Bring back joined-up planning laws

Do you know where this quote comes from? "Planning policies and decisions, including adequate land availability, have an important role to play in the preparation of local authorities' area housing strategies. These strategy statements should cover private and public demand and contain proposals for meeting demand. Local authorities should adopt a corporate approach, involving housing and planning committees in preparing and coordinating development plans and housing strategies."

No, it's not the latest proposed changes to planning guidance PPG3; it's not the Communities Plan; it's not a government response to the interim Barker report on housing supply. It is, in fact, from the superseded PPG3 of March 1992.

This is the very same PPG3 that first enshrined "a community's need for affordable housing as a material planning consideration which may be taken into account in formulating development plan policies" and enabled councils to "seek to negotiate with developers" in order to "cater for a range of housing needs on developments of a substantial scale".

When we examine the interim Barker report, homelessness figures and the government's planning reform agenda, we must remember that attempts to integrate the planning and housing systems to deliver more affordable housing are not a recent phenomenon. The two professions have common roots and traditions emanating from philanthropic initiatives such as the towns of Bournville, Saltaire and New Earswick.

The first planning legislation was the 1909 Housing & Town Planning Act, followed by a further joint act in 1919. It was only in 1925 that strands of legislation diverged via the separate Housing and Town Planning Acts.

What followed was, of course, the separate development of single-tenure estates of council housing on compulsorily acquired land, often beyond the remit of the planning system. The results sometimes fell well short of the government's present aspirations for high-quality residential environments and socially mixed and balanced communities and these failings were fundamental to the introduction of the right to buy in 1980 and the subsequent curtailment of councils' role in housing development.

The PPG3 of 1992 was an attempt to reintegrate planning and housing but carried only the limited weight of government guidance. Subsequent versions and explanatory circulars have re-emphasised the same advice. Slowly but surely, regional planning guidance has incorporated indicative estimates of affordable housing needs and development plans have included ever more ambitious affordable housing targets.

If the system is to deliver the homes so urgently needed, the links must be strengthened by statute

The system is failing
The interim Barker report, however, makes it only too plain that the present system is failing to deliver. Homelessness charity Shelter recently suggested that the 39,000 extra houses per year that Barker indicates should be built is an underestimate.

There are 93,340 households in temporary accommodation in England, the highest number ever. We have a national housing crisis and this is openly recognised by government ministers. Yet planning officers can still say, "I became a planner to protect the environment – simple but true" (I won't ask you to guess the source of that quote, it was a letter to Planning magazine earlier this month) and equate this to contributing to "the achievement of sustainable development", the mission statement that is to be enshrined as the statutory purpose of planning in the forthcoming Planning & Compulsory Purchase Bill.

Planning committees refuse schemes that are central to the strategy promoted by the housing committee of the same council. Planning authorities fail to consult their housing colleagues on schemes with significant potential to deliver affordable homes. All too rarely is affordable housing offered as a positive material planning consideration to outweigh environmental or other planning objections.

The fundamental problem is that the planning system has no statutory duty to tackle homelessness or any other need. The law gives councils the power, although not the duty, to promote and improve the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of their areas. But the emerging planning law only refers to "wellbeing" when dealing with compulsory purchase.

No one wants to resort to the mass solutions of the past, but if the planning and housing system is actually to deliver the homes that are urgently needed, the links must be strengthened by statute.