Local authorities that fail to produce strategic local plans should be penalised.
This isn't about council bashing – I have the highest regard for local authorities and work closely with them to make good developments happen. Rather, my opinion is borne out of deep frustration. If we are to make a plan-led system work, then local authorities must produce those plans.
Local government planning involves specifying what types of development – be it housing, retail, offices, or industrial – should go where.
The previous government's major planning reforms of the early 2000s were focused on making things happen early on.
The Planning Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 shifted development control to being plan-led, providing greater certainty to residents that things would get done.
The thinking was that local authorities should produce clear plans setting out how they intended to meet the needs of their area. These strategic plans would then inform subsequent decisions about those applying for individual planning applications.
The only problem was that this system was overly complex, particularly the requirement to have a whole suite of documents within the core strategy known as the local development framework.
By 2011, seven years after the planning reforms went on to the statute books, , 70% of local planning authorities had stillnot adopted a core strategy.
The 2011 planning reforms were designed to solve this problem. The new national planning policy framework proposed a "presumption in favour of sustainable development" for those making a planning application in areas where there was no local plan.
This led to howls of outrage from bodies such as the National Trust, which dubbed it a "developers' charter" that would unleash unrestrained development in the countryside. But the obvious solution for any local authority that wished to retain control over development was to make sure it had a sound, adopted local plan.
And yet, even now, only 47.9% of local authorities have an adopted local plan, with only a further 22.9% in the process of doing so.
No corporation would get away with a nine-year delay in presenting a business strategy to its board. Local authorities could never get away with abdicating their legal responsibility to provide education or social care.
Perhaps a penalty should be imposed, and this could be to restrict councils' ability to draw down funds from central government or to access grants or other funding streams. The doling out of the now-defunct planning delivery grant depended on the performance of local authority planning departments, so the principle is not a new one.
Producing plans that satisfy all stakeholders is nigh-on impossible, but that is what local government is for – to manage and resolve competing local demands for the greater good of the whole community. Local authorities desire greater financial powers – and I for one would support that – but first they must show that they are mature enough to plan strategically to meet the needs of future generations of residents and businesses. The success of our planning system depends on it.
Liz Peace is the chief executive of the British Property Federation.
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