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. 

The Olympic Park Legacy Corporation

The London Datastore recently published on their website the boundary file for the Mayoral Development Corporation in East London. There is quite a bit of background information on the GLA web pages, at this link, but of particular interest is the precise boundary of the Corporation. If you are a GIS user you can download the file and then map it, or, you can look at the map and letter signed by the Mayor of London himself. Alternatively, you can look at my map below and explore the area in Google maps...

Full screen version

By my calculations, this area is 1.88 square miles in size (1,202 acres / 486 hectares) and has a perimeter of 6.47 miles. So, it's quite a big area and bigger than the City of London. It includes parts of the London Boroughs of Waltham Forest, Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets and the area has been described (in October 2011) as 'London's single most important regeneration project for the next 25 years'. 

The name of the corporation is to be the London Legacy Development Corporation, as outlined in this letter. This is also an example of the Localism Act in action.

I found it quite interesting exploring this area, looking at what is included and (more interestingly) what is not. I hope you find it useful.

Free House Price Data

In recent times it has been a little difficult to keep up with the increasing number and variety of datasets being released by central government in the UK. There are already around new 5,400 datasets out there but until this month the Land Registry's 'price paid' data remained closed. Unfortunately, what we'll be getting is not the entire back catalogue of price paid data, but only new data on a monthly basis. This is still a welcome development, but the release of new data only is a major drawback, as Owen Boswarva notes in this blog post.

I've used this data before and it's extremely useful and interesting (and it also allows you to find out how much your neighbours sold their house for, should you be so inclined!). Of course, you can do this already via websites like Zoopla but you can't get the entire datasets from these providers, which is only fair because they pay a lot of money for it (more than £50k). Perhaps the Land Registry will eventually release the entire dataset, going back to 1995 for England and Wales, but until then this remains a tantalising but ultimately frustrating development.

N.B. This data will, of course, be 'free' in the same way that all other datasets paid for by the taxpayer are 'free'!

Journal Paper (by former undergraduate!)

I've been guilty of plugging my own academic work on here from time to time, which I suppose is fair enough because this is my blog, but today I thought I'd blog on someone else's work. Hannah Wright, a recent graduate from my Department (Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield) published a shorter version of her third year extended essay in Local Environment, an international peer-reviewed journal. Hannah now works for Arup in London but the paper below was written entirely during her time as an undergraduate at the University of Sheffield. 

I'm aware of undergraduates publishing work in scientific journals as part of larger teams, but I've never heard of a sole-authored publication in a peer-reviewed journal by a social science undergraduate. 

Hannah's work was obviously exceptional, and it is rather unsettling in some ways to see an undergraduate's work in print (!) but ultimately it is just very exciting to see this happen. I could claim that it's all down to the brilliance of the teaching here at TRP or that it's all down to my expert tutoring but I think it's fairer to say that we just provided the right environment for this kind of work. I'm not expecting this to happen again any time soon (though we do have lots of bright sparks on the UG programme) so that's why I thought it blog-worthy.

What does the paper say? Well, it's about green infrastructure and the contested meanings attached to it in English planning policy.

P.S. I'm happy to report that the original essay did receive a First Class mark!

Small Area Population Change in London, 2001 to 2010

Every ten years, data nerds in the UK get very excited by the prospect of getting their hands on new Census outputs. If you're lucky enough to be Canadian then you can get excited every five years but for many of us (Americans and Chinese included) it's the decennial Census that really does the trick. In the UK we can expect the first results in July 2012 according to this document. But what about in between Census dates? This is where small area data analysis becomes tricky. That's why the ONS publish mid-year population estimates for small areas in England and Wales. 

I've been looking at data for London again, so I thought it would be interesting to see which small areas have increased in population and which have declined in the period from 2001 to 2010 (the most recent data). Some map results below, but it is interesting that 11 areas (LSOAs) have more than doubled in population during this time. 

See this map with Borough outlines on a separate web page

• The 11 areas which have more than doubled in population are in Tower Hamlets (4), Greenwich (4), Ealing, Enfield and Hounslow
• 85 areas have increased in population by 50% or more between 2001 and 2010
• 344 areas have increased in population by 25% or more between 2001 and 2010

• 5 areas have decreased in population by 50% or more - these areas are in Greenwich (2), Southwark, Brent and Newham
• 19 areas have decreased in population by 25% or more during the 2001 to 2010 period.

Overall, the population of London has increased by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2010. According to the mid-year population estimates it has increased by approximately one Manchester in population terms (i.e. about 500,000 - equivalent to the City of Manchester population in 2011). That's about a 7% increase. 

The data are somewhat experimental but if we aggregate up to Borough level, then Brent and Newham both show losses (about 5% and 4% respectively) whilst City of London (60%) and Westminster (25%) show the largest gains.

This data for London - and lots more - can be found on the pages of the excellent London Datastore.

Inequality or Deprivation?

One thing I've been thinking about recently is the question of whether we should be interested in poverty/deprivation/disadvantage in particular or whether we should be concerned with inequality more generally. The latter is of course the big issue (interesting link) and more recently I've been interested in wider questions - some of which are captured in a new paper. With this in mind, I've taken the English deprivation data (i.e. IMD2010) and looked at it by local authority to see how many areas are within the 10% most and least deprived on this measure. Click on the image extract below for the full size chart...

Full size version

I've labelled some individual local authorities and have done this in absolute rather than percentage terms because I'm interested in both the level of inequality and the absolute number of 'poorer' or 'richer' areas in each local authority. Because Birmingham has by far the highest population it stands out but this chart is more about the internal differences in the number of areas in each local authority that are either in the most or least deprived decile in England and, therefore, the level of inequality.

A few final nuggets...

• Manchester has more than 100 areas within England's 10% most deprived, but no areas within England's 10% least deprived.

• Wokingham has nearly 70 areas within England's 10% least deprived, but no areas within England's 10% most deprived.

• Doncaster, Hackney, Haringey, Hull, Knowsley, Leicester, Newham, Nottingham, Sandwell, Tower Hamlets and Wolverhampton are among the areas with areas in the most deprived 10% but no areas in the least deprived 10%.

• Dover, Exeter, Gravesham, Nuneaton & Bedworth, and Thurrock all have equal numbers of areas in the least and most deprived 10% in England - though the total is quite low in each case.

Take a closer look at the chart to explore more - areas are arranged alphabetically to aid navigation. You'll have to zoom to see it in detail...

Population Density in New York City

In some recent posts I've been looking at the issue of population density. I did this for London in December and for the continental United States earlier this month. Given the extremely high population density in Manhattan, I thought it would make sense to take a closer look at New York City. So, I took some publicly available NYC GIS data, some 2010 US Census data and went to work. The result is the 3D map image below...

See this image full size

The mapping here is done at the Census Tract level, of which there are about 2,100. These areas have an average population of about 4,000 though there is some considerable variation between areas in that several tracts contain more than 10,000. The spatial patterns above are fairly obvious and, as expected, Manhattan dominates once again. However, the individual Census Tract with the highest population density is actually in Corona, Queens with a figure of 216,000 persons per square mile*.

There's a lot more information on New York City's 2010 Census results on these pages, from the New York City Department of City Planning...

* N.B. It's important to point out here that these areas are much less than a square mile, but I'm using square miles since it is a conventional measure of population density in urban areas).