New research has found a lack of evidence to back the economic case for proposed planning reforms in England, warns they could even hit growth in the short-term and calls for more work to quantify things like brownfield land availability.
Inexpensive Progress? A Framework for Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Planning Reform found that, while planning does impose some costs on some sectors, little work has been done on assessing its economic benefits.
It was written by Vivid Economics and commissioned by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
The report found there is little research on how to quantify the benefits of planning or its distributional effects and noted specific evidence gaps.
"These areas include the future availability of brownfield land (building on work recently published by CPRE), the expected land take for development over coming decades, and the costs and benefits of green belts (developing research published by Natural England and CPRE in 2010)," it says.
It notes the main mechanism for encouraging brownfield development since 1995 has been the brownfield housing target but says there is an absence of evidence for causal relationships to outcomes like city centre population increases.
It is also unclear what effect the Draft NPPF etc. would have on brownfield use.
But it concludes brownfield building will typically have external benefits and greenfield building external costs.
The £250,000/ha average additional cost of brownfield building quoted by DCLG actually only applies to contaminated land and brownfield usually offers benefits like fewer environmental impacts from construction and use, social benefits and efficient use of infrastructure.
The paper suggests a mechanism for encouraging brownfield land use such as encouraging developers to take account of social, rather than private, costs and benefits when choosing their sites.
"The relative amounts of brownfield and greenfield land used in the absence of such a mechanism would probably be sub-optimal," it says.
"The mechanism should be sufficiently nuanced to permit the social values of different types of brownfield and greenfield land to be taken into account. To be effective, such a mechanism has to be suitable for implementation by local planning authorities."
It recommends the Government make available information about expected brownfield land availability by area, including clear assumptions about flows in and out of stock and the implication for greenfield needs.
British Property Federation chief executive Liz Peace said the media had been quick to paint the development world as being against sound planning and sustainable development, but this is not the case.
"Developers want to see plans put together and decisions made against a sound, well constructed evidence base," she said.
"This report argues that such an evidence base needs to be wide-ranging and take into account not just traditional and easily measured economic impacts but also more amorphous concepts such as the availability of brownfield land and the costs and benefits of green belts."
CPRE director of policy Neil Sinden said effective planning should not be seen as a choice between growth and the environment but should aim to secure long-term well-being.
It allows account to be taken of the whole community's needs.
