Time and its use in housing development
Dominant rhetoric surrounding housing development has featured recurrent reference to delay and to a need to deliver housing more speedily.
This has been linked to the housing affordability crisis, and attention to hastening build-out rates and speeding up planning permissioning have been important concerns for government in recent years.
In that context, surprisingly little work has been carried out examining how time is actually used in and across the so-called development ‘pipeline’. Some studies have looked at time lags, at planning delay and build-out rates – notably the Letwin review published in 2018, and that work set out where time is used at various stages on very large developments. Did you know that, for large sites, Letwin calculated that the build-out stage and the preceding planning stages take over 14 years?
This type of headline time tally may surprise many who are not in the wider planning and development professions, but this is far less surprising for insiders. The questions remain, however, over why this is so, and also regarding what the time is actually spent on. In recent work that I have led recently, we decided that too little actual evidence of time taken was underpinning both the debate over ‘delay’ and the planning reform agenda. So, we did a deep dive into a large development of around 400 homes on an allocated site to provide an ‘archaeology’ of the development pipeline. This involved looking at hundreds of files and correspondence over a 15-year period.
How time is used in development
The resulting findings show the activities that occupied the site promoter, developer, the local planning authority, and the role of other actors. The work highlights how the time was used across the various stages. This included a 2-year period before the outline planning application was received and where a range of site investigations, survey work and data gathering was undertaken. The time to assess and then grant the outline permission took a similar period of time. The case also reveals the multiple changes and amendments requested by the developer over a span of more than four years and how that series of changes reopened numerous issues to be reassessed and agreed.
The full findings hold important consequences for how we understand the complexity of development and the way that time is controlled and used. The implication is that we need to think ‘whole system’ in reforms to development and planning if we are serious about delivering development at scale and without unnecessary delay. And, of course, more research is needed!
This blog piece stems from a recent report for CPRE, produced by Prof Gavin Parker with Dr Mark Dobson and Dr Michelle Lyon, titled ‘Timelining the pipeline’ which is available here.
