less like big society stuff and more like greed or bribery. So to date this sort of debate has been going on away from the glare of mainstream media, and hasn't really entered the public realm.
But that too may be changing, if this week's Sunday Times is anything to go by. It carries two pieces on the planning debate. The first, by Jenni Russell, Throwing the Countryside to the Developer Wolves, is a call to arms to all national Trust/CPRE types, very much in the Simon Jenkins mould. But two pages further on, in a Think Tank piece, an article by Neil O'Brien of the Policy Exchange is entitled Get Paid to loosen the Green Belt. Unfortunately, the articles are paywalled so I can't provide a link. But if you've followed this piece so far, you will have a pretty good idea of what is in them. O'Brien's killer paragraph goes thus:
A better solution would be to let communities keep more of the planning gain and concentrate the money on those nearby who are most affected by development. Cash should go directly to households, rather than just councils or neighbourhoods. A big cheque in the post might prove some consolation for having development nearby.
No one has got as far as outlining a mechanism by which this might happen. Who would decide who would be eligible, and how much each household might receive? You don't have to think about this very long and to see that you might be opening a can of worms here, setting neighbour against neighbour in a pro-development gold rush. But if it "worked", suddenly every village in England might be falling over themselves to climb aboard this particular bandwagon - precisely what the CPRE fear. NPPF is no help here. It's simply left to local councils to decide how to handle it, and to decide what is or what isn't sustainable.
And this is perhaps the nub of the problem. NPPF doesn't really make it clear how much power the local councils will have in future. Are they still going to remain the sole arbiters of where development can or cannot take place? Or are developers (be they individuals, groups or professionals) going to be able to bring forward their own schemes on any bit of farmland that takes their fancy, in return for some form of "community cashback." You can't really have both. Either the planning system remains top-down, council led, or it becomes bottom-up, developer pushed, with the role of the council reduced to protecting specific areas, and arbitrating on whether the proposals are sustainable or not.
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