Planning in Wales: Developers are guilty until proven innocent

Gus Williams – CEO, Bevan Buckland

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A lot of the issues around planning in Wales are well versed – the statutory consultation role of Natural Resources Wales, the availability of planners, the duplication of pre-planning conditions between bodies, lack of planning resources, the inconsistencies between different authorities, and the long delays in decision-making by the Welsh Government.

The secondary impacts of this are also widely understood: the drain of skills over the bridge exacerbates existing skills shortages in Wales, the impossibility of meeting housebuilding targets, and the rising costs in a sector already struggling with input costs.

Fundamentally, I wonder if the Government’s current approach to housing, planning and construction is entirely back to front.

Weak enforcement puts all the stress on the approval process and pre-conditions, when a more functional planning system would have clear rules and rely on stricter enforcement.

This shifts the burden onto those developers who breach the rules, not the entire sector.

The ingrained assumption that all developers are untrustworthy and guilty until they can jump through the hoops to prove otherwise is not something we see in any other sector of the economy.

Conditions such as affordable housing quotas reduce the economic viability of construction and actually constrain supply, making housing ultimately more unaffordable – the opposite of what’s intended.

The best way to make housing more affordable in Wales would be simply to scrap affordable housing conditions and greatly increase overall supply in the places people want to live and work.

While I support social housing, the prioritisation of social housing to the detriment of anything else also ends up putting even more demand and pressure on social housing.

Legislation increasingly burdens new housebuilding while doing nothing to address the bigger issue of retrofitting and upgrading the existing housing stock.

Design is over-prioritised, meaning every development has to start from scratch, and every design is scrutinised from scratch. This all adds to the cost.

There’s a reason that most housing in Wales built in the 19th and early 20th centuries follows the same basic blueprint, structure and layout – economies of scale and speed of construction.

The focus on Local Development Plans, and the lack of a national strategy, undermines a more coherent approach to how we can really grow the economy in Wales.

On environmental issues, particularly biodiversity and ecological degradation, we currently all stand around with the fire extinguishers, ensuring that even the smallest new development doesn’t carry any risk, while ignoring the huge ecological fire already burning – I’d be interested to find out if enhanced planning rules have had any overall net positive impact on biodiversity in Wales in the last 20 years.

Perhaps the biggest issue the Welsh Government gets back to front is one of public value.

Planning permission is a public asset, and probably the most valuable asset that the government holds.

Changing the mindset to see planning permission as an asset with a revenue stream that could raise new government income — money which could then be spent addressing the issues that the planning process tries to accommodate but largely fails — while at the same time spurring economic growth.

The planning process is widely agreed to be the most significant barrier to investment and growth in Wales.

Many Welsh companies are capital-rich, but the costs associated with the risks and uncertainty of the planning process are discouraging businesses from investing that capital in Wales.

There is a win-win scenario here if the government takes reform seriously.