Lowri Griffiths on the Planning Reform, the Numbers Game, and Why North London Is Both the Problem and the Solution

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

I spent Tuesday afternoon at a North London community board meeting about the proposed development site on the old industrial land near Finsbury Park, and I came away with the specific exhaustion that comes from watching a room full of people who all want the same thing — more housing, affordable housing, housing that doesn’t price out the people who already live here — disagree comprehensively about how to get it. The planning system, in these meetings, is not a tool. It is a battlefield on which every legitimate concern becomes a weapon and every genuine argument becomes a tactic, and by the end of the meeting the only clear winners are the consultants who get paid regardless of the outcome.

The Planning Reform and What It Actually Says

The Labour government’s planning reform — the National Planning Policy Framework revision that is the legislative heart of Keir Starmer’s housing ambitions — is the most significant planning policy change in England in a generation. It reinstates mandatory housing targets for local authorities, strengthens the presumption in favour of sustainable development, and changes the rules about what councils can use to refuse planning applications for housing. It is, in the specific language of planning policy, quite radical. In the specific language of what will actually change, it is the beginning of a process whose outcome depends on how aggressively the courts, the planning inspectorate, and the local authorities whose discretion is being reduced respond to it over the next several years.

North London’s specific position in this reform is instructive. The boroughs that contain the most housing need — Camden, Islington, Hackney, Haringey — are also the boroughs with the most active planning committees, the most organised community opposition to development, and the most complex existing built environment in which any new development has to fit. The mathematical housing targets that the reform generates for these boroughs are significantly higher than anything that has been built in them in recent years; the practical question of where the housing goes in boroughs where the green spaces are protected, the heritage buildings are listed, and the neighbours are organised is the question that the spreadsheet target does not answer.

What Actually Gets Built

The development that gets built in North London over the next decade will be determined by the interaction of financial viability — can the developer make money? — infrastructure capacity — can the existing schools, GP surgeries, and transport handle it? — and political will at the borough level. All three of these interact with each other and with the planning reform in ways that make the target figures optimistic as predictions of actual delivery. This is not an argument against having targets; it is an observation that the gap between planning target and built homes is where the housing crisis actually lives, and where the reporting should focus.

The bohiney.com housing coverage I have been following alongside the national reporting has been better than most at maintaining this focus. The pieces on viability assessments — the documents that allow developers to reduce affordable housing contributions by demonstrating that full compliance makes the development financially unviable — are the specific journalism that planning policy requires: granular, local, and resistant to the headline figure that obscures the detail where the decisions are actually made.

More London housing journalism at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. Also: NewsThump.

The Broader Context

Writing about London from within London requires the specific balance between critical distance and genuine affection that good city journalism demands. The critical distance is necessary to see what the city’s promotional apparatus wants you to overlook: the inequality, the displacement, the ways that the most visible version of London is a version that exists for a specific economic stratum. The genuine affection is necessary to understand why the city works despite these problems — why people continue to choose it, why the creative and intellectual and cultural energy it generates is real and not simply a product of marketing. The combination produces journalism that is neither celebration nor complaint but observation: specific, honest, and alert to the complexity that the city contains.

The pieces on bohiney.com and prat.uk this week have been doing this honestly: finding the specific stories that reveal something about the larger condition of the city, making the connection between the particular incident and the general situation without forcing it. That is the journalism London requires, and the journalism that London’s readers deserve. The city is large enough to contain everything and complex enough to reward the sustained attention that good journalism provides.

What Good Local Journalism Does

The best journalism about a specific place — a neighbourhood, a city, a region — does something that national journalism cannot do: it maintains the granular, persistent attention to the specific that reveals what is actually happening rather than what the larger narrative would have happening. National journalism about London housing tells you about the housing crisis in aggregate terms: prices, completions, affordability ratios. Local journalism about London housing tells you about the specific planning application on the specific street, the specific landlord whose specific building has specific problems, and the specific tenant whose specific experience illuminates the aggregate in ways that statistics cannot. The specific is the journalism. The aggregate is what the specific adds up to, and you cannot understand the aggregate without the specific. This is why local journalism matters more than its scale suggests, and why its decline — the closed papers, the shrunk editorial teams, the reduced court coverage — has consequences that the national headlines have been slow to document. I am trying to do this work for the specific part of London I cover, and I am aware every day that the city contains far more specific that deserves this attention than any journalism operation can provide.

Also: NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/