It was during a debate on the Town and Country Planning Bill that a minister described the Bill’s central purpose as being “to secure a proper balance between competing demands for land, so that all the land of the country is used in the best interests of the whole people. This is especially necessary in these small, densely populated islands”. The year was 1947 and the debate was on the Bill that would become the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.
The context was the need for post-war reconstruction and the recognition that the state should take a proactive role in ensuring that land was allocated for housing and social and economic infrastructure while ensuring adequate safeguards for the countryside. It was, at its heart, about making sure that the right uses occurred in the right places.
Planning’s burden
The 1947 Act followed the Labour Party’s 1945 election manifesto that promised “land nationalisation” and a housing programme to ensure that “every family in this island has a good standard of accommodation”. Fast forward nearly 80 years, to Labour’s 2024 manifesto and the need for new housing was almost as acute, leading to promises to create 1.5m new homes over the parliament with the planning system taking the strain.
It was announced there would be a new National Planning Policy Framework, an emphasis on up-to-date local plans and the introduction of the “grey belt”. The manifesto added “we will strengthen planning obligations to ensure new developments provide more affordable homes”. And, so, to our dear friend, the section 106 agreement, tasked with ensuring the delivery of that affordable housing, bringing us clauses that have become ever more complicated.
While the complexity of these clauses, and the time taken to negotiate them, is often cited as a major drag on the delivery of housing, it seems to have become accepted wisdom that it is appropriate for a significant proportion of affordable housing to be delivered in this way.
But that’s not all. Employment and training obligations include targets requiring specified numbers of jobs to be filled by local residents and apprenticeships, internships and work experience places to be provided during the construction phase, with financial penalties if targets are not met.
Agreements include requirements to put in place travel plans for the occupants of commercial and residential premises and financial contributions for travel vouchers. Energy requirements include obligations to connect to district heating networks and the payment of carbon off-set contributions, sometimes running into millions of pounds. Infrastructure contributions include money for police, education, health and transport.
But why is it assumed that the development industry, unlike, say, the car industry or banks, must fund these initiatives? And why, when faced with an unprecedented combination of challenges making delivery almost impossible, are developers painted as the villains?
The Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations are supposed to provide a safeguard that planning obligations will not be excessive by setting three tests that they need to satisfy, including that they are directly related to the development and necessary to make it acceptable in planning terms. But it’s difficult to argue that what can often seem as excessive requirements breach the CIL Regulations when national policy sets out what it considers to be the purposes of the planning system, in broad terms. The December 2025 new draft National Planning Policy Framework describes those purposes in terms of economic, social and environmental objectives, with examples including support for communities’ well-being and coordinating the provision of infrastructure.
Lightening the load
No one would suggest we turn the clock back to 1947. The world is a more complex place with a dramatically increased population. It’s right to set a framework that requires the planning system to do its bit to meet those challenges and for policy to demand that developments comply with high environmental and design standards. But asking it to undertake the heavy lifting to address many of the UK’s most significant policy challenges begins to look like a lack of imagination.
With housebuilding lagging far behind the government’s target, it’s time to review the extent to which the planning system should be a tool of social policy. How else might we deliver much-needed affordable housing? Could labour market challenges be addressed through education, training and partnerships with business, rather than the imposition of targets on developers? A part of that conversation is who pays. Should it be developers and the buyers of market housing or should general taxation take more of the strain?
The London emergency measures are an acknowledgment that the system’s ask of the development industry isn’t delivering the desired outcomes and it remains to be seen whether the slight relaxation of affordable housing targets is carried forward to the new London Plan. But perhaps we need to have a grown-up conversation about what the planning system is expected to deliver; after all, you can’t keep asking it to achieve more and then look surprised when it fails to do so.
