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ichael Gove is the great survivor of modern Toryism, having served in more cabinets than any other minister since the formation of the coalition government in 2010. The secretary of state for levelling up has spent a big chunk of the past year applying his well-honed political skills to broker a truce among his fellow Conservative MPs on what has become the hugely divisive issue in the governing party of planning for housing.

The fruit of this peace making emerged in the run-up to Christmas, with the publication of the long-awaited latest revisions to the NPPF, which includes a number of changes to the system for meeting housing need.

The final version of the revised NPPF states that the standard method for assessing housing need, which was introduced under Theresa May’s government in 2018, is “an advisory starting point” for local authorities in generating housing numbers when plan-making. This confirms the wording in December 2022’s draft NPPF.

However, the revised NPPF gives a more explicit indication of the types of local characteristics that may justify the use of alternative methods for assessing housing need. As an example, it says, this could be that the area is an island where a significant proportion of the population is elderly.

Another key change is that the government has dropped plans, outlined in the 2022 consultation, to allow councils to be able to take past over-delivery of new homes into account when assessing housing need for plan-making.

The revised NPPF text has also dropped changes proposed in the consultation draft that said avoiding development that is “uncharacteristically dense” for an area would have outweighed the requirement for authorities to meet housing need.

Instead, a new paragraph 130, setting out the objective to protect the character of local areas, states that “significant” uplifts in the average density of residential development may be inappropriate if the resulting built form would be “wholly out of character with the existing area”.

The implications for councils, developers and others

Developers were quick out of the box to condemn the government’s move to allow councils to treat the standard method as a “starting point”, arguing that it will result in a reduction in the number of new homes coming through local plans.

From a “technical perspective”, the changes to national policy on the standard method are “pretty limited”, said Sam Hollingworth, associate director, planning, at consultancy Savills.

However, Edward Clarke, associate director at consultancy Lichfields, pointed out that the current Planning Practice Guidance (PPG) on housing and economic needs assessment refers to the standard method as a “minimum starting point” for assessing housing need.

Planning authorities can use other methods for assessing housing need, but only if the outcome is the delivery of a higher number, according to the PPG. The new NPPF, though, points towards councils being “let off the hook” of using the figures generated by the standard method, said Clarke. He continued: “That inevitably opens up lower housing targets, by freeing up places to go below the standard method. As a result, he said: “You're going to see local plans come through with lower numbers.”

Chris Young KC, a barrister in No5 Barristers Chambers, agreed, saying: “It’s not a radical change, but you cannot move to advisory housing targets and think there’s going to be no consequences.”

To set against this, however, the tightening of the latest document’s wording on the circumstances in which local planning authorities can use alternatives to the standard method is good news, said Young. “They have used some very clever wording to try and ensure that local authorities really focus on the standard method and don’t start opting for alternatives,” he explained.

This clearer guidance on alternative methods is valuable, Savills’ Hollingworth also noted. “It will be helpful in terms of giving a clearer steer to decision-makers as to what might constitute an exception to depart from projections,” he said.

The new NPPF wording will “negate” the scope for councils to debate methods of measuring housing need during the plan examination process, such as arguing that they should be based on different population projections to those used in the standard method, said Hollingworth. He continued: “Hopefully it will discourage local authorities from trying to simply interrogate reams of demographic data to try and find something that justifies departing from the standard method.”

Paul Miner, head of policy and planning at countryside charity CPRE, agreed. “Overall, there’s probably a less clear presumption that the standard method should be followed. But if you read the NPPF as a whole, it’s still very difficult for local authorities to get away from using the standard method,” he said. “It gives occasional circumstances where you might have exceptional justification for a different approach, but by definition those circumstances are meant to be exceptional.”

Meanwhile, the government’s moves in the draft NPPF to curb suburban densification have been reined in, experts agreed. The changes in the positioning of the document’s paragraph 130 (see above) and its wording are both significant, said Isabel Jones, a director for landscape and townscape at consultancy Turley.

The equivalent paragraph in 2022’s draft NPPF was bound up with the section devoted to the so-called “presumption in favour of sustainable development”. However, the new paragraph 130 sits in section 11, “Making effective use of land”, which “is quite a notable change”, said Jones. “It needs to be read in that context, around other paragraphs that are more supportive of increasing density.”

The new paragraph also refers to the policy applying only to urban areas, whereas the draft did not specify, which could have been interpreted in a “much broader way” to rural locations, said Jones. Its reference to schemes involving significant uplifts in density being potentially inappropriate if they are “wholly out of character with the existing area” will be “challenging” to apply in practice, she said.

“To be able to demonstrate that something is wholly out of character, you’d have to be introducing something that’s completely different from the local townscape,” she explained. “Most urban areas can accommodate some kind of change. In urban environments, you’ve often got quite a mixed character, so for development to be wholly out of character is quite a high bar.”

Charlie Banner KC of Keating Chambers told a recent edition of the Have We Got Planning News For You webcast that this paragraph sets a “very high threshold” for vetoing increased densities. He added that it will be “less easy” for the new paragraph to be deployed as a “trump card in the context of decision-making” and “difficult for members to rely on too freely if officers have recommended regenerative change”.

Vetoing applications on the grounds of being “wholly out of character” is common practice among council planners anyway, claimed Nicky Linihan, housing delivery specialist at public sector planner body the Planning Officers Society. “It’s something you would always look at as part of a planning application,” she explained. In addition, the government’s response to the NPPF consultation states that judgements on whether applications are “wholly out of character” will have to be backed up by evidence in the authority’s design codes.

This “heavy emphasis” on using design codes further raises the bar for efforts by councils to veto schemes on the grounds of density, said CPRE’s Miner. “There would be quite a high burden of proof on local authorities if they wanted to use that policy,” he explained.

Nevertheless, Paul Barnard, chair of the planning working group at the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport, saw the potential for residents to seize on the NPPF’s wording about “wholly out of character” development to put pressure on planning committee members. “They will play those very words back and that will put doubt in the minds of planning committee members,” he said.

The written ministerial statement by Gove, outlining changes to the NPPF, muddies the water a bit, said Turley’s Jones. She highlighted phrases in the statement about protection of “precious neighbourhoods” and “safeguarding” the “gentle density” of suburbs – a nod to the concept at the heart of the government’s own Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

This illustrated what barrister Young saw as the “contradictory” nature of the NPPF. “It is speaking with a forked tongue,” he argued.

But these contradictions are rooted in the fraught political process that surrounded the NPPF’s publication, Barnard suspected. He said: “It’s contradictory because it tries to face in umpteen different directions at the same time.”

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