Portas is not strong enough on planning

Retail guru Mary Portas’s review into the future of high streets is wide-ranging. She understands that the problems facing town centres are complex, and that the battle to support them needs to be conducted on many fronts. Among these are planning. She does not accept the Government’s contention that the draft National Planning Policy Framework maintains existing levels of protection for town centres, and calls for its wording to be made more precise “so it’s really clear that people and place come first and the policy is less vulnerable to legal disputes”. She calls for more research to understand the impact of retail developments on town centres, and a requirement for all large schemes to be given an “exceptional sign-off by the secretary of state”.

As sensible as they are, I’m not sure how much impact these recommendations will have. Her demand that that the wording of the NPPF be made more precise is in itself too vague to really force the Government’s hand. Similarly, it’s not clear how “the exceptional sign-off idea” would really change things given that, as Portas points out, the secretary of state has only chosen to call in one of the 146 out-of-town schemes referred to him since 2008.

All the signs are that the coalition and, in their latter years, their predecessors have quietly releasing the brakes on out-of-town development in the belief that it will bring much-needed economic growth.

Labour dropped the need test, which required developers to show that there was unmet demand for their proposed schemes, despite opposition from the Royal Town Planning Institute and senior planning officers. When in opposition, the Conservatives promised to restore the test, but the coalition has not done so.

As Portas points out, the secretary of state is not enforcing town-centre-first policy through call-ins.

The draft National Planning Policy Framework removes offices from the sequential test, which demands that out-of-town development cannot take place when town centre sites are available. It also removes the requirement for retail developers to demonstrate that they have met the sequential test, instead saying that councils should “prefer” retail and leisure schemes to be located in town centres “where practical”.

What’s more, the Government has proposed to stop collecting its own data on the proportion of retail development that takes place in town centres, reinforcing the impression that it would not mind if the issue dropped off the radar. This is despite complaints from the Communities and Local Government select committee that the Government needed to improve its collection and publication of statistics on town centres.

I see that a new research report on town centres has been published today, alongside the Portas report, and it will be interesting to see if this has up-to-date figures for the proportion of development that is taking place out-of-town. In 2007, certainly until yesterday the most recent year for which figures are available, 67 per cent of retail development in England took place outside of town centres.

That is the scale of the challenge with which high streets are contending, and they need a planning environment which pays more than lip service to a town centre first policy.

(Picture by Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).