In it to win it? The Development Plan Maps Lottery. What a difference a letter makes.

As RTPICymru chair for 2016, Ive recently been asked to write a blog for the Homes for Wales campaign. That is in gestation and should be available to read soon. Great for those of you who find sleeping difficult.  I'll keep you posted. In the interim have a look at Homesfor.wales and  give the campaign your support as RTPICymru does. 

Housing, as usual, was a hot topic at planning committee yesterday. When isn't it? In one case Councillors reaffirmed, after lengthy debate and far from unanimously, a previous resolution to refuse planning permission for fewer than 100 houses of the 6500 or so the Development Plan requires to be built.  

The Plan (as with many in Wales) is currently failing on housing.  Harsh words, but the truth. The Strategic Planning Manager accepted as much when he slipped in an announcement about imminent partial review.  

That the current Plan was only adopted 2&1/2 years ago is significant.  The Council has around 4.1 years of housing land supply (compared to the minimum 5 years) PPW and TAN1 expects. Watch this space. It will get worse.  Lets blame the residual method. Council's are, so why not the rest of us.  

The most heinous failing of the scheme however was that the land in question happens to be on the "wrong" side of a line. The development boundary line. Objectors (appreciably) and councillors saw the line as something fixed, definitive, a degree of permanence.  They overlooked, I'm sure, that past incarnations of the proposals maps for the locality inform you that, not too long ago, the thick black line was  drawn somewhere different to its current location and it will have been at some point re-drawn to allocate land to build their housing estate.  The Councillors were equally vexed that less than 5 years ago they went through a tortuous process deciding where these lines should be  - and the strategies, allocations  (and non allocations) that consequently flow to or from them.    

Planners have long loved lines on maps. Lines on maps mean important things to us.  They are also defensible lines which politicians and  the public latch onto.  They mean you can put something one side of it but not the other.   

Thick black lines on maps help give black and white answers to questions such as "can we get permission to build the houses we want to build inside the line?" Usually "Yes" is the answer.  Revise that question to "Can we build the houses we need inside the line" and the evidence points to a different answer.   

I'm increasingly reaching a view that some of these lines are counter productive - especially when it comes to delivering the houses we need.   Yet every time I mention it policy planners look aghast. 

The debate yesterday made me cast my mind back to this article.   The opening line asks the question "What is a map?".  Peter Barber, head of Maps at the British Library went on to say.  "A Map is a lie"  Read the article for yourself.  Its fascinating.

Maybe then we should look to reduce the reliance on lines (or is that lies) on maps to help society address the housing problem. What a difference a letter can make.  Imagine then how that same application might have been judged where the Development Plan had no such thick black lines. The line on the map gives an immediate negative association - that the settlement ends with the lie and nothing shall be built beyond it.  

Imagine then that application considered just on all its other merits - its organic (and market) response to accepted housing need and settlement growth, objectively assessed landscape, physical and social infrastructure impacts and requirements, its sustainability, heritage and biodiversity implications.  The outcome might very well have been different.

Imagine a plan without development boundary lines, where choice, competition and encouragement to  new housing in sustainable locations is genuinely proposed - rather than growth restricted within artificial map boundaries.  A plan which gives a different kind of certainty through genuine options; facilitates imaginative solutions about where and how to build houses (and schools, shops and workplaces); avoids an approach which by default encourages objection because of  rigid structure and restriction.  A plan where location and scale of housing is managed and monitored against that broader yet flexible strategy, steered to locations where growth can be met now and in the future, with the infrastructure to serve it.  That can still and should be a Plan that protects the quality of places in Wales that we all love. A Plan that fosters investment in and enhancement of them rather than perceiving development as automatically harming them.

A Plan doesn't have to have lines on maps to be a Plan to achieve this. The plan could be something different.  Perhaps lines on maps are part of the problem and the solution.

Perhaps with such a Plan you'd need a stick or two to nudge things along. Short-time limited permissions and phasing could encourage them to be completed. Or a Local Development Order...  

I don't believe any of that is too difficult to achieve but it certainly requires someone to imagine it and to be brave and confident to lead it.
   

Imagine a plan that said deal with all these and you CAN build the houses you need there.  Maybe call the process something like Development Management.  Yes I like that name, it has a great ring to it.