“We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on“. (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations)
Permissions in principle will change our planning system significantly, mark my words. In my 11.6.16 blog post I posed a series of questions arising from the legislative skeleton that is sections 150 and 151 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016.
Victorian part-work style, we now have had the Housing and Planning Act 2016 (Permission in Principle etc) (Miscellaneous Amendments) (England) Regulations 2017 (made 6 March 2017, in force 27 March 2017), the Town and Country Planning (Brownfield Land Register) Regulations 2017 (made 20 March 2017, in force 16 April 2017) and the Town and Country Planning (Permission in Principle) Order 2017 (made 20 March 2017, 15 April 2017). The statutory instruments don’t yet give effect to all of what sections 150 and 151 enable, but we now have some answers.
This blog post is not a full summary of how the regime will operate. There are various good summaries but I particularly recommend the Lichfields 27 March 2017 ‘essential guide‘.
A few headlines from the new regime:
1. Local planning authorities will be under a statutory duty to publish their brownfield land registers by 31 December 2017 and then maintain them, reviewing the entries at least annually.
2. The registers will be in two parts:
– Part 1: previously developed land with an area of at least 0.25 hectares that is suitable and available for residential development and where residential development is achievable (all defined terms)
– Part 2: land in Part 1 where the local planning authority has exercised its discretion to enter the land in Part 2 and has decided to allocate the land for residential development having followed defined publicity, notification and consultation procedures.
3. The information that must be recorded for each entry is specified and includes
– “the minimum and maximum net number of dwellings, given as a range, which in the authority’s opinion, the land is capable of supporting”
– “where the development includes non-housing development, the scale of any such development and the use to which it is to be put“.
4. Part 2 will not include sites where the development would require environmental impact assessment. So, if the proposed development falls within Schedule 2 column 1 of the 2011 EIA regulations (for most purposes, more than 150 dwellings or on more than 5 hectares), a negative screening opinion or direction must first be obtained (but remember, indicative screening thresholds as to when significant environmental effects are likely to arise allow for the possibility of projects much larger than 150 dwellings).
5. There are no statutory rights of appeal if the local planning authority refuses to include land on the register (ECHR article 6 compliant?). Judicial review would, as always with any decision of a public body, be available but the decision to include land on Part 2 is at the local planning authority’s discretion so that would not be easy.
6. Once land is on Part 2 it has automatic “permission in principle” for five years. In order to be able to carry out the development, application for technical details consent is required, particularising “all matters necessary to enable planning permission to be granted”. The statutory determination period for technical details consent is ten weeks for major development and otherwise five weeks, so deliberately shorter than the equivalent periods in relation to “traditional” non-EIA planning applications (thirteen and eight weeks respectively). A section 106 agreement may be required if the usual tests are met.
7. There is no defined limit on the extent of non-housing development that can benefit from the procedure, alongside residential development.
8. The procedure applies to conversion and extension of existing buildings as well as development.
For a wider overview of where this mechanism is heading, there are also useful references in DCLG Planning Update Newsletter March 2017, from which it is clear that further regulations will follow to (1) allow applications for permission in principle to be made for minor development (ie basically less than ten homes) for sites on part 1 of a brownfield land register and to (2) allow automatic permission in principle to stem from allocation in defined categories of statutory development plans rather than just from designation on a brownfield land register. Guidance is also in the offing (dovetailed with the revised NPPF? We can but hope).
We also await the Government’s response to its February 2016 technical consultation on implementation of planning changes chapter 2 (permission in principle) and chapter 3 (brownfield register). It was originally promised to be published alongside the regulations. In the meantime, a number of passages in the consultation document are useful in putting flesh on the bones:
“The result of a grant of permission in principle is that the acceptability of the ‘prescribed particulars’ cannot be re-opened when an application for technical details consent is considered by the local planning authority. Local planning authorities will not have the opportunity to impose any conditions when they grant permission in principle. It will therefore be important for the development granted in principle to be described in sufficient detail, to ensure that the parameters within which subsequent application for technical details consent must come forward is absolutely clear.”
“We expect that the parameters of the technical details that need to be agreed, such as essential infrastructure provision, will have been described at the permission in principle stage and will vary from site to site”
“We are proposing that local planning authorities should use existing evidence within an up to date Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment as the starting point for identifying suitable sites for local brownfield registers. To support this, we will encourage authorities to consider whether their Assessments are up to date and, if not, to undertake prompt reviews.
While sites contained within the Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment are a useful starting point, we will encourage local authorities to ensure they have considered any other relevant sources if these are not included in their Assessments. This could include sites with extant planning permission and sites known to the authority that have not previously been considered (for example public sector land).
We will also expect authorities to use the existing call for sites process to ask members of the public and other interested parties to volunteer potentially suitable sites for inclusion in their registers. We propose that this would be a short targeted exercise aimed at as wide an audience as is practicable. That will enable windfall sites to be put forward by developers and others for consideration by the authority.
Authorities that have recently undertaken a full Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment may not consider this to be necessary when initially compiling a register. However, in areas without up to date evidence and for all authorities completing subsequent annual reviews of their register, the process of volunteering potentially suitable sites will play an important role in refreshing the evidence base and help ensure all suitable sites, including windfall sites, are included.”
“We intend to introduce measures that will apply where additional action is needed to ensure that sufficient progress is being made. These measures could include a policy based incentive which would mean that local planning authorities that had failed to make sufficient progress against the brownfield objective would be unable to claim the existence of an up-to-date five year housing land supply when considering applications for brownfield development, and therefore the presumption in favour of sustainable development would apply.
“We propose that the measures we adopt would take effect fully from 2020, and would apply to any local planning authority that had not met the 90% commitment by that date. However, in light of the need for local planning authorities to make continuous progress towards the 90% commitment, we are also interested in views on any intermediate objectives and actions that might apply. “
Be in no doubt, eventually we will have a mechanism that:
– imposes hard statutory deadlines on authorities to publish and regularly update their registers
– whilst light on statutory recourses for developers whose land is not included, will be focused on by Government – woe betide authorities that do not play ball
– will in many cases provide a quicker route to development than the familiar allocation, outline permission, reserved matters approach
– will be potentially relevant for establishing the development credentials of a site even if in due course a traditional planning application is intended
If you have residential development or conversion in mind, the first step is to seek to ensure that your property is on Part 1 of the first round of brownfield land registers, to be published by 31 December 2017. Within the 73 authority pilot areas this process is well underway. Although care is needed to secure reference to an appropriate scale of development, that’s a pretty immediate way to secure acceptance that your site is suitable for residential development!
Simon Ricketts 1.4.17
Personal views, et cetera
SIMONICITY 