Sustainable Dwellings - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

The LPA can define 'isolated' in any way they like on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, if a house on a remote hilltop is NOT defined by an LPA as 'isolated', or if an infill house in a hamlet is defined as 'isolated', then the LPA would have some questions to answer. 'Sustainability' is another aspect altogether : the NPPF requires homes to be 'sustainable'. In fact any construction which is not sustainable scores very badly in NPPF terms. So what is 'sustainability'? It is not a simple process or calculation to obtain a yes/no answer or some sort of numeric score. Use of PV or double glazing is not 'sustainability' ... just data points. Similarly, being away from a town is not always by definition 'unsustainable', despite what some LPAs sometimes say. Motor fuel use might DROP as a result of a new remote development. Buildings need to be sustainable i.e. good insulation, limited use of non-renewable materials etc. The building context also needs to be sustainable. That house on a hill-top with full insulation, made of recycled newspaper, growing all its own food and growing biofuels and rarely requiring motor vehicle use by residents or visitors would be very sustainable. The same location with a red-brick poorly insulated home, with heated outside swimming pool, and five Range Rovers in the garage would NOT be highly sustainable. To cover all the points you need to read the Brundtland Report and get a feel for what 'sustainability' means. (I had to read it for work purposes ... and I was very pleased that I did : it was an eye opener) It would be advisable for any application which needs to rely on 'sustainability' as part of its case to review and document as many sustainability factors as possible. If an applicant fails to make this effort then they risk the LPA saying something like: "This application is not sustainable due to factor XYZ as so we recommend refusal". In fact, if you haven't bothered to collect your data to cover all/most sustainability metrics relating to a development then how do YOU know if you are putting forward a sustainable proposal? Finally: 'sustainability' is NOT just a touchy-feely hippy concept which can be glossed over by adding a bicycle rack to your development. Our children face an energy deficient and materials deficient world and we need to prepare for that. Don't let the madness you see on our motorways on a Friday evening deceive you : few people in the UK will be driving large Range Rovers (or equivalent) in say 20 years time.

I cannot see anywhere in the NPPF where it says that an individual home has to be ‘sustainable’. Surely it is not the individual dwelling that has to be ‘sustainable’ but rather the alternative options for locating that dwelling in one place compared to another ? So if there are more sustainable places for building housing eg. within or on the edge of a settlement with services (which have capacity for more housing), then that is a more sustainable option than an isolated dwelling which over its lifetime is very likely to consume more resources than a better connected alternative. The exception would be where the sustainability would derive from direct proximity to the workplace or where there are no better alternatives.

Peter, you comment startled me so I rushed to my well-used copy of the NPPF for a quick check! The main thrust of the NPPF is 'sustainable development' ... and construction of a home is surely 'development'? The final 'sustainability score' of a 'development' will indeed include a factor relating to location - and also to the resources used in its construction and resources used during its lifetime. As you suggest, an isolated red-brick mass-produced home is indeed likely to be less 'sustainable' than the same home adjacent to an established community. In absolute terms however both homes may be poorly insulated and may be burning fossil fuels inefficiently day after day. However there will also be isolated homes which be highly sustainable ... and such homes need not be the ultra-expensive over-engineered show-homes we see on Grand Designs. At the end of the day it comes down to the numbers : as I noted above, it's not safe to simply assume that an isolated home is by definition 'unsustainable'. Is an isolated home which needs very little fuel for heating by definition worse than an inefficient home in a village? You need the numbers to prove the case one way or the other.

Thank you for your contributions. I think that there are three elements to sustainability. Firstly the sustainability of the actual buildings. For the most part this would be covered by building regulations and using appropriate heat sources, recycling etc. Second there is sustainability of location. This is where the difference between home in the open countryside and isolated homes in the countryside comes in and affects hamlets and small villages, some of which have lost their infrastructure with post office and school closures. Surely such sustainability has to be measured against how people actually live and are going to live rather than how planners think people live. Prior to mass ownership of cars groceries were delivered by a boy on a bike with a carrier in the front. Now they are increasingly delivered by a man in a van making multiple stops. You do not need easy access to a shop to but items for day to day living you need access to the internet and many authorities are boosting speeds in rural areas. Equally most minor illnesses are now diagnosed on-line or over the telephone. Sustainable locations do not necessarily mean facilities within walking distance. If and when the oil runs out someone will invent alternative means of propulsion. Thirdly there is sustainability in terms of impact. There must be a percentage growth that adversely impacts on the existing settlement although that percentage will vary in each individual case. What is needed is some guidance on what sustainability in the NPPF means. This can either come from the authors of NPPF or from the courts or from individual l.p.as setting their own criteria in policies that have been subject to consultation and examination. It cannot come with planners saying that it means whatever they want it to mean. That is not plan led development that is administrative dictatorship and is wrong.

Hi Leslie, I think we will find that we (applicants, planning agents, planning officers, councillors) will all need to get a firmer grasp of 'sustainability' and how to assess it. In fact it is practically impossible to obtain any absolute measure of sustainability - but it IS possible to make quantified sustainability COMPARISONs. These comparison will allow Proposal A to be compared to Proposal B. The will also allow comparisons to be made between 'Overall Situation Following Refusal' against 'Overall Situation Following Approval'. However, as I have noted elsewhere, simplistic approaches to assessing sustainability don't work - you need to build a score based on multiple, weighted, possibly non-linear, attributes. This is going to lead to a lot of fun and games! - What factors are relevant? - What weighting should be given to each factor? - What non-linear algorithms (if any) should be used? - Who will validate the overall method? - Who is going to collect the data? - Who is going to perform the calculations? - What happens if an applicant uses a set of factors which is not the same as the set used by the LPA? - Who will pay for this work? - How can planning departments handle these processes? - How can councillors be trained in these concepts? - How will a typical planning applicant be expected to handle these issues without the use of a trained & expensive planning agent? I now hear everyone cry - "What nonsense! We can't do all that ... we will bodge a quick & dirty solution" ! Well, what happens at the Appeal when one side has a limited or bodged sustainability argument whilst the other has a highly detailed, highly structured sustainability argument? Failing to approach sustainability in sufficient depth will leave the 'lazier' side at risk of losing their case, however valid it is generally. Although most applicants - and many planning professionals - will regard the whole sustainability drive as nonsense, it should be noted that sustainability is "the golden thread" running through the NPPF. The NPPF didn't come from nowhere - it was created by people who are intellectually capable and who understand the world we live in and the threats & challenges it faces. We owe it to our children to regard sustainability as a vital contribution towards a decent future for this country - and the world. Planning until now has been mostly based on words, opinions, politics and the like - so it will be a long haul to introduce quasi-mathematical analysis into the planning process. Many less-numerate applicants, planning staff and councillors will fight tooth and nail to preserve their comfortable and pliable 'world of words'. However simply regarding sustainability as a pain in the backside forced on the planning community by a bossy central government does nobody any favours. Disclaimer: My firm is developing a software package which will allow 'sustainability scores' to be created from data entered by an applicant, planning agent or planning officer.

The development plan is the tool to decide between alternative housing options. The local plan tries to ensure consistency of decision making as well as influence an appropriate pattern of development. The alternative would be to decide each application against a list of ‘sustainability merits’ which would likely be a recipe for inconsistency and unfairness. An appraisal of the various policy options during the preparation of the development plan, is the tool we use to determine sustainability. Modern homes in settlements with services will benefit as much from new technologies as modern homes in isolated locations. Therefore in most cases it will be more logical to build new homes in the better connected places. This is particularly true in the UK where there are also conservation reasons for not encouraging sporadic development in the countryside. Plenty of exceptions are still available for new housing in less well connected places eg. rural workers homes, subdivision, re occupation, rebuilding and residential conversion. Para 55 of NPPF is about location and supports planning for new housing in settlements with services. ‘Sustainability’ in terms of design or the good nature of the people who are going to inhabit a property is not listed as a special circumstance justifying location of an isolated new home.

Peter I agree with you in large part, and the most interesting part of what you said,, was your interpretation of Para 55 and `special circumstances` My `beef` with some LPA`s is that they take a contrary view.....that you can`t read Para 55 as you and I have done, but instead treat conversions the same way as isolated new homes because the building to be converted is not within a settlement and is therefore not sustainable ( based purely on one aspect -location-of Les`s three sustainability criteria) Now that`s where the issue for me lies.....PPS 7 has gone but some LPA`s haven`t moved on!

Peter, I think that we will have to agree to disagree. Your plan-led centralised approach will continue to allow planning officers to simply recommend refusal for rural development by saying, for example, that 'developments away from settlements will be unsustainable due to increase motor vehicle use'. No argument allowed. Case closed. Business As Usual despite the arrival of the pesky NPPF. This blanket approach - on average - may indeed be effective ... but it does place above-average designs at an unfair disadvantage. A comparison: The police or the courts could say that someone caught on the street at 1AM carrying a crowbar was - on average - likely to be a house breaker. Convenient for the police - but a bit tough on someone trying to change a car tyre. It would lead to people with flat tyres NOT fixing them at night - a distortion of democracy caused by authorities not wishing to assess situations on a case-by-case basic. Luckily for the general population the police and courts do work on a case-by-case basis, whatever the cost. I would like to think that the planning system works in the same way - but prior to the NPPF I doubt that it did. Now let's take a look at the Ministerial Forward to the NPPF: * The purpose of planning is to help achieve sustainable development. * Sustainable means ensuring that better lives for ourselves don’t mean worse lives for future generations. * Development means growth. * In order to fulfil its purpose of helping achieve sustainable development, planning must not simply be about scrutiny. * Planning must be a creative exercise in finding ways to enhance and improve the places in which we live our lives. * In part, people have been put off from getting involved because planning policy itself has become so elaborate and forbidding – the preserve of specialists, rather than people in communities. * This National Planning Policy Framework changes that. By replacing over a thousand pages of national policy with around fifty, written simply and clearly, we are allowing people and communities back into planning. Perhaps I am simply naive, but surely the NPPF is suggesting that the current system is broken and that it's time for a change? The staid old centralised command ways have been found wanting so we need a new approach. In particular I don't feel that local plans which are intended to be simple for LPAs to administer and which try to preserve the 'old way of working' will provide the flexibility and optimism that the NPPF clearly wishes to encourage. Overall I am rather disappointed at the LPAs general reaction to the NPPF. Only a few seem to regard it as an opportunity. Many seem to regard it as undue interference by central government and are doing everything possible to resist it.. To be frank I don't expect much change in the short term : the LPAs are here for ever whilst those annoying democratically elected governments come and go. The LPAs now have a choice : either they work to help our population now & in the future, or they put our society at risk by sticking to the old ways. That said, someday we WILL need to address sustainability properly in order to feed our families and keep the lights on. __________________________________ As for Clause 55 not specifically encouraging sustainable houses in the countryside, it should be noted that the list of 'conditions' is not absolute. There is the statement 'Local planning authorities should avoid new isolated homes in the countryside unless there are special circumstances such as .... ' The 'such as' allows cases & situations not in that list to be approved. I can imagine developments which deliver a net improvement in 'sustainability' for the area/county/country could be considered for approval, even if not in the list. These cases of course would end up with an Appeal!