National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between John McDonnell and Chris Hinchliff

Thursday 16th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on council and social housing. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing this very important debate.

On a personal basis, a debate on national planning policy feels like a very fitting bookend to the outgoing Administration. The issue of what gets built where defines our daily lives like no other issue, and I have found my first two years in this place defined by those debates. Without wanting to cast myself as a latter-day Cassandra, I shared early on my view that, try though Ministers might, there would be no appeasing the developer lobby—no amount of deregulation will ever satisfy them—and so it has proven, with the clamour for relaxed fire safety standards and the weakening of environmental policies, and for there to be less opportunity for ordinary people to influence decisions in the planning system, as loud as ever.

However, my views on the subject have changed. Today, I am not joining this debate to raise a series of detailed concerns about the latest redrafting of the NPPF—although I do still have such concerns, especially in relation to possible changes to the sequential test on surface water flooding and limits being imposed on local authorities to pursue more ambitious policies on climate and nature restoration. The point I really want to make today is that I believe we have reached a point where national planning policy is completely broken and the NPPF is beyond reform. After decades of deregulation, the genius of Labour’s post-war democratic settlement has been degraded and reduced to a system of fiendishly complex processes, combined with overwhelmingly negative outcomes, which, for all the world, seems to have been designed by an evil genius to drive all those involved mad.

When Lewis Silkin created the planning system that rebuilt this country from the ashes of world war two, he described the distinctly Labour vision for a policy that would meet “actual needs, democratically expressed.” Yet what the NPPF has achieved for years—I am afraid the latest iteration will be little different—is almost the precise opposite of Silkin’s idealism. Pretty much ever since the first version of the NPPF in 2012, what we have seen is the proliferation of speculative development across the country, with democratically produced local plans ridden roughshod over and housing built first and foremost for profit, not for people.

In fact, a national planning policy framework is not even an accurate name for what we have. There can be no plan-led system when national policy introduces the overwhelming likelihood of caveats to local plans through an ever stronger and equally inaccurately named presumption in favour of sustainable development, which in reality functions as a passport to permission for all but the very worst speculative schemes. This is not planning in any reasonable sense of the word—it is merely reacting.

Under the NPPF system, more and more of the initiative, the influence and the advantage lies with the vested interests of land promoters and major developers, whose private profit will never accord with the public good. And thus we have a national system in which the notion of affordable housing is a running joke, and in which the environment that politicians so often protest their love for is repeatedly trashed as a secondary matter compared to the unequally distributed benefits of growth. It is a national planning policy framework that overwhelmingly produces outcomes that lock us into car-dependent, unsustainable lifestyles, with polluted air that chokes the lungs of our children and costs the NHS billions, and utterly fails to secure public consent for the development we very desperately require to meet the needs of those stuck in temporary accommodation and in cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I apologise to the Minister; I am hopping between two different debates in two different Chambers. I told my constituents that I would make this point about planning policy in my area, which has fought for decades to protect the green belt. The introduction of the concept of the grey belt means that developers are now turning green belt into grey belt by dumping, cutting down trees and despoiling the area, and then applying for planning permission for development. The concept of grey belt has undermined all that we have spent decades campaigning for.

[Chris Hinchliff]

I agree with those concerns. As I understand it, many of the applications for grey belt are in fact on greenfield sites, and that needs to be addressed.

For all its labyrinthine processes, the NPPF makes a mockery of local democracy, which breeds disillusion and contempt for politics in this country. The system we have created through the NPPF traps communities in a never-ending cycle of adversarial confrontations with corporations that see our local landscapes as easy pickings and cream off much of the wealth of new developments, while leaving the public to carry the majority of the costs. The section 106 mechanism they rely on is not only obscure, but demonstrably incapable of securing the investment in the infrastructure—GPs, schools, sports grounds and public transport—necessary to keep pace with population growth, when hundreds of new houses are bolted on to towns that have already seen almost all their facilities closed.

The housing the NPPF produces is often both miserabilist and identikit. It is seemingly designed to erase local identity and shorn of local traditions, with no space for community and with a built environment that is best described as unhappiness given physical form. All in all, the damage that successive iterations of the NPPF have done to our country is difficult to forgive. Now is the time to consign the NPPF to the dustbin of history where it belongs and start afresh instead of making further amendments.

The one positive note I can strike is that it is not difficult to imagine something far, far better. We need to return to Labour’s democratic principles, stop treating the public as a problem to be silenced and embrace them as a source of optimistic solutions for meeting the needs of the future. It is time to replace the constant nonsense that traduces our constituents as nimbys, and to put power in their hands so that they can decide where and how to meet the housing needs of their communities in a way that expresses their hopes and priorities for the future. It is time to bring back architects in every local planning authority, working with each community to shape plans for future development on an appropriate scale for each settlement, and with a renaissance in the local vernacular that strengthens and reinvigorates the culture and identity of each unique town, village and city. In short, it is time to ditch the NPPF and build a new system that puts power in the hands of the people and allows planners to genuinely plan with communities.