Vision for building beautiful places set out

Beautiful, environmentally sustainable, and life-enhancing communities are at the centre of widespread planning changes announced by Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick.

The Building Beautiful Places plan will mean good quality design will be paramount, with local communities put at the very heart of decision-making to help shape their towns and cities.

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is being amended so that the Building Beautiful Places plan will mean residents and planners will find it easier to embrace beautiful, practical design while rejecting the ugly, unsustainable or poor quality.

The changes set an expectation that all councils should develop a local design code - an illustrated design guide that sets the standard for a local area - with input from local people. The process, outlined in the NMDC, demonstrates how and when local communities can be involved in developing a design code, using digital tools and social media, as well as face-to-face workshops, roundtables and exhibitions.

With an increasingly digitised planning system, local people will also be able to better navigate and access the planning process with online map-based local plans – allowing people to visualise local plans for development and participate more fully in the planning system. Two new web apps recently launched to help homeowners improve and extend their homes.

The Secretary of State has detailed a range of measures that, taken together, the government says will revolutionise the planning industry to enshrine quality, beauty and sustainability in the heart of local decision-making across the country from city centres to rural villages.

They will help promote community spirit, improve physical and mental wellbeing and help the environment. The measures will improve communities’ infrastructure, champion neighbourhood design and support walking and cycling to boost health and wellbeing.

Greater emphasis than ever before will now be placed on quality and design in the planning system. Local communities will be fully involved in how they want new developments to look and feel, with a much greater emphasis on environmental sustainability.

The changes to the National Planning Policy Framework set an expectation that good quality design should be approved, while poor quality should be rejected and includes an environmental commitment to ensure that all streets are lined with trees.

These measures mean the word ‘beauty’ will be specifically included in planning rules for the first time since the system was created in 1947 – echoing an era when a greater emphasis was placed on delivering attractive buildings for people that installed a sense of local pride.

Jenrick said: “Today I have set out the government’s vision for a planning system that make beautiful, sustainable and life-enhancing design a necessity, rather than a luxury. Our revised National Planning Policy Framework will ensure that communities are more meaningfully engaged in how new development happens, that local authorities are given greater confidence in turning down schemes which do not meet locally set standards. This is about putting communities – not developers – in the driving seat to ensure good quality design is the norm, and the return to a sense of stewardship – to building greener, enduringly popular homes and places that stand the test of time in every sense.”