The National Planning Policy Framework

I work in a planning department at an English university so I'm duty bound to blog today on the new National Planning Policy Framework for England. It might sound a bit boring but it's likely to have significant implications for the built environment for years to come and it represents the biggest change to the planning system in England in a generation (or more).

What are the main changes? Well, much has been made of the reduction of planning policy guidance from more than 1,000 pages to around 50. That's one of the most obvious changes and there is certainly a good deal of simplification associated with the NPPF. It has 13 main sections (image below), from 'Building a strong, competitive economy' to 'Facilitating the sustainable use of minerals'. It also covers 'Protecting Green Belt land', which is something I've written about recently on this blog in relation to data.

I was interested to see that the Glossary (excellent as it is in many ways) does not include a definition of 'sustainable development' (the NPPF's key guiding principle). Instead, it says on p. 2 that:

"The purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. The policies in paragraphs 18 to 219, taken as a whole, constitute the Government's view of what sustainable development in England means in practice for the planning system."

Paragraphs 18 to 219. That's quite a lot, but I didn't really expect it to be defined, given the inherent difficulties associated with defining it. To be fair, the Government could not really be expected to define this but it does seem strange that their view of the core principle of the NPPF cannot be articulated in fewer than 200 paragraphs.

Other interesting snippets I noticed so far...

• Section 3 on 'Supporting a prosperous rural economy' is only 157 words long (much shorter than, for example, Section 7 on 'Requiring good design' - which gets 840 words)
• The word 'regeneration' appears 3 times in the NPPF
• Among the documents the NPPF replaces is the 1990 PPG on 'Development on Unstable Land' - the NPPF mentions the word 'unstable' once
• The 'Plan-making' section from p. 37 says that 'Local plans are key to delivering sustainable development'
• Local planning authorities have to prepare a Strategic Housing Market Assessment and Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment
• Parishes and 'neighbourhood forums' can use neighbourhood planning to 'grant planning permission' through Neighbourhood Development Orders (p. 44)
• Related to the point above, the NPPF states that 'Where a Neighbourhood Development Order has been made, a planning application is not required for development that is within the terms of the order' (p. 46)
• But, NDOs and Community Right to Build Orders 'require the support of the local community through a referendum' (p. 47). 
• Annex 2 (p. 50 to 57) is the Glossary and v. useful
• Annex 3 (p. 58 to 59) details the documents replaced by this new NPPF

The ministerial statement on the NPPF from Greg Clark is on his website and all other NPPF materials can be found on the CLG website. The NPPF pdf doesn't take long to read! It will be 'interesting' to see how all this plays out in practice over the next few years. Perhaps it will not be as good or as bad as people think...

A final point of reminder here - the NPPF applies to England and not the whole of the UK. 

England's Green Belt - 'Closed' Data

At the moment I'm doing some work related to housing market search behaviour and I have a very interesting dataset for it. I thought it would be nice to compare housing market search patterns to where areas of green belt land in England are. This is where I ran into problems. Everyone knows that there is green belt land in England, but knowing precisely where it is and how to get this in digital format is more difficult.

It seems that, for whatever reason, Landmark Information Group have the rights to the data, as you can also see from this BBC map. The problem is, I was quoted a price of £35,000 + VAT for the full dataset. I've nothing against Landmark but I couldn't figure out why it would be so costly or why it is not open data. To cut a long story short, I got the data directly from the Department for Communities and Local Government but the licence means I can't really do much with it publicly, so I've made a small map below showing what it looks like.

The problem with this is that if a normal person* just wants to check which areas of the country are green belt and which aren't (and given current proposals to reform the planning system in England, this is quite important!), it cannot be done easily, if at all. What I'd really like to do is take the green belt shape file and put it on top of a Google map and then let the world see it. But it's not my data, it's not open data, so I can't. This seems like a pity and not just because I'm addicted to mapping things. It seems like a pity because this information should, I feel, be in the public domain in an accessible format. 

*Clearly, I'm not a normal person or I would be doing something else at this time of day/week.

Learning from the past in regeneration?

Last week, a government select committee published their report into regeneration. This was all about regeneration (and its failures) in England, but much of it resonates more widely. Before I mention what was in the report, it is worth noting the composition of the committee: 5 Labour MPs (including the committee chair), 6 Conservative MPs, 1 Liberal Democrat MP. I should also mention that last week a paper of mine was published. This is significant not because I had something published (!) but because the paper was entitled 'Learning from the Past? A Review of Approaches to Spatial Targeting in Urban Policy' and it has a lot to say about the issues in the select committee report. Unusually, for me, it also has no maps or stats in it! I look at examples from across the world and my view is that there is a problem with the way we conceptualise the 'problem' in urban policy, but enough about that.

Back to the select committee report... The most significant thing the report says - and this was widely reported in the news and regen media - is the following quote, from the opening paragraph of the conclusion:

"Regeneration to enable growth offers little evidence that the Government has a coherent strategy for addressing the country's regeneration needs. The document lacks strategic direction and fails to target action and resources at the communities most in need. The measures it sets out are unlikely to bring in sufficient resources or to attract the private sector investment that in many areas is badly needed."

The part about investment being badly needed in many areas is perhaps most significant in some of the former housing market renewal areas - one example being the Welsh streets in Liverpool - see a Google street view of this here. This subject is covered more generally in Part 3 of the report where there is a particularly powerful quote from from Ros Groves, Chair of a Liverpool residents' association, who said:

"We need to think what my people are living in and the conditions they are living in. It is a famous line: we have kids in schools; you ask them to draw a house and they will draw you a house with boarded-up windows, not fancy little curtains or anything else. To me, that is not a future that we can build on, which is criminal. We have a right to have a decent life and place where we live, and that is the one thing that we ask Government. Can we have it? Can we let any Pathfinder area be left with what some people are being left to live in?"

As you can tell, the committee are not exactly thrilled with the government's approach to the housing market renewal programme. Regeneration and Renewal used the word 'damning' and that about covers it.

In Learning the Lessons in Part 4 of the report there is a quote from Paul Lawless, Professor of Urban Policy at Sheffield Hallam University. His views on learning lessons are summed up in one particular quote: 

"One marked weakness in this strand of policy has been a reluctance on the part of new administrations to learn from previous regeneration initiatives. There is every possibility of this happening again, as a new government launches a regeneration programme with little if any acknowledgement of lessons from previous interventions."

My small contribution to the literature effectively finds the same things, and not just in England but more widely in different parts of the world. Not learning from the past, however, is not restricted to regeneration but the implications of not doing so here are particularly severe for those living in areas targeted by urban policy. 

Full details of the inquiry associated with the report can be found here. That's all I have to say for today! Take a look at the report - it makes fascinating reading (though I couldn't find it a pdf version).

NSNR Final Evaluation

Just over a week ago (4th March 2010), the final evaluations of two major English urban policy initiatives were published by CLG. One of these was the New Deal for Communities (NDC) final assessment - the other was the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR) final report. This short post is about the latter document, which contains 119 pages in all.

The NSNR was launched in 2001 with the notion that "within 10 to 20 years no-one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live" - a very noble (unrealistic?) goal. The report itself covers the following, in some detail:

• the nature of deprived neighbourhoods;
• change in deprived areas;
• factors influencing change in deprived neighbourhoods;
• the impact of NSNR on deprived neighbourhoods;
• the effectiveness of NSNR arrangements; and
• lessons for the future.

With all such evaluations, however, the real issue is not the evaluation itself but the wider context within which the programme operates. It has been said that the most effective anti-poverty strategy is economic growth and in many ways this is true, but even in a period of sustained growth (e.g. 1997 to 2007) what we have seen is a deepening of concentrated deprivation in many cities, though there have been some successes. So, on p. 80 we have "overall value for money appeared to be good for the majority of the interventions" and on p. 112 a more engouraging statement: "in terms of value for money, NRF appears to have performed well – demonstrably so with regard to reducing worklessness in particular"

Some earlier work I was involved in at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies is reported from p. 18 to 21 and there are many other interesting results, data and maps. The report also makes a very kind acknowledgement of my input!

The Economic Deprivation Index (EDI)

I've been meaning to blog on this for a while, so here goes...

Relatively recently, the Department for Communities and Local Government released the Economic Deprivation Index for the purposes of 'tracking neighbourhoods' through time in relation to their levels of economic deprivation. They did this because the existing Indices of Multiple Deprivation (2004 and 2007) 'do not facilitate backwards comparison nor do they enable users to understand how the pattern of deprivation is changing between these fixed points' (CLG, 2009).

Despite this, several examples of comparison between 2004 and 2007 deprivation levels have been produced at the local level - e.g. exhibit a, exhibit b - though I'm not picking on anyone here; I actually think there is a good deal of confusion that needs to be addressed since the new EDI says what is quoted above and the information on the 2007 Indices of Deprivation page says 'comparison between the two Indices is therefore acceptable'. So, it is hardly surprising that people compare IMD 2004 and 2007.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The EDI is comprised of data from the Income and Employment Domains of the IMD and is produced on a yearly basis from 1999 to 2005. The maps below summarise changes at LSOA level, where green is an improvement in rank and red is a reduction in rank. You can click on the images for larger maps.

More commentary follows below... but the official report is worth a look.

England EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


A couple of nuggets here for England as a whole... The largest change in rank towards being more deprived was 17,769 - for a LSOA in Slough (008D), which changed from a rank of 31,509 in 1999 to 13,740 in 2005. Since LSOAs are quite small, and the data very sensitive to micro-spatial factors, such changes are not entirely surprising (but I do wonder what happened here). In total, 27 LSOAs saw their rank change by 10,000 or more places towards being more deprived and the majority of these were in the south of England.

At the other end of the scale, there were 22 LSOAs which changed rank by 10,000 or more towards being less deprived. The LSOA experiencing the largest improvement was in Tower Hamlets (029A) with a rank change of 18,463 places. In 1999 it was ranked as the 12,878th most deprived in England (so, not really that deprived) and by 2005 it had moved to 31,341. More interestingly, one LSOA in Nottingham (026C) was amongst the most deprived in 1999 (ranked 3,150) but by 2005 was ranked 16,873 (a change of 13,723 places - the fourth largest improvement). The big leap forward came between 2002 and 2003 (new build 'luxury apartments'?).

London EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


We can also take a closer look at London - there does seem to be a more obvious pattern of change between 1999 and 2005 than for England as a whole. This is clearer towards inner London and perhaps reflects even more severe housing market pressures in the capital - particularly in Westminster, Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. The outer boroughs, and Hillingdon in particular, seem to have become more deprived according to the EDI - although this is all relative of course because some of these areas are not at all 'deprived'.

Manchester EDI Change in Rank 1999-2005 (Green = Improvement, Red = Decline)


And now to Manchester, because it is the location of the LSOA that has remained most deprived on the EDI for each year from 1999 to 2005 (Manchester 009C). The overall pattern looks not too bad, with mostly greens. However, when you overlay the location of the 10% most deprived LSOAs (2004 IMD - since these are the main policy targets), things don't necessarily look so good. Lots of areas which remain the focus of policy have not improved on the EDI - they have become worse according to this measure. The exact change in rank may not be statistically significant but it is notable that they have not been able to improve rank at all. I'll not go into whether or not such indices are a useful measure - that's not for me to decide. I just thought it would be useful to explore the data for now.

So, that's the Economic Deprivation Index... Now I need a holiday.