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With its significant Thames-side presence and very good transport links into the southern parts of the borough, Lambeth will always attract development opportunities. Planning committee digest readers – and those developing in the borough – will have noticed that over the past couple of years, the borough’s planning committee has behaved increasingly erratically.

In a couple of weeks’ time, the borough will have a new leader. Will Jack Hopkins’ tenure lead to a more consistent approach? Here, we profile the borough’s new leader.

Councillor Jack Hopkins will be formally elected as leader of the council on 13 February. Hopkins was the favourite and defeated challengers including planning cabinet member Matthew Bennett.

Now aged 38, Hopkins is a south Londoner who attended school in Catford before studying politics and international relations at Warwick University. When Labour regained control of Lambeth in 2006 Hopkins worked as a policy officer in Steve Reed’s leaders office, and as a strategic partnerships officer for the council, before moving to a similar job for Hackney council; his role involved advising the crime and disorder reduction partnership on working with the council.

At the 2010 election Hopkins gained a seat in Oval ward from the Liberal Democrats. He was chief whip of the Labour group for two years before being appointed cabinet member for public protection; when Lib Peck took over as leader his portfolio expanded and was renamed ‘safer and stronger neighbourhoods’. He was named Community Champion of the Year by the LGIU in 2014 for his work on the neighbourhood enhancement programme.

In a reshuffle after the 2014 election he moved to the jobs and growth portfolio, which included responsibility for regeneration and planning policy. His post included overseeing some projects which were massively controversial: a shipping container business park, ‘Pop Brixton’, was shifted away from food and environment projects towards entrepreneurship; he was criticised for not preventing Network Rail evicting businesses in Brixton Arches to make way for regeneration, and an attempt at a community-led affordable housing scheme on Somerleyton Road failed.

In April 2017 Hopkins unexpectedly stood down from the cabinet, announced that he would not be standing at the next council election, and subsequently set up in business. His company Good Planners Ltd consisted of Hopkins and Brandan Wilkinson, who had been a planning officer in Wandsworth; they had a contract to advise clients of Kinleigh Folkard and Hayward on planning issues.

In the run-up to the 2018 election, Hopkins reversed his decision to stand down and was re-elected in Oval ward. After the election he returned to the cabinet as deputy leader, taking on the jobs, skills and performance portfolio; having now been elected leader, Hopkins is currently winding up Good Planners Ltd.

As with many of the leading Labour councillors in Lambeth, Hopkins is on the Blairite wing of the Labour Party. He voted for Liz Kendall in the 2015 leadership election, and backed Owen Smith’s leadership challenge in 2016. His partner is Joanne Simpson, a fellow councillor who is vice-chair of the planning committee.

It seemed unlikely at one stage, but yes, we have actually made it into the year 2019. And what a year it is going to be.

Everyone will be hoping the incident just before Christmas, when announcement of the local government settlement was suddenly delayed to allow for a Brexit debate, does not become a precedent. But the fact is that all of central government is now totally dominated by Brexit and its consequences. Ministers are finding they lack the mental energy to take any other major decisions.

This isn’t getting better: anyone who thinks things will suddenly calm down once Britain has actually left the EU on 29 March (or whatever later date), is likely to have to revise their expectations. 

It’s going to be a problem for anyone trying to put pressure on the government over housing and planning. Shelter put together a commission on the future of social housing in January 2018, which has just published its report, calling for many more homes to be built by public authorities, more protection from eviction for private tenants, and a new regulator to stand up for tenants.

The Prime Minister has put her personal stamp on affordable housing (her “number one domestic priority”); in normal times the Shelter commission would be a big political challenge, but times are very far from normal. Another sign is that the Conservative attempt to help more people become home owners has come under intolerable strain, and ‘Help to Buy’ will be wound down by 2023. Even those who support its aim feel that it has failed to make home ownership more affordable but instead become a very effective government subsidy of large housebuilders.

The first change in the local government map for 10 years takes place in April, when three sets of districts will merge (in Suffolk and Somerset) and Dorset will become two unitary councils. Reform was partly prompted by councils becoming financially unviable: smaller districts have been warning for years, but with Northamptonshire actually collapsing last year and others teetering, action had to be taken. It is quite possible other authorities may need emergency measures this year, but the problem really keeping council treasurers up at night is the Fair Funding Review which will affect government grants from 2020.

2019 will see another metro Mayor (the eighth) for North of Tyne, covering Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North Tyneside and Northumberland, with more pressure for devolution. On 2 May there is the biggest round of local elections in the four year cycle, with most of England involved. The councillors were last elected in 2015 when the Liberal Democrats were in government, Ed Miliband was Labour leader and David Cameron won an overall majority, so some big changes may happen.

London is the biggest exception. But fat chance that the capital will be immune from electioneering, as everything will be ramping up for the Mayoral election next year. London’s Conservatives are getting good at taking potshots at Sadiq Khan, but don’t seem to have made any actual damage to his electoral support. Their Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey is well behind and still little known to the public, so expect strenuous efforts to promote him. Khan will equally be doing his best to ensure he has a good story to tell in May 2020.

It’s not quite correct to say that London boroughs face no elections, as governing parties will be holding their AGMs at which leaders can be challenged and cabinet members deposed. Long-serving leaders accumulate opponents and last year’s elections brought in many new councillors who have now found their feet (just under one third of all London Borough councillors were first elected in May 2018). Expect challenges, with the left feeling fired up (and a first report from the Grenfell Inquiry is likely this year).

Yes, 2019 is going to be an interesting year. Some would say it’s being so cheerful as keeps us all going…

Until last night’s resignation of a junior Minister over the delay in reduced bets on fixed-odd betting machines, the Budget had been unusually welcomed.  Most normal budgets unravel in some way over the week, and the hidden increase in NI contributions had been the only blot on the landscape.

The budget revealed the UK economy to be in a much better shape than previously thought, due to borrowing coming in significantly lower than forecast, to the tune of £11 bn this financial year. It also saw the OBR upgrade its growth forecasts for next year.

The budget included a plethora of spending commitments, signalling that Phillip Hammond is happier to allow a small amount of borrowing as a percentage of GDP to continue, rather than maintain the previous Conservative paradigm, started under George Osborne, of cutting spending to create a budget surplus.

For the housing sector there was relatively little in this budget. Considering many believe the ‘housing crisis’ to be one of the biggest domestic issues facing the UK at the moment, one may have thought there would be even more policy announcements and ideas to get the UK building.

The biggest policy announcement on housing had already been made a month earlier, at Tory Party conference, when the PM said the government were lifting the council borrowing cap to boost housebuilding. With a Housing White Paper already published back in February 2017, a revised NPPF earlier in the year and an array of spending and policy announcements in budgets from the past couple of years, the chancellor may have simply run out of ammunition to throw at the subject.

Despite the Chancellor coming under sustained pressure from members of his own party to reduce top rates of stamp duty, currently doing harm to the London market, the budget merely extended, and backdated, stamp duty abolition to those in shared ownership properties.

He also announced an extra £500m for the Housing Infrastructure Fund, the pot of money councils can apply for help with building homes. This money he claimed would help deliver an extra 650,000 homes.

Perhaps the most important and potentially radical policy announced on the subject was entwined with the aim of saving Britain’s high streets. Philip Hammond released £1.5bn to help the UK’s struggling high streets, included within this was a £675m fund to help councils transform retail areas. This could be spent on turning unused high street shops or vacant commercial spaces into housing. With various big retailers collapsing recently, this policy was clearly aimed at utilising these brownfield sites for housing in sustainable places, consistent with the policy aims of the NPPF.

The budget had slightly rosier forecasts for the UK economy than the spring; growth was revised higher for 2019 to 1.6% from 1.3% previously, although growth for this year was unchanged at 1.3%, mainly due to the slowdown at the start of the year caused by the prolonged cold snap.

Government borrowing is now forecast to come in a whole £11.6bn lower than the OBR’s original estimates in March of £37bn for the financial year. Rather than pocket this windfall to get closer to the fabled budget surplus, Philip Hammond spent the money on income tax cuts and the massive funding boost for the NHS announced earlier this year. The OBR’s forecasts for government borrowing in future years show Hammond is happy to let government borrowing continue at a small percentage of GDP, rather than balance the books by the early 2020’s as previously indicated.

Have the Conservatives crossed the Rubicon in their economic policy?  With an increasing tax burden overall, the Conservatives are taking the clothes of a social democratic Labour party, in opposition to the Corbynite socialist variety.  This was a budget designed to deliver stability, rather than announce any controversial policies that may get voted down. The budget is only a footnote in the broader political landscape. Brexit hangs over everything and what happens in March 2019 will affect the UK economy and consequently the housing sector, arguably more than this budget will.

 

When Jacob Rees Mogg MP attacks the green belt as a ‘corset’ that restricts the housing market, and that by loosening this garment, the market could ‘breathe by at least 25%’, one can either react in fury at the latest Rees-Mogg outburst, or sit up and think:  Oh, that’s not what I expected to hear from a Conservative MP with lots of green belt in his own constituency.

Jacob went on:  ‘I think the biggest challenge facing us at the moment is housing’, which is also rather interesting given his interest in Brexit.

So the big question is why the new stance?  Why has Jacob Rees-Mogg seen the light, and will this rub off on other more nimby-ish Conservative MPs.

A very senior Conservative Minister in the housing department told us earlier this year that the election last year was a turning point:  “Before the election, I was hearing in the Commons tea rooms the need to stop housing to pacify constituents.  After the election, all I was hearing was that electoral success lies in allowing more housing.”

The Government announced plans to build 300,000 new homes a year, never achieved since the 1960s; with the new housing secretary, James Brokenshire, announcing the new garden communities programme in August, with projects ranging in size from 10,000 to 40,000 homes.

Just 2.27% of England is actually built on and a mere 10.6% of England is classified as urban. And that tenth isn’t all concrete: it includes parks, golf courses, gardens, canals, reservoirs and so on.

The LSE claim that if we let London expand by one mile into the scrubby green belt within the M25, we could add a million new homes. That might upset a few people in the Surrey and Sussex commuter-belt.

MPs, in some instances, are becoming more open to the idea of redefining the Green Belt to let themselves meet their targets. A report from the Campaign to Protect Rural England in August showed plans for almost 460,000 homes have been pencilled in for green belt land since 2013.

Does this new realism rub off onto local councillors?  That’s debatable.  Cherwell District Council approved 4,000 green belt homes, earlier this year, despite 1,500 objections. Cllr Colin Clarke, their lead member for planning, said: “I do appreciate the fact that the objectors had some major concerns, but at the end of the day I think the right decision was made and had to be made”. But the majority of councils are far more protective, particularly in their own backyard. Cllr Colin Smith, the leader of Bromley, reiterates that the Green Belt is something his council is “totally committed to defending”.

At Thorncliffe, we’re happy to help identify YIMBYs – the people who say “Yes, In My Back Yard”.  And we’re happy to help you identify those MPs who feel likewise, and perhaps persuade certain councillors that the need for housing trounces the need for green belt protection at all costs.

Get in touch.

Westminster, the council covering the administrative centre of the nation as well as the principle retail and entertainment areas of central London, only lost the title of ‘largest planning authority’ due to council mergers in the south-west. It remains the most important single council for the property development industry, which is why many have looked at it with concern over the last two years.

In keeping with its status, Westminster’s old approach was that development was generally good and the council wanted to help make it work. A political and planning committee lead was provided by Robert Davis, who was readily accessible to developers at formal and informal events. He kept close control on committee decisions – with only four members, the chair needed only one other to agree with him to get his own way. No members of the public could speak at committees.

Retrospectively this approach looks a hostage to fortune. Residents thought their views counted for nothing while the council ‘cooked up cozy deals’ with developers. It seems to have been partly responsible for the Conservatives’ loss of a seat to Labour in West End ward – which includes Mayfair, Soho and Fitzrovia.

So things are changing at Westminster. Out went Robert Davis, removed from committees and moved to a different cabinet role; he has now resigned as a councillor after a standards inquiry found his extensive gifts and hospitality amounted to a breach of the Code of Conduct. And this week the council said what it would do to “place residents at the heart of the planning process”.

Developers may be reassured that council leader Nickie Aiken heralded the changes in a speech to the Westminster Property Association, the group of major landowners and developers. She told them she was “setting an ambitious policy direction and freeing up those who know how best to deliver it”.

Westminster had called in the Planning Advisory Service to do a review. The council has accepted most of their recommendations (some, such as allowing public speaking at planning committees, were already the subject of pre-election pledges). But it is the non-tangible recommendation that is possibly the most important: the council has been faulted for being too reactive to development and doing too little to give developers a vision.

Oddly, one part of the review is finding that too many applications have been going to committee rather than getting delegated decisions. The Planning Advisory Service recommend councillors are directed towards major schemes, and allowed to get involved at an earlier stage with pre-application presentations. They also recommend a design review panel, although the council does not seem keen.

The review is short on detail, which will be decided by the Planning and City Development committee in November. Public speaking is promised to begin no later than 1 December.

Further change is coming. The council’s new City Plan is slated for next month, with Nickie Aiken saying her cabinet member is “ready to revolutionise what the City Plan and a reinvigorated planning service can achieve”. Development planning had been subsumed in a directorate also including housing, but with Westminster having separately decided to take housing management back in house, will now be in a separate Place-Shaping and Planning Directorate.

Developers need to react to all the changes in Westminster. While the council leadership wants to stay close to the development community, the first few months of the new major applications committee in Westminster have shown it is a far more unpredictable committee than its predecessor.

Now public opinion will be far more important than the ability to lobby the councillors.  Time to change your approach to Westminster Council?   Need help with public opinion in Westminster – ask us here.

This week, we’ve been able to talk one-to-one with all of the major MHCLG team.  Here’s an impartial take on the Conservative housing policies.

In looking at the Conservative Party’s housing policy, one is sometimes reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where a supercomputer found the answer to the ultimate question only to discover it was meaningless because they hadn’t worked out what the question was in the first place.

The Conservatives have lots of ideas to solve the housing crisis, but are somewhat unclear on what the crisis is. Is it the fact that prices are too high so young people cannot buy? Is it shortage of affordable rented homes? Is it too much building on sacred green belt sites? Is it a simple failure to build enough homes of all types?

David Cameron and Theresa May both addressed housing but did very different things, with Cameron trying to incentivise housebuilding with the New Homes Bonus, improved delivery with permitted development rights, and helped home ownership with Help to Buy grants and then requiring Starter Homes as a developer obligation. His approach on affordable housing was to allow higher than social rent levels. For Cameron the question was inaccessible home ownership.

Theresa May looked at first to share his approach – her Downing Street speech of July 2016 talked of young people who “find it harder than ever before to own your own home”. But soon it became clear she saw a different problem: the Housing White Paper in February 2017 moved the emphasis away from home ownership and towards rented solutions. Starter Homes requirements remain unimplemented; after a series of lengthy consultations, it may be worth taking bets on the date the policy is formally dropped.

Due to the disastrous circumstances of its delivery, no-one remembers the content of May’s 2017 conference speech but its message was supposed to “The British Dream” in which fixing the housing market was central. She praised and recommitted to Help to Buy, and committed £2bn more to affordable housing. Three months later housing was added to the title of the Ministry, giving us the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.  Housing was described as the “number one domestic priority”.

Home ownership still drives Tory hearts; Philip Hammond’s budget cut in Stamp Duty cheered them, and members see the resentment from young people who find buying a home unattainable. But 2018 has seen far more on social housing: a green paper, and a well-received Prime Ministerial speech at the National Housing Federation. In her conference speech May agreed a longstanding cross-party local government demand, and lifted the cap on councils borrowing against their council house rent income; she has been widely praised by the sector for it. May’s enthusiasm for council homes helpfully contrasted with Boris Johnson who used his speech at a fringe event to attack social rented housing.

Earlier in the week Housing secretary James Brokenshire committed the government to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid 2020s (a cynic may note this timeframe is longer than the present Parliament), and signalled proposals to make upward extensions permitted development. Brokenshire also announced a New Homes Ombudsman to “champion home buyers, protect their interests and hold developers to account”. Grassroots Conservatives at conference were very keen to see good, well-designed developments that provided all the necessary infrastructure and created a sense of community, thinking them likely to be popular.

One senior Minister told us that he had noticed a change of heart amongst his Conservative parliamentary colleagues since the 2017 general election.  Before, MPs were happy to be NIMBYs.  Now, they know that, to do so, they are depriving houses to the sons and daughters of their voters.

With May having again re-emphasised her commitment to housing being her “number one domestic priority”, developers might wonder what they had done to deserve the remark directed at them by housing minister Kit Malthouse at one conference fringe event: “They say dogs can smell fear, well, so can developers” – it seems to have been a reference to the threat to take over unimplemented development permissions. Malthouse emphasised to delegates he had been tasked to build “more, better, faster” and one policy unchanged from the Cameron era is to try to open up housing development to more smaller and innovative developers – a James Dyson for the sector.

Looking forward, money remains tight and for all the talk of austerity being over, the spending tap is not open (May’s commitment to social housing amounted to £2bn over several years and not starting until 2022). The beginning of September saw rumours that Help to Buy is seen as simply boosting prices and therefore having no impact on affordability (although Malthouse has defended it). Might Hammond’s budget at the end of the month see funds directed away, say to more Stamp Duty cuts and to the affordable housing programme? If so, major housebuilders will regret the loss of what has been a handy subsidy.