This week the Government published its much-delayed verdict on the Marshcroft planning appeal lodged by Redrow and Harrow Estates for 1,400 new homes in Tring, in Hertfordshire’s Dacorum Borough.
Following the release of the updated NPPF by Michael Gove in December, this appeal has been seen by many in the industry of as an early test case of the Government’s true position on the question of housing delivery in constrained Green Belt districts.
Setting aside any political allegiances, many in the development industry would agree that developers have been led a merry dance for the past 14 years by the current government as it has often said different things to different audiences at different stages of the electoral cycle.
What is patently clear about this latest decision is that is ultimately political. It also speaks to wider battleline emerging between the two major parties ahead of a general election later this year.
We can expect to see more such ministerial decisions come through in the coming weeks and months and in sensitive locations such as the Green Belt Home Counties similar decisions should be expected.
For example, several more recovered appeal decisions are due next week in neighbouring St Albans and the industry will be waiting to see if a trend will be established for Green Belt decisions this side of the general election.
Some background on the Marshcroft case
Located in the Green Belt and adjacent to the Chilterns National Landscape (formerly known as the AONB), the Marshcroft scheme was initially earmarked for development in an early draft of the emerging Dacorum Local Plan.
However, a community backlash led the authority to alter its approach and instead focus a significant proportion of its housing number away from the borough’s market towns and towards the major settlement of Hemel Hempstead.
Tring’s housing numbers dropped by over 80%, and the Marshcroft allocation fell away.
Against this backdrop – and despite a housing shortfall and a Local Plan that is only at an early stage – the lengthy appeal process ended with the Secretary of State disagreeing with the Inspector that Very Special Circumstances existed to overcome the harm to the Green Belt.
The Inspector, in setting out his concluding balancing exercise, attached substantial weight “to the market housing, affordable housing, self and custom build housing, Extra Care housing and socio-economic benefits” as sufficient to outweigh the harm to the Green Belt.
Instead, the planning balance was applied the other way with Green Belt trumping the clear shortfall in housing in the Borough.
The rise and fall of the Planning White Paper
The Marshcroft appeal is in many ways a natural conclusion to the Government’s tormented position on housing policy and the invariably impossible task of appeasing its voter base while seeking to deliver a target of 300,000 homes per year.
To make some sense of how we got here, one has to cast their mind back to Summer 2020, a time when Boris Johnson’s Government was still riding high in the opinion polls.
With a sizeable parliamentary majority, and the catastrophic fallout of ‘party-gate’ not yet having come to pass, the Prime Minister was busy promising “the most radical reforms of our planning system since the end of the Second World War”.
Later that Summer, the development industry was eagerly picking through the details of then-Secretary of State, Robert Jenrick’s Planning White Paper, which sought to deliver “a whole new planning system for England”.
Key elements of the White Paper included proposals to split land into three zone, with so-called “growth” zones automatically receiving outline planning permission – and, in doing so, limiting the say local communities would have in where new homes are built.
The White Paper also proposed the (re)introduction of mandatory housing targets for local authorities.
Changes of this kind were never likely to win the support of backbench Tories in the shires, but for a brief (albeit fleeting) period, it did appear that we were on the verge of major planning reforms.
Then came the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June 2021 – the parliamentary constituency immediately adjacent to that in which the Marshcroft site is located.
It was a stunning victory for the Liberal Democrats, who were able to tap into a collective local angst about housebuilding in the countryside and the impact of HS2, delivering a hammer-blow victory over the Conservatives.
The Tory Party rolled out the standard message about incumbent Governments often suffering by-election losses, but the scale of vote swing was so dramatic that it was clear there was something else at play here.
Indeed, anecdotal evidence from doorsteps suggested that voters were concerned about the prospect of the countryside being “concreted over” – all of which served as ammunition to those backbench Tories keen to interpret the result as a quasi-referendum on the Government’s planning reforms.
Let’s be clear: cracks in the Government planning reforms were there from the start. Right off the bat, a rumoured 80 Conservative MPs were lining up to oppose the new methodology for assessing housing needs that would have shifted growth towards the South East. But the by-election result brought everything into much sharper focus.
Fast forward to Autumn 2022 and after an excruciating year for the Tory party, we had another new Prime Minister. Robert Jenrick’s bold vision had dissipated with his replacement by a carousel of short-lived Secretaries of State, ending with Michael Gove returning for a second stint at the helm once Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.
With a General Election now firmly on the horizon and the Tories flagging in the polls, the Government’s outlook inevitably shortened and became more centered on damage limitation, rather than bold and long-term policy reform.
Gove’s much-anticipated NPPF reforms were released in December 2023 after a whole year of delay and, given the experienced of the past few years, it came as no surprise that mandatory housing targets did not figure in the new NPPF, and the requirement for local authorities to alter Green Belt boundaries to accommodate housing need had been watered down.
Labour was quick to respond, saying it would scrap the revised NPPF on “day one” of a new Labour Government.
While Labour also subscribes to the ‘brownfield-first’ approach, its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has actively sought to diametrically oppose himself with the NIMBY-ism that many associate with the home-owning generation that underpins the Conservative voter base across the UK.
Indeed, he has openly presented himself as a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) – saying he wants to “back the builders not blockers”.
The Labour Leader used his party conference speech last year to outline his party’s vision to deliver an ambitious 1.5 million homes by building new towns and relaxing planning laws to allow development on low quality Green Belt land – for which he coined the term “Grey Belt”.
What all this means for the upcoming General Election
It would be foolhardy to extrapolate too much from any single appeal decision, but it is hard to set aside a lingering sense there is an overtly political dimension to the Marshcroft decision.
What’s more, this decision is a timely reminder that we are currently seeing the unfolding of an ever-growing divergence between the two major parties on the issue of housing – something that will have ramifications far beyond the boundaries of Hertfordshire.
On the one hand we’ve got a Conservative Government facing major losses at the election, now doubling down on localism in a bid to cling onto as many seats as possible in traditional Tory heartlands.
Meanwhile, we have a Labour opposition that is on the rise in the polls and increasingly challenging the status-quo and banking on there being political capital in positioning itself as ‘the party for hosing’.
Considering the scale and nature of the planning reforms proposed just a few years ago under Robert Jenrick, it’s remarkable to see how the tables have turned, with Labour now grasping the thorny electoral nettle that is national housing policy reform from the Conservatives.
Perhaps what’s most interesting is that, by employing this strategy, the Labour Party is essentially taking a gamble to de-prioritise votes in the NIMBY heartlands of the South East and Home Counties, in a bid to tap into a wider proportion of the electorate that has suffered as a result of the ongoing affordability crisis in the UK housing market.
Whether this approach will pay dividends remains to be seen. Recent evidence would suggest that floating voters in England, for example, have been more successfully mobilised by the Liberal Democrats, often campaigning on a largely ‘anti-housing’ platform.
Ultimately, General Elections are rarely decided on any single issue and given the wider economic context of high inflation, high interest rates and stagnant wage growth – housing is not going to be the only issue at play at the next election.
But perhaps more than ever before, the battle lines over housing will make headlines as the two major parties go toe-to-toe in the battle to secure our votes.
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