Presumption in favour of sustainable development

This blog post is for those with an interest in how the planning system operates in England so apologies for those lucky enough to be living and/or working elsewhere. In 2012 the newish Tory Government introduced the National Planning Policy Framework and the presumption in favour of sustainable development. Greg Clark, the minister at the time, did a reasonable job of defining ‘sustainable development’, before the discovery that this would put a brake on urban development that was a significant contributor to carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. From then on the ‘presumption’ operated as a balance tilted towards development with little or no concern about sustainability and the environmental impacts. The Labour Government in 2024 has picked up the baton and decided new development should be accelerated in the pursuit of economic growth. The extent or depth of the denying the importance of sustainability can be judged by Labour’s revised NPPF that continues with the presumption in favour of sustainable development at the same time as acknowledging that the upfront or embodied carbon from new development is a problem. Come May 2025 when the Government’s carbon reduction plan will be scrutinized by the Courts the problem of upfront carbon from development could be a decisive issue. At a recent housing seminar at the London School of Economics and Political Science Prof Becky Tunstall thought that the issue of embodied carbon emissions justified consideration of a ‘presumption against new housebuilding’. This would not be a moratorium on housebuilding but would enable the planning system to select those forms of new houses that would meet genuine housing need; social housing, housing for older people, co-housers, self/custom-builders, conversions and sub-divisions. If these sustainable forms of housing continued to be permitted as a percentage of general market housing then the overshooting of carbon budgets would be inevitable. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922002245. Incidentally, this paper was cited twice in the December issue of the TCPA Journal. And Tamworth and Litchfield tried and failed at appeal to successfully argue that the level of under-occupancy should be taken into account when calculating the housing land supply – but a good attempt which requires more robust data and policy backup. Mental gymnastics should be unnecessary in the application of planning policy and law and I would recommend practitioners reverting to the original presumption, the one in favour of sustainable development, and ask appeal inspectors and the courts as may be necessary, to find general purpose housing unsustainable due to excessive upfront/embodied carbon (and car dependency) that conflicts with the way in which everybody but the ‘planners’ have been using the word/concept. Why set up a new presumption when the original, that has been accepted by an unwary Labour Government, should do?