New Orders: Using Development Orders to Get Britain Building

• Neither of the main two political parties in the UK are prepared to deliver comprehensive planning reform. Labour’s King Speech contained no legislation for it, even though the party has a large majority in the House of Commons;

• Existing efforts to get around the planning system without primary legislationhave proven slow, expensive, and incapable of delivering new housing on the scale required to address the crisis;

• The principal barrier to proper planning reform is that neither Labour nor the Conservatives is prepared to implement a national overhaul that upsets its own MPs;

• Yet the most potent weapon in the Government’s arsenal has been under-utilised: issuing Development Orders under Section 59 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990;

• These allow the Secretary of State either to grant planning permission to a specific project, or to any project in a defined area that meets whatever conditions are attached to the Order;

• At present, this regime is used only to provide limited Permitted Development rights for home modifications and a few other uses, but it could be much more widely applied, including to both the ‘Grey Belt’ and New Towns proposals in Labour’s manifesto;

• A Development Order-led strategy would bypass many of the friction points that bake costs and delays into the planning system, allowing ministers to unlock higher volumes of more attractive housing at pace – and only where they can get away with it politically.