A Default Yes to development around stations?

A part of our work on domestic retrofit, my old practice once did a scheme for an inter-war semi that included a significant extension. At the behest of the client the extension was a modernist box and was part of a refurbishment that would have made the house zero carbon.

It was refused by the planning authority, not on the basis of its size or impact on the neighbours, but because it did not constitute ‘sustainable development’. This was in 2012 soon after the NPPF first introduced a presumption in favour of ‘sustainable development’. The experience made me realise the double-speak of our discretionary planning system where a presumption in favour of anything stands for very little, and words can mean whatever the case officers say they do.

The presumption is still there in paragraph S3:1 of the new NPPF. It says: ‘Decisions on development proposals should apply a presumption in favour of sustainable development’. This means that developments should be approved ‘unless the benefits of doing so would be substantially outweighed by any adverse effects’. The word ‘substantially’ is new and supposedly strengthens the policy.

But the new NPPF goes further. In paragraph S5:1H it states that the same presumption in favour of development should apply to land within walking distance of a well-connected station (defined as within 800m of a station within one of the top 80 travel to work areas with at least four services an hour). Para GB7:1h says that this even applies if the land is in greenbelt. The words ‘default yes’ do not appear in policy, but is how government have described their intentions.

This is great! It is something that my colleague Nicholas Falk has been campaigning for this for years. The Centre for Cities have estimated that 1.7 - 2.1 million new homes could be built on land near to the stations around London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, and Newcastle.

Research by Lichfields updated this August is slightly more conservative. They estimate that here are 780 stations that meet the criteria. Those with 4-8 trains per hour are surrounded by an average of 40ha of developable land, while those with better services in urban areas have an average of 16ha. This could accommodate up to 570,000 new homes.

But this will only happen if the ‘default yes’ is real. The reality is that our planning system is more likely to start with a default no.

Planning authorities do not even start with a ‘default yes’ on sites that they have allocated in their local plan. They are wont to place all manner of barriers in the way of potential development, from visual impact and the capacity of local streets to wildlife protection and myriad other planning issues.

And then there are the Golden Rules set out in Para GB8 of the NPPF. So profitable is it assumed that development around stations will be, that it must provide 15% more social and affordable housing than the local policy or 50% if no policy exists. The golden rules also stipulate that the development should contribute to local infrastructure, make a positive contribution to the landscape, support nature recovery and meet standards on green space provision. In short, all the things that you would need to do to get planning permission.

Some commentators have pointed to New Zealand as a precedent for this policy. Their housing shortage was the worst in the OECD when the Labour government under Jacinda Ardern put in place rules allowing denser development around transport nodes. This is credited by some commentators with creating a boom in housing supply and reducing rents by 30%.

However, when I spoke to Ben van Bruggen, a UK urban designer now working in New Zealand, he painted a slightly different picture. The housing boom is real, but this is due to ‘upzoning’ across the board making it permissible to build three houses on plots that were previously restricted to a single home. The coalition government elected in 2023 allowed councils to revoke the policy, but only if they came up with other means to provide more housing. Auckland did this through a policy to build around transport nodes but this has not yet produced results.

In any case, the New Zealand system, like most planning systems in the world, works because a ‘default yes’ means just that - it gives the applicant the right to build. It’s a million miles away from the situation in the UK where, as Lichfields put it in another report, ‘since 2012, effective decision making has developed a resistance to the Presumption much as bacteria has evolved to outsmart or resist antibiotics’.

All the presumption in favour really does in the UK is tip the playing field marginally towards the development favoured by the policy, especially at appeal. What it doesn’t do is give certainty and, in any case, the golden rules almost certainly make the development unviable at present. To create a New Zealand style housing boom we would need something far more radical. For that we would need ‘deemed planning consent’, but now I’m just being silly!