Read any good book on the science of innovation and you realise that beneath the success stories lies a bedrock of information and hard data which has enabled change to happen. Often there is a lot of tinkering before the right solution is found. Sometimes there are epic tales of trial and error before a successful product or approach comes to fruition. From medical science through to space exploration, the presence of hard data coupled with strong analytical minds has been a key driver of change and a force for good in the world.
Unfortunately, the UK planning system lacks data. Beyond the macro tables gathered each year by MHCLG there is very little information to analyse what happens in the planning system.
A data gap means three things occur. First the system is vulnerable to populist agendas. When no one fully understands the problem there is a tendency to make baseless criticisms which can stand. Take last week when Robert Jenrick stated the Government will act on build out rates despite there being no evidence of widespread land banking. Land banking is an easy target and with limited data to understand the wider problems, it doesn’t go away. Policy then follows when minds could be better concentrated elsewhere.
Second, the data gap means change can be obstructed by vested interests and emotional arguments. The HBF last week published a serious piece of research on planning permissions. The research really was a response to lack of data and the challenge by the LGA that there are plenty of consents and they just need to be built out quicker. The HBF made the case that LGA analysis was flawed because it was comparing planning permissions with completions in two year horizons and then rolling them across a ten year period. This was apples and oranges they claimed. There can be a whole host of reasons why after a consent is awarded it takes more than 2 years to finish. This is a reasonable counter but they acknowledged the real problem:
There is a gap in the literature, principally focused on the challenges of analysing the planning permission data, and the geographical pattern of planning permissions and housing need. The existing evidence points to the difficulty of interpreting planning permissions data, but also that different parts of the country have different planning and housing market dynamics. Pg 5
In short, no one really knows because unlike other sectors the housing and planning sector doesn’t have a bedrock of data!
Thirdly, limited data means we are not learning from mistakes. Last year, I commissioned Litchfields to undertake an analysis of small sites. We wanted to try and understand why small sites were no longer bringing forward meaningful housing numbers and moreover, we wanted to understand why there has been such a substantial decline in the numbers of SME developers in the UK.
It turned out this was very difficult to do. Unfortunately, no data on small sites is actually kept. That’s right, no one records the planning journeys because no one differentiates site sizes except London which up until last year did keep a repository of information on small sites.
Using this we were able to undertake a trends analysis of the journey of small sites. It was fascinating. We saw that small sites were taking far too long to be determined but we also found possible root causes for the delays – mismatches on tenure requirements, complex 106 negotiations and unnecessarily detailed viability negotiations. With small tweaks we were able to suggest some policy changes which could make major differences to housing delivery. Unfortunately, the research was hampered by the fact we couldn’t analyse any other part of the UK. Only London had the information. Whitehall turned around and said it was not clear whether the journey in London was replicable in other parts of the country. If other parts of the country counted their small sites data, we could compare performance of cities and more robustly understand what was working and what wasn’t. Unfortunately we can’t, it doesn’t exist.
We live in a world where policy development requires substantive amounts of data and information before a new approach is brought forward. Yet in the housing and planning world that information doesn’t exist. It means planning reform is poorly conceived and criticisms which should be easily discredited remain.
If Robert Jenrick wants to achieve some lasting and successful change in the housing sector he should take a step back and put proper data gathering in place. If that can be achieved a whole world of possibilities will become available. The danger is he might not like what he finds.
