Planning

More planning powers for Ken Livingstone

The Greater London Authority Bill (‘the Bill’) is going through Parliament and could become law as early as October 2007. The Bill includes London-wide strategies for housing, climate change, energy and waste.The proposals to enable the Mayor to step in and take over the role of Local Authority and determine planning applications of ‘potential strategic importance’ have attracted the most critical interest.

The Mayor already has power to direct refusals of ‘strategic applications’ – a power he has only exercised 18 times in the last six years, so a cynical view is that he will only intervene to ensure a scheme is permitted, and where he is concerned that the Local Authority will refuse. This could focus on the issue of tall towers.

The Mayor’s enthusiasm and promotion of more tall towers for London is well known. A number of boroughs, including Westminster, Wandsworth, Southwark and the City of London have voiced their objections, citing the tall tower issue.Westminster argues that its famous skyline and views of the Palace of Westminster, its World Heritage Site should be determined by Westminster. The track record on tall towers in London shows that the Mayor has a point: a number of tall towers have been refused by boroughs, only to be found acceptable by the Secretary of State after a long and expensive inquiry.

The Bill creates a new procedure for determination of the application by the Mayor: once the Mayor has notified the borough that he is recovering it, he will hold a meeting at which a planning decision will be made, of which he will give at least 14 days notice advising who can appear and make representations and what material may be presented.

The result will be much quicker planning decisions where the option would have been a Public Inquiry.When the Mayor recovers an application, he will also handle the accompanying Section 106 Agreement.

Schemes that will qualify as applications of ‘potential strategic importance’ include:

• Buildings over 30m high outside the City of London
• Buildings over 25m high adjacent to the Thames
• Buildings over 150m high within the City of London
• Schemes of 500 residential units
• Sites of 10 hectares
• Floorspace in Central London of 20,000m2
• Floorspace outside Central London of 15,000m2
• Floorspace inside the City of London of 100,000m2.

The thresholds for height and floorspace within the City of London were significantly increased from the original draft Order accompanying the Bill (originally 75m and 30,000m2 respectively) as a result of lobbying by the City of London. Westminster is also arguing for increased height and floorspace within their remit. From the above thresholds it is clear that if the Mayor chose to be an interventionist he could be handling a significant number of applications each year.The Mayor’s office has indicated that he would use his power only very selectively, but there is no guarantee of this once the law is passed.

So, is this good or bad for the developers of major schemes? On balance it is good, because whilst there will be initial uncertainty as to who will determine the application, requiring the developer to court both the local borough and the GLA, in reality, developers are already doing this on major schemes and the likelihood of an earlier consent will be a real prospect.The Mayor will argue that his new guidance (currently draft) ‘London View Management Framework’ (which will form part of the London Plan) will give even better safeguards for these views.Whether the public believes this remains to be judged against the track record in coming months.

The Mayor may not get the control of tall buildings, which he seems to want, even when the Bill becomes law. Earlier this year UNESCO exceptionally broke with convention to express publicly its concern that the UK Government is not doing enough to protect the setting of London’s World Heritage Sites, and the Government’s response may be to call in applications affecting views of such sites for determination by the Secretary of State.

If and when the Bill becomes law, it will be interesting to see how the battle for control of decisions on tall buildings develops during the following 12 months.

Rachael Jordan
Planning Assistant
rachael.jordan@mishcon.com

Oliver Goodwin
Head of Planning & Environment
oliver.goodwin@mishcon.com

Property Matters! 08