It’s time for a new system that puts power back in the hands of local communities, argues Chris Hinchliff MP in a speech at today’s Westminster Hall debate on national planning policy.

Thank you Sir Desmond, it is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, and I congratulate the member for Bath and the Mendip Hills for securing this very important debate.

On a personal basis, a debate on national planning policy feels like a very fitting book end to the outgoing administration.

The issue of what gets built where defines our daily lives like no other issue and I have found my first two years in this place defined by these debates.

Without wanting to cast myself as a latter-day Cassandra, I said early on in my time as the Member of Parliament for North East Hertfordshire that, try though Ministers might, there would be no appeasing the developer lobby.

No amount of deregulation will ever satisfy them – and so it has proven, with the clamour for relaxed fire safety standards, the weakening of environmental policies, and for there to be less opportunity for ordinary people to influence decisions in the planning system as loud as ever.

But, Chair, in one way my views on this subject have changed.

I am not joining this debate today to raise a series of hyper-detailed concerns about the latest redrafting of the National Planning Policy Framework – although I do, of course, still have such concerns, especially in relation to possible changes to the sequential test on surface water flooding, and limits being imposed on local authorities to pursue more ambitious policies on climate action and nature restoration.

However, the point I really want to make today is that national planning policy is completely broken and the NPPF is beyond reform.

After decades of deregulation, the genius of Labour’s post-war democratic settlement has been degraded and reduced to a system of fiendishly complex processes, combined with overwhelmingly negative outcomes, that for all the world seems as if it has been designed by an evil genius to drive all those involved mad.

When Lewis Silkin created the 1947 act establishing the planning system that rebuilt this country from the ashes of World War Two, he described the distinctly Labour vision for a policy that would meet “actual needs, democratically expressed.”

What the NPPF has achieved for years, and I’m afraid the latest iteration will be little different, is almost the precise opposite of Silkin’s idealism.

Pretty much ever since the first version of an NPPF was introduced in 2012 under the Conservative and Lib-Dem joint administration, what we have seen instead is the proliferation of speculative development across the country, with democratically produced local plans ridden over roughshod, and housing built first and foremost for profit not for people.

In fact, a National Planning Policy Framework is not even an accurate name for what we have.

There can be no plan-led system when national policy introduces the overwhelming possibility of caveats to those Local Plans through an ever stronger and equally inaccurately named “presumption in favour of sustainable development”, which in reality functions as a passport to permission for all but the very worst speculative schemes.

Chair, this is not planning in any reasonable sense of the word – it is merely reacting.

Under the NPPF system, more and more of the initiative, the influence, and the advantage lies with the vested interests of land promoters and major developers whose private profit will never accord with the public good.

And thus, we have a national system in which the notion of affordable homes is a running joke; in which the environment politicians so often protest their love for and their determination to restore, is repeatedly trashed as secondary matter compared to the unequally distributed benefits of growth.

It is a national policy framework that overwhelmingly produces outcomes that lock us into car-dependent and unsustainable lifestyles with polluted air that chokes the lungs of our children and that costs the NHS billions.

It utterly fails to secure public consent for the development we very desperately do require to meet the needs of those stuck in temporary accommodation, and in cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions.

And for all its labyrinthine processes, it makes a mockery of local democracy in a way that breeds disillusion and contempt for politics in this country.

The system we have created through the NPPF traps communities in a never-ending cycling of adversarial confrontations with corporations that see our local landscapes as easy pickings and who cream off so much of the wealth of new developments while leaving the public with the majority of the costs to carry.

The Section 106 mechanism is not only obscure but demonstrably incapable of securing the investment in infrastructure, the GPs, the schools, the sports grounds, and the public transport necessary to keep pace with population growth, when hundreds of new houses are bolted on to towns that have already seen almost all of their facilities close.

And the housing it produces is both miserabilist and identikit, seemingly designed to erase local identity, shorn of local traditions, with no space for community, and with a built environment that is best described as unhappiness given physical form.

All in all, Chair, the damage successive iterations of the NPPF have done to our country is difficult to forgive.

Instead of further amendments, now is the time to consign the NPPF to the dustbin of history where it belongs and start afresh.

And the one positive note I can strike in this debate is that it is not, in fact, difficult to imagine a different approach to national planning policy that would be far, far better.

We need to return to Labour’s democratic principles, to stop treating the public as a problem to be silenced, and to embrace them as a source of optimistic solutions for meeting the needs of the future.

It is time to replace the constant nonsense that traduces our constituents as NIMBYs and to put power in their hands to decide where and how to meet the housing needs of their communities in a way that expresses their hopes and their priorities for the future.

It is time to bring back architects in every local planning authority, working with each community to shape plans for future development on an appropriate scale for each settlement, with a renaissance in the local vernacular of buildings that strengthens and reinvigorates the culture and identity of each unique town, village and city.

It is time to put power in the hands of our local authorities to work with the public to identify the genuinely sustainable sites for development in every area, to assemble this land at current use value through massively enhanced Compulsory Purchase Order powers, and to determine the necessary infrastructure to support these communities to thrive into the future, rather than leaving it as a matter of negotiation.

In short, Chair, it is time to ditch the NPPF, and build a new system that puts power in the hands of the people and allows planners to genuinely plan with local communities.

And then developers, including councils themselves, can come forward and build what has been democratically decided and designed.

That is what a rules-based, democratic and sustainable planning system would genuinely look like.

I hope that one day Ministers will see it.

Chris Hinchliff MP has been Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire since 2024.

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