Planning reform will thwart low energy housing, councils say

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The claim, made in an open letter to housing minister Steve Reed, and initiated by the Town and Country Planning Association, says that draft planning policies would limit local authorities from setting high environmental standards for new homes.

Hugh Ellis, director of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association, said movement away from higher standards was movement away from a solution. "Building regulations must be seen as a floor to increase standards across all new buildings, not a ceiling,” he said. The planning system is “ideally placed”, he said, to support ambitious innovation on climate, calling the downgrading of standards “disappointing”.

Currently, local authorities in some areas including Cornwall, Bath and North East Somerset, and Central Lincolnshire require all new homes to be ‘zero carbon’ in operation, meaning the energy used to run a home once it’s built does not use any fossil fuels. To achieve this, homes need to be built to high energy efficiency standards, which also means cheaper energy bills for residents. But proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which are currently being consulted on, would curtail local authorities from setting standards that go beyond building regulations.

Christopher Hammond, chief executive of UK100, a cross-party network of more than 100 local authorities committed to reaching net zero ahead of the national legal target, said councils want to deliver homes and buildings that are cheap to run and warmer places to be in but that this is stymied by the planned changes.

Local authorities have “spent years developing rigorous, evidence-based, viable plans to deliver comfortable, energy efficient, affordable homes,” he said. “The proposed NPPF would block this from happening in the future. We are co-signing this letter, because local leaders need a planning system that matches their ambition — not one that centralises power in Whitehall forevermore and frustrates their power to deliver the homes their communities deserve”.

According to a report in the Guardian newspaper, a spokesperson for the Home Builders’ Federation said: “Building regulations are national rules enforced through building control, not planning authorities. A patchwork of 300 local standards would create confusion, delay delivery, and ultimately hold back the new homes the country needs.”

However, Magnus Gallie, senior planner at Friends of the Earth, one of the signatories to the letter, told the newspaper the changes being proposed to national planning policy would effectively prevent local authorities from adopting cutting-edge energy efficiency standards.

“This means new housing will fail to address rising fuel poverty or deliver truly zero-carbon homes. With the climate crisis already a reality, we need our homes to be fit for the future, not planning policy watered down to appease developers,” he said.

The proposed NPPF changes would effectively rule out a route which delivered transformational change to energy performance standards in the Republic of Ireland, which has notable similarities to the UK in terms of legal system, planning act and building control act. In 2005, Green Party councillors on Fingal County Council collaborated with Passive House Plus editor Jeff Colley to deliver 60 per cent reductions in calculated energy demand and carbon emissions for new buildings, along with mandatory renewable energy provision.

When Green councillors achieved similar successes in two other Dublin local authorities, Ireland’s Construction Industry Federation objected on the basis that different standards in different areas would create confusion, arguments which are echoed by the Home Builders Federation current objections. When the Green Party entered coalition government in Ireland in 2007, Colley was appointed chair of the Green Party’s policy committee on buildings, using the initiatives by Irish local authorities to set significant energy reduction targets for new homes nationally under changes to Ireland’s Part L of the building regulations: 40 per cent energy and carbon reductions plus mandatory renewables and airtightness testing in 2007, rising to 60 per cent energy and carbon reductions in 2011.