It’s All About The Actual Logistics

Repeat after me: the planning system isn’t just about housing. 

Any country needs adequate modern space for ensuring that goods of every description, basically everything around us, can be efficiently and quickly delivered to their destination. Of course we are more reliant than ever on complex, often international, supply chains and in recent years we have seen how sensitive they are to disruption. Locational, operational and energy efficiency is also key to minimising the costs which ultimately will be borne by the consumer. We know all this. And yet somehow there’s a disconnect when we need to think about planning for the necessary floorspace, whether in large modern, often highly automated, high-bay warehouses or in “last mile” urban logistics hubs. 

Last year the British Property Federation, in conjunction with Savills, published a great explainer document, Levelling Up – The Logic of Logistics.

And so it was heartening to see the Department for Transport’s Freight and logistics and the planning system: call for evidence, published on 4 July 2023, with a deadline of 6 October 2023. It seeks evidence in three main areas:

• local plan making and land availability
• planning decision taking and the applications process
• how the planning system can support specific policy priorities, including:
  • supporting supply chains
  • decarbonisation of freight
  • heavy goods vehicle (HGVs) driver parking facilities and welfare
  • strengthening the Union

I know that the DfT is very much wanting to hear positive suggestions as to how the system can be made to work better.

Last Tuesday my Town Legal colleague Paul Arnett recently co-hosted, alongside Quod, a roundtable meeting attended by a number of operators and developers in the sector, together with those in the public sector. 

Some interesting comments were made. For instance:

• Conceptually the way in which the local plans system struggles, without a more strategic plan making tier, with assessing and planning for the larger than local need for logistics space. Often the need for development at particular locations is driven by geography and road/rail/port access rather than particular local needs, unlike with perhaps housing and other forms of employment development. 

• The current failings of the NSIP process, save in the case of strategic rail freight. 

• Other calls on space, by way of for instance data centres and dark kitchens, reducing that which is available for freight and logistics. 

• The benefits of clustered development, several facilities in one location, in terms of employment, public transport and power. 

• The challenges in making the case to local planning authorities for the associated facilities required, for instance in some locations a higher than usual level of car parking to allow for occupiers with workers on night shifts and for the overnight re-charging of electric vehicles (in the case of operators who traditionally may have expected staff to store their petrol or diesel vehicles at their homes overnight). 

There was much talk of the challenge of securing sufficient power, by way of connections to the national grid and how critical this has become, with many operators already making the move to all electric fleets, and with of course the extent of roof PVs.

The discussion became topical when the prime minister was bounced by leaks into making his speech on net zero the next day (20 September 2023). 

I had come out of that roundtable session wholly enthused by the degree to which the corporate participants were so advanced with their thinking on decarbonisation and net zero. To listen the next day to Rishi Sunak was like going back in time (for some of us it probably triggered memories of the scrapping of the code for sustainable homes at a time when the house building industry was well on the way to  delivering on what was being required – these sorts of changes to previously announced regulatory changes are debilitating to business in a way that governments do not seem able to grasp). Maybe I’ll leave further commentary on that particular statement to another place, save for highlighting one positive passage from that speech: 

“Right now, it can take fourteen years to build new grid infrastructure.

There are enough projects waiting to be connected to generate over half of our future electricity needs.

So, I can announce today that the Chancellor and Energy Security Secretary will shortly bring forward comprehensive new reforms to energy infrastructure.

We’ll set out the UK’s first ever spatial plan for that infrastructure to give industry certainty and every community a say.

We’ll speed up planning for the most nationally significant projects.

And we’ll end the first-come-first-served approach to grid connections by raising the bar to enter the queue and make sure those ready first, will connect first.”

Spot-on. Now let’s make all that happen. Because it is all about the actual logistics. 

Simon Ricketts, 23 September 2023

Personal views, et cetera

Extract from cover of BPF/Savills Logic of Logistics document