Getting Britain building

New planning changes will get more data centres, prisons, renewables, and labs built

England has a new National Planning Policy Framework (or at least a draft one). The headlines may have been dominated by Deputy PM Rayner’s move to increase housing targets and reform the Green Belt, but Monday’s announcement had major implications beyond housing.

One reason why Britain persistently invests less than France, Germany, and the US is that our planning system frequently blocks investments in new sources of energy, data-centres, film studios, and laboratories. The new draft National Planning Policy Framework aims to change that. Not only does it upgrade housing targets and reform Britain’s urban containment policy (the Green Belt), it also contains a number of policy changes that will make it easier to build new renewables, laboratories, data centres, film studios, nurseries and prisons.

Let’s look at the key changes that will get new infrastructure built.

1. Onshore Wind is no longer banned in England: Labour have reversed the Conservatives de facto ban on onshore wind deleting footnotes 57 and 58. Previously, wind projects could only go ahead in areas identified as suitable for wind energy, and only then, if community concerns around the impact had been addressed. This may sound innocuous, but the failure of almost any council to identify land meant no new onshore wind projects came forward. In fact, Ukraine has added at least 12 times more onshore wind capacity than England,  in the years since Putin invaded. On top of this change, the Labour government has also announced that identifying sites where wind power would work is no longer optional.

2. Onshore Wind has been added to the NSIP regime: Major infrastructure projects go through a separate parallel planning system known as the NSIP (Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project) regime. Unlike the normal planning system where decisions are made by local authorities (e.g. council planning committees), NSIP decisions are decided by Secretaries of State. For example, Ed Miliband recently approved three major solar farm projects using this process. There are multiple advantages to using this regime. The key one is that while major infrastructure projects are nationally necessary, they often place large burdens on individual local authorities. Another is that major infrastructure projects are complex and often require permits or approvals from multiple regulators. The NSIP regime is more of a one-stop shop. Third, the NSIP regime also can grant compulsory purchase powers. The last Conservative treated onshore wind differently to any other kind of energy and excluded it from this regime. For them, onshore wind could only ever be a local matter due to past backbench backlash. Labour are now reversing this choice for larger onshore wind projects.

3. Thresholds for Solar and Onshore Wind: The NSIP regime has many advantages, but there are costs too. Preparing an NSIP application isn’t cheap. Many major renewable projects produce planning applications that stretch close to 100,000 pages long (every single one authored and reviewed by at least one highly remunerated lawyer) and are forced to carry out lengthy environmental assessments. The system is, at least in theory, meant to be a fast-track, but in practice local authorities often deliver quicker decisions. In the case of solar, many developers take the view that while the NSIP regime is better in theory, it isn’t in practice. Any project over 50MW is designated as nationally signficant. So as a result, developers have kept their solar projects artificially small to avoid being dragged into the regime. There are almost as many projects that have a capacity of 49MW as there are projects that produce either more or less than 49MW. Some clever lawyers even help developers split projects in two to avoid the extra red tape and delays. This is now set to change. Labour are proposing to raise the NSIP threshold for onshore wind to 100MW and the threshold for solar to 150MW. There may still be some bunching below the thresholds, but the higher thresholds are likely to reduce that significantly. At least until the technology improves again!

4. Anti-Solar farmland footnote cut: The last government added a footnote to the NPPF stating “The availability of agricultural land used for food production should be considered, alongside other policies in this Framework, when deciding what sites are most appropriate for development.” Best and Most Versatile agricultural land was already protected by the planning system, but this went further creating additional grounds to block new solar farm developments. As my colleague Ben Hopkinson argued recently, solar farms are not a meaningful threat to food security and solar can work alongside other forms of farming. The new Government, which is targeting clean power by 2030, has rightly removed this footnote.

5. It will be easier to build prisons…: Britain has too few prisons. As a result, the government is set to release a large number of prisoners early to combat overcrowding. In theory, we shouldn’t be in this situation. Britain has a funded prison building programme, yet prisons are not being built due to planning delays. The new NPPF makes clear that “significant weight” should be placed on the importance of facilitating new, expanded, or upgraded public service infrastructure when considering proposals for development. Like many aspects of planning this might seem like a minor change, but as Dan Tomlinson, a new Labour MP (and someone with experience of sitting on planning committees) points out, this makes it much harder for councils to refuse new prison projects. There was talk ahead of the election that Labour would drag prisons into the NSIP regime. Given the clear need for speed on prison building and the bureaucratic burden of preparing an NSIP application, I am glad that the Government has chosen a different route.

6. … and nurseries: Childcare in Britain is extremely expensive by international standards. There are a number of factors that help explain this: our staff-child ratios are high by international standards despite evidence showing that staff quality (not quantity) is the best predictor of outcomes and we lack the cross-subsidy between early-years and primary education that exists in other countries. But, in some parts of the country, bricks and mortar represent a big chunk of the cost difference. Labour pledged to combat this (and meet rising demand) with 3,000 new nurseries. Planning is a challenge, so the NPPF has been amended to ensure that the existing rules that give planning heft to new school projects also apply to nurseries.

7. The NSIP option is open for data centres, laboratories, and gigafactories. Britain can be (and in many ways already is) world-leading in AI and medical research. Yet, these major growth sectors are held back by a lack of supporting infrastructure. To truly capture the full benefits of AI means building more data centres (near where people live). To make the breakthrough discoveries that allow us to develop mRNA vaccines and low-cost blood tests for cancer means building more lab space. At the moment, our research powerhouses Oxford, Cambridge, and London all have an acute shortage of purpose built lab space, while a number of major data centres projects have recently been refused planning permission (thankfully the Deputy PM is set to overrule these calls). One of the problems is that while these have massive national benefits, locals don’t gain much in return. Labour wants to solve this problem, in part, by creating an opt-in route that allows data centre, gigafactory, and lab projects to opt-in to the NSIP regime. This route won’t be right for every project – remember solar developers are avoiding it when they can– and it’s welcome that it’s opt-in (rather than mandatory), but for major investments where certainty is key and local authorities aren't, it may be appropriate.

8. And the NPPF is strengthened for data centres, cleaner freight, film studios, gigafactories and labs. The NSIP route is optional however. Developers may choose to avoid it, in part, because Labour have also made it much more likely that local authorities will say yes. New wording in the NPPF forces councils to identify relevant sites and give greater weight to the economic benefits of infrastructure investments that are key to the growth of new high-tech industries. On top of the additional support for data centres and labs, the NPPF is also updated to force councils to recognise that decarbonising freight creates new locational requirements for storage and distribution hubs. 

When a new National Planning Policy Framework drops, the impact on housing will always be the main focus. But, in a number of areas, from ending the illogical ban on onshore wind to making it easier to build data centres, this is a quietly powerful pro-growth document. It will get more of the things that Britain needs built.