Can ‘Permission in Principle’ for New Housing in England Increase Certainty, Reduce ‘Planning Risk’, and Accelerate Housing Supply?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine the probable impact of moving towards ‘up front’ planning permission for housing schemes in England on development pace and future housing supply. That examination draws on interviews and focus groups with planning professionals, house builders, land promoters and others involved in land development. We begin by exploring the apparent effect of planning and ‘regulatory risk’ on development before examining strategies, including upfront ‘permission in principle’ (PiP), that claim the potential to reduce that risk and deliver greater certainty for the development sector. The broader focus for this article is how those compliance-based strategies might operate in England’s otherwise discretionary planning system, in which the power to scrutinise and make decisions rests with local government and elected politicians, and what benefits they might bring.

KEYWORDS:

• Planning risk
• housing
• UK
• permission in principle
• discretionary planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper draws on research funded by the Royal Town Planning Institute in 2017/18 (and published as de Magalhaes, 2018). Additional funding support was also provided by UCL Grand Challenges.

Notes on contributors

Nick Gallent

Nick Gallent is professor of housing and planning at University College London (UCL). His research is mainly focused on housing and the planning system, but often links across to community engagement with planning, and regularly looks at rural communities and places – in the UK and elsewhere.

Claudio de Magalhaes

Claudio de Magalhaes is professor of urban management and regeneration and head of the Bartlett School of Planning at UCL. His most recent research looks at the relationship between planning policies and perceptions of risk in the housebuilding industry.

Sonia Freire Trigo

Sonia Freire Trigo is a lecturer in urban planning at UCL and director of the Bartlett School of Planning’s MSc Urban Regeneration programme. Her research interests are focused on urban redevelopment and urban regeneration processes, with particular attention to the politics of planning and its influence on the concepts of urban change and land scarcity.

Kath Scanlon

Kath Scanlon is Distinguished Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics. She has a wide range of research interests including comparative housing policy, comparative mortgage finance and migration.

Christine Whitehead

Christine Whitehead is emeritus professor of housing economics at the LSE. She is an internationally respected applied economist working mainly in the fields of housing economics, finance and policy. Major themes in her research include the relationship between planning and housing; the role of private renting in European housing systems; financing social housing; and more broadly the application of economic techniques to questions of public resource allocation, with respect to housing and other key policy areas.