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Living on a prayer

The lost decade of strategic planning in the West Midlands

As the song lyric goes: “we’re half way there, living on a prayer”. This neatly sums up progress on the Birmingham housing shortfall for the period 2011-31. We are almost half way through the plan period, arriving at a key milestone in the adopted plan on Friday 10 January 2020 when the monitoring policy the Inspector imposed expects the shortfall to be addressed in the plans of Housing Market Area (HMA) authorities which are at least at examination.  We are not there but Birmingham City Council, in producing its Authority Monitoring Report (AMR) in December 2019, has decided not to take remedial action (the only real option being to review its own plan). It believes that sufficient progress is being made across the HMA even though only one plan has been adopted (Stratford) and one is at examination (North Warwickshire) delivering around 20% of the shortfall.

Birmingham’s 20 year shortfall is significant, largely because of its scale (37,900 against a requirement of 89,000) and an HMA comprising 14 authorities, two of which sit in two HMAs. The city’s plan released a site from the Green Belt for 5,000 homes (albeit with strong resistance from the local MP) but could still only provide a maximum 51,100 capacity within its boundaries. The balance was to be provided through the Duty to Co-operate with the other 13 authorities.

Two came forward early on to offer the 20% referred to above, but progress on other plans has been slower than expected. The council’s AMR says this is “not due to lack of co-operation but rather the time-consuming and complex nature of the plan preparation process itself”. The plan’s Inspector had been told in 2014, however, that seven authorities had already committed to plan reviews and felt that three years from adoption (which eventually happened in 2017) was enough time to get to examination. So, in reality, we are over five years down the line from that point.

Several authorities are commencing plan reviews but without any agreement on how much they are contributing to meet Birmingham’s shortfall to 2031. These include Solihull, who had offered 2,000 in a draft plan in 2016 which has stalled; Lichfield, who are considering up to 4,500 but over a plan period to 2040; South Staffordshire, who are looking at 4,000 by 2037; and Cannock Chase, who are contemplating between 500-2,500 by 2036. So, all told, there could be around 20,000 on the table against a policy shortfall of 37,900.

Living on a prayer

However, several factors are at play:

  • Plan reviews are now looking beyond 2031, at least to 2036 and in some cases to 2040. There is no agreement on the scale of need beyond 2031 across the HMA.
  • A Strategic Growth Study commissioned by the HMA authorities in 2018 identified the potential shortfall from 2031-36 as over 60,000 but considered the shortfall to 2031 had reduced to 28,000 due to increases in urban capacity, especially in Birmingham city centre.
  • A Housing Position Statement by the 14 authorities in September 2018 claimed that the overall HMA shortfall had reduced further to 11,000 (albeit based on gross supply figures, not applying a recommended discount). 
  • A promised 2019 update of that statement has not materialised, but it was rumoured that it would show the shortfall to 2031 had “disappeared”.
  • The Black Country Plan review is underway and the four authorities working together have recently published an Urban Capacity Review which suggests they have a 26,000 shortfall of their own, extending to 2038, justifying Green Belt release. This is partly due to the fact that some residential allocations from ten years ago have remained in industrial use.

So, if the HMA shortfall (incorporating Birmingham’s) has reduced to nothing but there is a substantial gap in the Black Country’s supply, does this mean the shortfall has shifted geographically? Or is it less of a problem up to 2031 but is heavily back-loaded to the next decade when urban supply might run out? And when will this show up in a jointly agreed evidence base?

These are issues which should be dealt with strategically but, in the West Midlands, there is a void – a “lost decade” since the abolition of RSS in 2010, when several sub-regional exercises have begun and then petered out:

  • The Greater Birmingham & Solihull LEP initially stepped into the strategic gap and promised a ‘Spatial Plan for Recovery and Growth’, which the Birmingham plan inspector had been convinced would be published during 2015 but wasn’t.
  • The newly devolved West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) set up a Land Commission in 2016 which recommended a spatial planning framework for the WMCA area but, as the new Mayor did not have strategic planning powers, it was only ever going to be non-statutory.
  • WMCA then struck a pioneering Housing Deal with Government in 2018 and set about producing a ‘Spatial Investment and Delivery Plan’ which was to be consulted upon and published by the end of 2018. By the end of 2019 this had become an informal, internal document stitching together existing plan commitments with a focus on infrastructure.

There is, as a result, no strategic plan for the West Midlands that has been subject to scrutiny or even debate. Perhaps the experiences of Greater Manchester and the West of England have lowered expectations about how the current system can deliver meaningful strategic plans for metropolitan areas. More likely, there has been strong political resistance to any form of strategic planning.

In the short term, this has not been a problem, as housing delivery has been increasing with consistent growth across the WMCA area over the past three years from 12,000 to 16,000 a year, and from around 8,000 to nearly 12,000 a year across the Greater Birmingham and Black Country HMA. These are impressive figures but mask a longer term problem unless the subsidising of brownfield development is aggressively sustained.

Resistance to Green Belt release can also not be underestimated as a driver for the reluctance to address long term spatial choices head on. The replacement of Objectively Assessed Need by the Standard Method, and its future revision, also mean that politicians can put off those choices until there is more clarity on the likely scale of needs.

As we start a new decade, joined-up strategic planning in the West Midlands is a distant memory and there appears to be no appetite politically for change. The forthcoming Metro Mayoral election could however be a testbed for new ideas, but we expect the battle for the Green Belt to be at the fore as it will be in other metropolitan areas.

For further information on housing and strategic planning in the West Midlands, please contact Mike Best or Tom Armfield.

10 January 2020