Constructing Consensus: The case for community-powered development and regeneration

Our country needs to build more. More houses are required to meet current and rising demand. High streets and town centres need regeneration. Our infrastructure is not keeping pace with the structural requirements of our economy and society.

This report argues that the key to unlocking our fraught planning system is to give communities more power and influence to shape local development.

Executive Summary

Our country needs to build more. More houses are required to meet current and rising demand. High streets and town centres need regeneration. Our infrastructure is not keeping pace with the structural requirements of our economy and society.

The new government is determined to address this, with the aim to build 1.5 million houses a key component of their first mission to kickstart economic growth. A series of measures have already been announced or indicated to achieve this, including the introduction of housing targets for local authorities and simplifying the planning process, including for major infrastructure projects. The focus thus far emphasises top-down mandates combined with deregulation of the planning system. Communities are often presumed to be innately anti-development, and the planning system that must represent their views deemed to be part of the problem.

This report sets out why the response to communities should seek to enhance rather than reduce their power within the planning system. The current planning process is undoubtedly fraught, but the way development is done doesn’t create enough opportunity for people locally to have a meaningful say. Too often, their role is reduced to a narrow window for consultation on a specific scheme, to which they can only consent or object. The whole process is set up to be adversarial, so it is no wonder friction is often the result.

Drawn out and costly planning negotiations don’t benefit anyone. Under-funded councils have limited capacity, though as democratically accountable bodies they must balance the needs of existing communities and those of the future. Developers need certainty to invest, particularly in a tough financial climate, though also need to be held to account for delivering both quality and affordability. And for communities who must live with the resultant development for years to come, the process can be opaque and stressful to navigate.

The core argument of this report is that by opening out the planning process to enable more and deeper community involvement, it is possible to build consensus rather than create opposition. Our proposition is that a more constructive and engaged role for communities can lead to speedier and higher-quality development. Evidence suggests that communities aren’t anti-development per se – according to a recent survey only 15-20% of the public are “hard NIMBYs”(Not in My Back Yard). The remaining 80-85% are open to development to different degrees, provided it responds to their identified concerns. Our research sets out a route to how in practice the priorities of this mainstream majority can be met: drawing on evidence and case studies which show that when communities are given a voice and influence, both quality and quantity of development can be increased.

Our report sets out the following three core propositions:

1. Local communities can be pro-housing development when they are more meaningfully involved in decisions and have a stake in the outcome. Evidence from the impact of neighbourhood plans and from examples of communities directly participating in decision-making shows how it is possible to build support for increasing housing supply.
2. Involving communities in regeneration schemes can increase the quality and sustainability of schemes. People locally have strong insight into how their localities are used and lived within, which is valuable expertise that can contribute to successful development.
3. Where local authorities have the power and resources to place shape and ensure developers prioritise community needs, high-quality and responsive housing delivery follows. Many of the identified challenges within the planning system can be resolved by empowering and resourcing it, rather than bypassing it.

We set out a vision for a renewed approach to regeneration and development which builds in the role, voice and influence of communities across all stages of development. This would involve:

• More frequent, deeper and deliberative engagement with communities on all aspects and stages of development – from local plan making through to the design of individual schemes.
• A redefined, appropriately resourced, active local state that can influence development and facilitate community voice and preference.
• Diversified access to finance, powers and capacity building support to enable communities to organise and play a variety of roles within the system, including taking a lead on regeneration of local projects, access community ownership models and to participate in neighbourhood plans.

Recommendations

We set out a series of recommendations in three sub-sections, addressing what can be done within the existing system (short term); the opportunities for policy reforms in this Parliament (medium term) and what a more transformative system would eventually involve (longer term).

1. For those working within the system

A series of practical actions can support the pursuit of effective community engagement and influence:

• Find the right partners – those developers, architects and wider networks who value community engagement.
• Put deep community engagement at the heart of the project – over and above statutory consultation requirements.
• Plan for the long term, but frontload community engagement – this can help ensure a smoother, quicker process to completion.
• Value the role of the democratically elected councillor – they are the lynchpin between the community and the formal council-led process and their role is supported by more effective community engagement.
• Deliver big change in small steps – most successful initiatives started small and gradually, based on specific opportunities or shared concerns and built out from there.
• Remain focused and determined – communities by definition are not homogenous and the journey not always linear, but ceding control upfront can result in much better outcomes by the end.

2. For policymakers reforming the system

The opportunity of a new five-year Parliament offers significant scope for reforms to support the role of communities:

• Establish long-term, sufficient funding for local government – including three-year revenue funding settlements and a shift towards single capital pot allocations to create long-term certainty.
• Revise the National Planning Policy Framework to require deeper community involvement across the development process, including a presumption in favour of consent for community-led schemes.
• Replace Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy with a Planning Gain Tax which can be used to fund local community-preferred infrastructure, affordable housing and the operation of planning teams in councils.
• Use forthcoming English Devolution legislation as an opportunity to improve community rights to more power and participation in planning and regeneration.
• Give councils greater powers to intervene in land sales and purchase land when in the interest of the community.
• Create new opportunities for deliberation and participation in strategic housing and planning initiatives, including by establishing citizens assemblies to develop ambitions for New Towns and significant new infrastructure.

3. Transforming the system in the long term

To more fundamentally transform our system of development towards being more community-led, there are longer-term ambitions to work towards:

Nationally:

• State financing of development to support investment where it is needed – reflecting community concerns rather than simply being reliant on market forces.
• More effective regulation to meet community preferences and wider social outcomes – reflecting the experience of Vienna and Zurich, where a tight regulatory framework ensures both quality or quantity of delivery, and a consistent framework for developers.

Locally:

• Deliberative engagement with communities normalised as part of the development process, ensuring ongoing dialogue and opportunities to participate in shaping plans, allocation and design.
• More councils acting as master developers – on the basis of increased local capacity, there is a case for councils playing a more strategic role especially on large schemes.

The case for change that we set out here might feel counterintuitive – on the face of it, it means adding more requirements to an already cumbersome system. But the response to opposition within the planning process should be to seek more and deeper community engagement rather than seek to circumvent it. There is a risk that if the government simply responds to the need to build more by using top-down targets and relaxing planning rules, this will simply increase local opposition to schemes. The perception that development is “done to” communities rather than “with” communities gives oxygen to local NIMBY narratives that development foisted upon them with no opportunity to shape or influence the nature of it.

If the Government wants to shift the balance in favour of YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) then steps need to be taken to enable communities to feel part of the process and play an active role in securing sustainable outcomes that can ensure thriving, liveable places. There is a real opportunity to align the approach to development and planning with the Government’s wider objectives to enable communities to “take back control”. The proposals set out in this report would begin a shift that is long overdue, and contribute towards increasing the pace, scale and quality of development our country needs.

Case Studies

The report features dozens of examples of community-powered development and regeneration in the UK and beyond. Here are a few of them.

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