OPEN SECRETS · PART 3 OF 3
Two parts into this series, I have told you what delay costs and where reform is being aimed.
That leaves the question I am asked most often by landowners who have followed the argument this far. If the system is about to get better, why not wait?
It is a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than the one you would expect a land promoter to give. Planning reform for landowners may improve the system in time, but it does not stop the clock while that change is taking shape.
So here is mine. For some landowners, waiting will be the right call. For most, I do not think it is, and the reasons have less to do with the reforms themselves than with what happens in the meantime.
Reform is aimed at smaller sites than yours
This is the part that gets the least attention, and it matters most if you own strategic land.
A great deal of what is proposed is calibrated around smaller applications. The Section 106 templates are for sites below 50 units. The recommendation to skip pre-application applies to sites below 50 units, or where an up-to-date Local Plan makes it unnecessary.
If you own sixty acres on the edge of a market town, that is not your application.
Strategic sites are precisely the ones that need pre-application engagement, that generate genuine consultee interest, and that require a bespoke Section 106 because the infrastructure package is bespoke. The reforms tidy the route through the system for straightforward proposals. Complex ones still have to be argued.
I am not suggesting the reforms are aimed at the wrong targets. Most applications are small, and making those quicker frees officer time for everything else. That is a real benefit, and some of it will reach you indirectly.
But indirectly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That distinction matters particularly for landowners with strategic sites.
You cannot legislate planners into existence
The second limit is people.
Lichfields found that four in five councils surveyed were below full staffing levels, and that only around one in three considered they had adequate skills and experience in their planning teams.
Read those two figures together, because they compound. A department that is short-staffed and short of experience does not process applications at the same rate as a fully staffed one, however well the process around it has been designed.
A better process helps an understaffed team. It does not make it a fully staffed one.
And planners are not quick to produce. Recruiting and training somebody who can competently handle a strategic application takes years, and local government is competing for those people with the private sector.
This is the constraint I would watch most closely over the next few years, because it is the one least susceptible to a policy announcement.
Planning reform for landowners takes time to become real
Here is the thing about planning reform that everybody in the industry knows and almost nobody outside it quite believes.
Announcing a reform does not change anything.
A reform announced today still has a long way to travel before it becomes day-to-day practice in several hundred separate planning authorities, each with its own committee, its own backlog and its own way of doing things.
Each of those steps takes months. Some take years.
The national scheme of delegation is due through legislation in October 2026, which is genuinely imminent. Much of the rest will take considerably longer to bed in, and bedding in has its own disruption. A planning department learning a new system is not, in the first instance, a faster planning department.
So when you weigh up waiting, be honest with yourself about what you are waiting for. Not the announcement. Not the legislation. The point at which your council is actually working the new way.
Some of it was never going to be quick
There is one more limit, and it is the one I flagged at the end of Part Two.
Not all planning delay is friction. Some of it is work.
Ecology surveys are tied to seasons. You cannot survey for great crested newts in November because you would like the application in by Christmas. Transport modelling takes the time it takes. Flood risk, heritage, landscape and viability all require somebody competent to do a substantial piece of analysis, and somebody else competent to check it.
Reform can stop a council asking you for assessments you do not need. It cannot compress the ones you do.
On a strategic site, that body of work is significant, and it sits largely outside the reform programme.
What predictability is worth
I have been fairly hard on the limits, so let me be fair about the upside.
Lichfields’ conclusion is that the most realistic gain from planning reform for landowners is predictability rather than speed. That sounds like a consolation prize. It is not.
A process that takes two years and is known to take two years is a different proposition from one that might take eighteen months or might take four years. You can plan around the first. You can budget for it, structure an option agreement around it, and have a sensible conversation with your family about timing.
The second is the one that does the real damage, not because the time is longer but because nobody can tell you what to expect.
If these reforms deliver nothing except a process you can forecast, that is worth having.
It is still not a reason to wait for them.
What can you control?
Strip out everything you cannot influence, and the list is short. Planning reform for landowners is only part of the picture.
You cannot control how quickly a council validates your application. You cannot control how long the Environment Agency takes to respond, whether your authority is fully staffed, or when a national reform reaches your district.
You can control when you start.
And you can control what state you are in when you do. Whether the land has been properly assessed. Whether you understand the Local Plan position and the timetable for the next review. Whether the technical constraints have been identified early enough to design around, rather than late enough to argue about. Whether you know how your site compares with the others competing for the same allocation.
None of that guarantees permission. It does not remove planning risk, and I would be suspicious of anybody who told you it did.
What it does is put you in the queue in good order, rather than joining it later and less prepared.
Nine years, again
I keep coming back to Crewe Northern Gateway because it makes the point better than any figure I can quote.
We started promoting that site in 2012. There was no policy support, the land sat outside the settlement boundary and it was in several ownerships. Phase one secured permission in 2015 and was completed and occupied in 2021.
Nine years.
Now picture the version of that story where we had waited three years at the start for a more favourable planning environment. The environment would indeed have improved. The scheme would still have taken nine years from the point we began, and the landowners would have been three years older when it finished.
That is the trade I would ask you to think about. Not whether reform is coming. It is, in some form, and parts of it will help.
The question is what happens to the time in between, and who absorbs it.
The decision is still yours
I said at the start of this series that cost can be transferred to a promoter but time cannot. Three parts later, I have not found a reason to change my mind.
The planning system may become faster. It will probably become more predictable. Both would be welcome. Neither is here yet.
Until they are, the only real control you have over time is deciding when to start.
If you own land with development potential and you have been waiting for a better moment, the most useful thing you can do is find out what you have actually got.
That work is worth doing whichever system you end up in.
