Could better planning affect the cost of your home?

Freiburg is famous as “one of the world’s most sustainable and child-friendly cities” and regularly scoops awards for leadership in attractive housing for “all tenures” (meaning social rented as well as prosperous private), maintaining historic ambiance, transport planning, promotion of walking and biking, traffic calming mechanisms, human scale mixed-use development, renewable energy, protection of nature, and ecological sustainability.

With the launch of a new Scottish Government-ordained "review" to combat the stubborn negatives in Scottish planning system, Freiburg’s positive example is much on the mind of Nicola Barclay, the new planning supremo for housebuilding industry group Homes for Scotland.

At the Royal Town Planning Institute’s Patrick Geddes lecture in Edinburgh last month Wulf Daseking, Freiburg’s former chief planner’s description of that city's experience prompted questions for her, and for many others on what exactly it is that prevents Scotland, with all of its peerless built heritage and ingenuity, from itself being international beacon of good planning practice.

“There is a lot that we can take from their attitude I think, at a civic leader level” Barclay told the Sunday Herald, in her first interview since her appointment in May this year.

Barclay (47), who has a background in commercial house sales as well as planning and the Scottish Futures Trust, is on a mission to step up the pressure on fixing Scotland’s “clunky” planning system, which in the eyes of many still presents an intractable barrier to economic growth in Scotland.

Although relentlessly positive, it is possible to deduce that she sees the main problems as follows: lack of clarity and consistency about what the words in Scottish Planning Policy actually mean, lack of pro-active collaborative attitudes by planners in solving the infrastructural blockages to development, and general lack of appetite for risk in an excessively reactive and often defensive planning establishment, at least at its upper levels.

“It all comes down to appetite for risk" she says. "The mayor of Freiberg had a vision and accepted that you have to take on risk to get it done. He just said we will make it happen, nothing will be insurmountable. We just have to get on with it [even if] that means investing in all the infrastructure upfront, on the understanding that you get your money back when housebuilders come and build.

“It’s quite a simple model but psychologically it’s a huge step, and very different from Scotland where a lot of civic leaders are sitting and don’t necessarily think they have that power, or won’t take the longer term vision. We need to think 20-30 years in the future.”

Given the perceived dryness of the topic, Homes for Scotland has an uphill task in getting planning reform front and centre of the political agenda. While glitzy initiatives – new handouts of public money to targeted business sectors for example – gain all the attention, blockages in part Scotland’s vital economic plumbing rarely get noticed by the public (unless they have cause to use the system). Consequently, they never seem to get fixed. While anyone looking around can see that the art of urban “placemaking” in Scotland has improved spectacularly in recent years , but when it comes to the bread and butter of planning – supplying the optimum number of houses for the population, present and future, the results speak for themselves.

Statistics were released last week showing the time taken to decide major housing developments for the first quarter of this year has increased to its slowest yet at over 64 weeks.This is four times the statutory period of 16 weeks and, compared to the same quarter last year, represents an increase of over 80 per cent whilst the number of applications determined actually fell by 40 per cent.

Scotland now builds 40 per cent fewer houses than it did in 2007, and even then there were 35,000 a year too few being built. The problems inadequate housing stock are some of the biggest that the Scottish Government faces, because of their effect on prices, and on the life opportunities for the tens of thousands of (especially) young Scots struggling to get on the housing ladder. Not only does this lead to constrained opportunities for would-be house-owners but it suppresses the prosperity of host of wider industries from services to retail.

Even a cursory glance he most recent Scottish Government Annual and Quarterly Planning Performance Statistics shows a succession of graphs in which a line that should either be slanting emphatically upwards (more projects approved) or downwards (time taken to reach a decision) is showing as stubbornly horizontal. There are some areas of improvement, but in too many cases, the line is even heading in the wrong direction.

Since the recession hit in 2007 it was possible to ascribe this to other factors, but it is now becoming clear to many in the planning and building industry that the much-vaunted reform system initiated in the Planning (Scotland) Act 2006 has not made enough of a difference. Scottish planning is still not working properly.

According to Barclay: “As we have come out of the recession, it’s now that we start seeing that actually the system is still pretty clunky.”

“The speed at which applications are processed is still very very slow, even if the speed of the application itself isn’t too bad, it’s negotiating the developer contributions, the so-called section 75 agreements at the tail end which can take just as long if not longer and that is still the problem. It comes back to infrastructure delivery, the system hasn’t really sorted that out.”

According to Barclay, fresh from attending the Housebuilders Federation in Birmingham, the mood amongst developers south of the border is far more upbeat, due to UK Government commitments to build 200,000 starter homes, reforms that will allow a reporter to determine applications where there is no local plan in place, and a more reliable and consistent help-to-buy regime.

The inadequacy of the status quo has now been tacitly admitted by the Scottish Government itself, which highlighted the review its latest programme for government. Chaired by SNP business trusty Crawford Beveridge, the document pledges to "review the planning system to increase delivery of high quality housing developments, by delivering a quicker more accessible and efficient process”, ensuring that planning "realises its full potential, unlocking land and sites, supporting more quality housing across all tenures and delivering the infrastructure required to support development".

In the now familiar pattern the three-man panel will take six months to suggest ways to "Streamline, simplify and improve current systems and remove unnecessary blockages in the decision-making process”. These recommendations will then be considered by the Scottish Government – a process that normally takes another six months – which will then either reject or attempt to implement them (a previous Beveridge-chaired “review”, like his independent budget review of 2010 was largely ignored, and in parts repudiated). A further period of time will pass before the effectiveness of any changes can be assessed.

It sounds ponderous but since 2014 planning has been the responsibility of cabinet secretary for communities Alex Neil MSP, who has previously expressed impatience with “Luddite” professional planners, and will be expected to seek substantial gains which will reflect well on his government’s stewardship of the economy.

He has already been prepared to angered some in the profession by not including a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute on the review bod. Prompting the RTPI’s Scotland Pam Ewan to declare herself “astonished and very disappointed that there is not a planner on the panel with recent practical experience of the planning system.”

She added: “The success of the review will depend upon knowledge and expertise of how the planning system works from the inside as well as the outside.”

This “disappointing” outburst earned a terse letter from the chief planner John McNairney, possibly channelling Alex Neil, saying that the review would be listening to planners but was not a representative body. “The Scottish Government clearly doesn’t like being challenged in public” was one planner’s reading of McNairney’s response.

According to Nicola Barclay however, the solution may not be another stately “stakeholder” consultation possibly leading to a root-and-branch overhaul, but better implementation of the system that now exists.

“I think our members’ main thought on the new planning system is that in principal it could work very well, it's the execution of it and the diverging interpretations of it at local level. You almost have 32 different authorities all interpreting it in different ways – and being allowed to!”

For Barclay, what is needed more clarity on how the current ones – sometimes expressed in woolly terms in SPP, should be interpreted, something the Scottish Government has promised in the new year. Others, like qualified planner and Labour councillor in North Lanarkshire Monica Lennon, the problem is due to the shape of government: “Responsibility for planning and housing sits with one Cabinet Secretary [Alex Neil] and infrastructure, investment and cities with another [Keith Brown]. I'm not convinced the current approach addresses the modern challenges facing industry or communities.”

Says Barclay: “I think we need more direction from Government. I'm not suggesting government should go in to local councils and tell them absolutely what to do, but we need clearer guidance from government about what they actually meant when they wrote certain paragraphs of SPP.”

“The planning advice notes will clarify some fairly fundamental technical points, about how do you translate the housing supply, how you determine if a site is “effective” or not and again I keep going back to the strategic infrastructure.

“If we can as an industry come up with some solutions as well it helps, it’s very easy to highlight the negatives in the system and why it’s not working but we should only do that if we have some solutions as well and I'm working really hard with the membership to get some things constructively and sharing examples of stuff they haven't done if they have worked abroad, what can they bring to the table here?”

“We need to be sitting around the table trying to collaborate and making it work, rather than shouting across the table at each other, that doesn’t help anybody.”

Barclay admits that those who contact her organisation tend to be those with complaints and horror stories rather than examples of the many ways in which the current system achieves successful outcomes. But the picture she reflects is not one of a system that puts the highest priority, Freiburg-style, in ironing out the problems and getting things built.

“For example some of the local authorities have thought that as they don’t have the expertise in house, we will outsource, so they have taken it to an external solicitor. But I have heard of cases where the external solicitor can’t get hold of the planning officer to get instructions. So the council has become the client but isn’t providing the information to the external solicitor, so it’s actually taking longer than it used to. On the face of it you would think great, they've outsourced it, let’s crack on. In fact, it’s actually taking longer.”

“The problem is lack of skills, lack of confidence that they’re making the right decision, all that is tied up in why it's taking so long.”

Barclay also notes the gulf that is opening up between the Scottish and English systems, the former setting the most store by the number of “social houses” it can construct, and the latter taking its lead from a strongly pro-development Tory government.

“In England they are looking at a dispute resolution model and they can't agree to bring in someone independent to sort it out. This is one of many things I will be suggesting to Scottish Government they should look at. We have got to find a way of sorting these things out quicker, because at the moment it's just stifling growth.”

Barclay does not dispute the interpretation that reforms of the risk appetite and culture of the planning system are unlikely to change until there is a generational change of personnel operating the system, and until that happens the same old dynamics will dominate, both in unimaginative behaviour from planning officers and a presumption against development by local politicians.

“There is a lot of short-term politics going on here unfortunately. [Local councillors] want to be re-elected, so they side with the community councils who reject new housing.

“What they need to do is to reach beyond those people and actually get out and talk to people beyond those groups. They should get out to their wider constituents, they should speak to the adults still living with their parents, because they who can’t afford a house, or who are sharing a flat with ex-university colleagues ten years into their working life because they still can’t get a deposit to get on the housing ladder.”

“That’s who local councillors should be talking to, rather than those that shout the loudest at the community level, and who actually already have a home thank you very much.”

“At Homes for Scotland we are trying to push the wider economic benefits of house building. We've prepared a report which we are launching in November will set out the financial other benefits of housebuilding of Scotland, so we point to what it’s contributing to the local economy. New housing isn’t a bad thing, it’s really beneficial to the Scottish economy.”

Every year with an undersupply of new houses exacerbates Scotland’s demand problems, benefitting nobody but existing owners, sitting on appreciating assets. Finding an enduring solution that would start to budge the statistics, would at last give the Scottish Government a triumph to proclaim around the world in the way that Freiburg now does.