This was a welcome change, but we have seen very recently (see the very recent Beehive Centre decision in Cambridge) it has still often required unnecessary and wasteful intervention.
Fast forward a year and we are pleased to see an even greater emphasis on how essential the country’s economic success is to boosting tax revenue and improving quality of life.
It’s all in the weight
There is a big overarching shift for the commercial and industrial sector. In the current NPPF it gives ‘significant’ weight to economic growth and productivity. In the draft NPPF this moves up the dial to ‘substantial’. Let’s be clear, this is greatest weight the NPPF has ever attached to any topic; this is most weight possible in NPPF language. In how the entire NPPF is crafted it forges a much clearer and easier path for economic development to gain consent.
Into the detail, it starts with the bolstering of a more positively worded ‘Presumption in favour of sustainable development’ (decision-making policy S5). This means that within settlement extents, proposals should be approved unless benefits are substantially outweighed by adverse effects (principle of development within settlements policy S4).
In practical terms, this removes any reference to demonstrating the need for economic development when within the settlement limits. This change is significant and seeks to tackle the ‘glass half empty’ approach of decision making at the local level. It is a default of ‘yes’. Outside of settlement limits need must be demonstrated (principle of development outside settlements policy S5) but in the absence of defined methods for assessing performance against need we expect this to be a more challenging policy approach to that of housing. At least there is recognition that storage and distribution is by its nature more commonly found outside of settlement limits.
Given that it is a huge investment decision to progress a major planning application and the land deal that will need to support it, commercial operators, whether with an occupier or as speculative, can now invest with a clearer intent and expectation to deliver development. The new NPPF approach gives a greater confidence to the market to deliver and in doing so to remove unnecessary constraint to good economic development just because a once-written Local Plan may not have foreseen it.
This is all very well, but the lack of facilitating infrastructure is as equally important to supercharging the growth required to maintaining international competitiveness. The draft NPPF now includes a specific requirement to address barriers to investment including inadequate infrastructure, services or housing, or a poor environment through strategic policy. Whether it is power, water, housing or local amenity, this joined up thinking is long overdue.
Also welcomed is the government’s efforts to increase the range of uses acceptable on sites allocated for economic development. Development plans should not be overly prescriptive and recognise the importance of enabling commercial property to respond to market requirements.
The Science and Technology (S&T) sector had some successful representation in earlier rounds of the NPPF with laboratories and data centres name-checked as critical infrastructure that plays an important part of the national economy. The latest revisions are a helpful step forward to notably increase the weight to be given to economic development and allow such development unless there is a ‘limited circumstance in which it is expected that permission would be refused’. If a development carries other planning benefits alongside the economic developments, then it will carry a much-increased prospect to gain planning consent.
While the NPPF cannot be prescriptive for all commercial sectors, it is very clear on some (freight and logistics) so it will be to now think through whether other nationally important sectors should have equal and clear policy direction.
