This chapter will first consider the planning reforms introduced by the 2010–15 Coalition government. It will then focus on three aspects of the planning system that have been central to both policy development and academic discourse since 2010. These are localism, the focus on planning for growth in relation to other sustainability criteria and the issue of development viability.

Planning reform

The Coalition government abandoned any concept of a national spatial strategy. The previous government's Sustainable communities plan (ODPM, 2003) identified four growth areas: the Thames Gateway, the Ashford growth area, the London/Stansted/Cambridge growth area, which was subsequently extended to Peterborough, and the South Midlands/Milton Keynes growth area. This was followed up by the designation by central government of a number of towns as growth points. The view of the Coalition government is that whether or not an area should promote residential and employment growth is a matter for local decision. The regional plans that set housing growth targets at the local authority level were withdrawn. The setting of housing targets is now a matter for individual local authorities. While London has its own regional plan, which includes 10-year housing growth targets for individual boroughs, there is no planning framework for the London metropolitan region as a whole, and the pre-existing Inter Regional Planning Forum has lapsed.

The government has sought to liberalise the planning regime and speed up the planning decision process. The National planning policy framework (NPPF) (DCLG, 2012) introduced a presumption in favour of development, which required local authorities to demonstrate that a development did not comply with adopted planning policy – a significant requirement when about half of the local planning authorities still did not have plans adopted under the 2004 planning regime. Local authorities who consistently missed approval timescale deadlines or lost appeals could see their planning powers taken over by central government. The permitted development rules were extended to allow developers to convert offices and industrial buildings into homes without a requirement for planning consent.

In the Localism Act 2011, the government also introduced the neighbourhood plan procedure, by which groups of residents and local businesses could develop their own statutory plan for their neighbourhood. In practice, this has weakened the ability of democratically elected local planning authorities to plan strategically, and many neighbourhood plans constrain growth.