Much has already been written and debated on the government’s proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), with most of the rhetoric and analysis focusing on the drive to deliver the 1.5 million homes that the government has committed to over the next five years.
But without supporting infrastructure – roads, schools, healthcare facilities and not least employment opportunities, there can be no housing development in isolation.
So it is a relief to see that the changes proposed in the NPPF revisions strengthen the need to ensure that strategic commercial development is also delivered. As this has never been mentioned before it is a positive step forward.
This is clearly the key to creating sustainable future development across the board, with the substantial boost in housing numbers being matched by the development of key employment uses – both traditional and modern.
Specifically, the NPPF proposals include the following text in respect of what planning policies should do to ‘build a strong, competitive economy’:
“Appropriate sites for commercial development which meet the needs of a modern economy should be identified, including suitable locations for uses such as laboratories, gigafactories, data centres, digital infrastructure, freight and logistics”.
This is the first time such specific sectors of commercial activity have been mentioned in the NPPF and it should seek to ensure that LPAs will no longer be allowed to ‘kick the can down the road’ by suggesting that large scale freight and logistics development, for example, should be considered at the sub-regional level, rather than at the district level.
The NPPF has always noted that planning policies and decisions should “recognise and address the specific locational requirements of different sectors”, but the proposed revisions now also acknowledge the need to provide for new, expanded or upgraded facilities and infrastructure that are needed to support the growth of data-driven, creative or high-tech industries (including data centres and grid connections). In addition, the proposed revisions add the following text to the paragraph that requires the provision for storage and distribution operations at a variety of scales and in suitably accessible locations:
“….that allow for the efficient and reliable handling of goods, especially where this is needed to support the supply chain, transport innovation and decarbonization.”
These proposed changes may have gone under many peoples’ radar in the drive to understand how housing targets would be increased from 300,000 to 370,000 dwellings per annum, but they are a critical part of the government’s commitment to reintroduce strategic planning so that planning for growth on a larger than local scale can be delivered, along with the necessary infrastructure.
Local Plans rightly focus on the provision of new housing sites and meeting local housing need, and there are consequences if this need is not met, but the same is not true for employment land. Councils are left to their own devices and do their own employment land needs assessments, publish them and allocate the required land, but we’re finding from two emerging local plans in Suffolk that they have significantly underestimated the amount of employment land they should be delivering by up to 100%.
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that many local authorities tend to be against ‘big sheds’ because they are perceived as only creating small numbers of lower paid jobs. However, documents produced by the Freight Association and Savills show that logistics facilities actually generate a significant number of jobs with many being higher paid jobs as well. For example, at Gateway 14 in Stowmarket, the 1.2m sq ft logistics hub for home and leisure products company The Range includes the largest office floorspace that has ever been built in Stowmarket.
