English town planning, urban design and property development
While headlines have focused on pedestrianisation, a more quietly significant change is looming: a change in who actually decides planning applications in the Oxford Street area, perhaps as early as 2026. How busy is the development corporation likely to get and how much planning work will it have to deal with?
There’s a long legacy in central London of mixed use buildings, with residential often having been required by planning policy. But when combined with the new building safety regime, these largely commercial buildings are encountering new regulatory challenges.
What better way to kick the new year off than by exploring some of the implications of December’s new NPPF for London? I’ve started with what has changed (and what hasn’t) for London’s houing targets.
I’ve long suspected that Government stats on planning application timescales don’t show the whole picture. New information from the GLA lets us peak under the hood in London at least, and the picture isn’t too rosy.
The Secretary of State’s delay to the M&S scheme on Oxford Street has drawn national attention to the rapidly growing issue of embodied carbon in the planning system.
It looks like “radical reform” of the planning system may just become “tidying up”. But there’s quite a lot that needs tidying, not least amending both planning permissions and – following a couple of PINS appeal decisions – listed building consents.
NPPF Revisions. Beautiful – but what about town centres? The new NPPF does not take the opportunity to update town centre policies to respond to Class E. In the absence of this, some practice is starting to emerging from early appeal decisions.
Planning activity in London’s West End showed a sustained recovering in October and November, following a slower-than-usual summer.
I hope that the GLA’s soon-to-launch Planning London data hub will encourage much more innovative use of information about planning in London. This is my Lockdown 2.0 stab at visualising interest in planning applications in central London.
All the planning excitement seems to have moved on to the Planning White Paper. But I still think the Class E changes have very significant, and immediate, effects. And some of those effects are really quite counter-intuitive. Here are my favourite quirks and curiosities so far.