British Land and Landsec have drawn up a series of recommendations to regenerate the UK’s towns and cities by improving how the planning system supports brownfield regeneration.
The paper, ‘More growth, more homes, more jobs – how to reform the planning system to unlock urban regeneration’ calls for a series of changes that will not need primary legislation or significant public funding to help drive growth in towns and cities across the UK, and will tackle what the partnership believes to be a planning system that is hindering economic growth.
The property companies are behind some of Britain’s most significant regeneration projects, including Landsec’s 24-acre Mayfield neighbourhood in central Manchester and British Land and AustralianSuper’s 53-acre Canada Water in London. The two companies have applied learnings from these schemes and developed them through this latest paper.
The paper states that development on brownfield land in key urban locations is increasingly needed to drive investment and growth and build communities for future generations, yet it is impacted more than any other form of development by the shortcomings of the current system. This is despite the fact that all political parties are united on the need to deliver more new homes and economic growth on brownfield land.
British Land and Landsec highlight three principal reasons for this in the paper:
- Successive changes to the planning system have resulted in layers of complexity, which mean the system’s default mode is to prevent or delay economic activity.
- These changes have added to the burden on planning authorities, meaning they have become increasingly stretched.
- A focus on housebuilding on greenfield sites and a rigid planning framework detract from mixed-use urban development.
British Land and Landsec’s roadmap of proposed improvements includes the following:
- Define brownfield urban regeneration sites as a separate planning category and focus on these opportunities to drive economic growth
- Secure quick wins and pilot new ways of working in progressive authorities
- Resource the planning system more effectively and reduce complexity and duplication to improve performance, with centralised specialist planning resource to support the delivery of large, complex sites
- Encourage proportionate decision-making to ensure that planning decisions are taken at the level their impacts are felt
- Recognise the bespoke nature and viability challenges of urban regeneration
- Create tax incentives to unlock investment in infrastructure and remediation of brownfield land
- Place communities at the heart of reshaping urban spaces
Simon Carter, chief executive officer at British Land, said: “There is political consensus in the need to prioritise urban regeneration over greenfield development. The ideas we are recommending today would help to drive our country’s growth by rejuvenating our great cities and towns and can be put into place quickly and easily.”
Mark Allan, chief executive officer at Landsec, said: “Urban, brownfield regeneration has the potential to unlock growth and prosperity for cities across the UK. However, the current planning system acts as a significant brake to this growth. We believe that by making some necessary but simple changes to the existing planning regime, we can unlock this opportunity – for the benefit of the UK, for the economy and importantly for the communities we build for.”
