Street Votes - what's the big idea?

Everyone in the planning and architecture world has been trying to desperately get some insight into the approach that new Secretary of State, Michael Gove, might take to the vexed question of planning reform. There has been plenty of speculation and few actual pronouncements, but this week his comment that the idea of Street Votes - as proposed by the Policy Exchange, a thinktank - was a 'cracking idea', gave commentators something to grab hold of.

The concept of Street Votes is that residents of a street could band together to develop a 'street plan' which, if approved by a supermajority of votes in a mini referendum, would then permit whatever it contained to automatically gain planning permission.  On the face of it, how democratic and what a great way to avoid planners having to determine lots of individual planning applications! And how fantastic for the property owners, who could all stand to profit by building extensions or even whole new homes by subdividing their dwellings or building in their gardens. But, ever the pedant, I've been mulling over what this might really mean in practice.

Let's say you were the owner of a house in a stereotypical street of 30 semi-detached houses somewhere in, I don't know, Surrey. (Street Votes wouldn't, if the Policy Exchange proposals are followed, apply to any homes built before 1918, and to make things simple, I'm using an example from the report itself, which says 'A street of suburban bungalows, for example, could agree on the right to create Georgian-style terraces.') 20% of our notional street, or a minimum of 10 households, would need to get together and develop the detailed designs required to constitute a plan for approval. This would involve surveys, architects fees, engineers, energy consultants and so forth - as well as, of course, the participation of homeowners themselves. The Policy Exchange report sets out a complicated set of geometrical principles which they feel would be appropriate,  including setback, height restrictions, plot ratios, rules for corner plots and much else besides, for the full 'design specifications' which would confer automatic planning permission. 

It would represent a fair amount of work to develop such a scheme on a technical level, and that before you get into whether all the neighbours agree on what a 'beautiful' design might look like. All of which would need to be paid for up-front with no guarantee of success at referendum. Compared to the ease of getting a plansmith to draw you up a back extension, this would be a significant investment for the households on our notional street - after all, it's basically developing a planning application for a multi-million pound development. The notion suggested in the report that architects might do this pro bono - forget it.

Then, building all that extra floorspace is also expensive. The worked example in the report requires, by their figures, a £2m investment per household in construction, in order to realise a net profit of £1.7m. There seems to be an implied expectation that developers may finance this up front in deal with homeowners to vote for their plans. And there's a reason developers aren't going round already offering to do this kind of deal with a streets-worth of homeowners - it's time-consuming, risky and complicated. I'm not convinced that cutting planners out of the equation is going to fundamentally alter that. 

Imagining that neighbours will magically come together once the potential for increasing the value if their homes is dangled, is naive and could be hugely divisive. I was once involved with a project where at one stage some residents suggested a version of just this - that they all agreed to sell off part of their back gardens to be developed for mews-style homes. It didn't get far. Most homeowners didn't want to look out at a new home at the bottom of their garden, and felt the financial gain wasn't worth the pain. And that wasn't even a scheme at the scale of what the report proposes, where homes would be demolished and completely rebuilt to create more floorspace, and residents would have to move out during the process. 

The successful precedent given in the report concerns mansard extensions which were added to a row of homes in wealthy Primrose Hill, of the kind (pre-1918, conservation area) which are in fact explicitly excluded from the Street Votes proposal. These were privileged owners who could pay for good architects, and for the building work, and didn't create any more homes to meet local need. I can see Street Votes being a great success for enclaves of wealthy suburban households who want to gain several extra bedrooms, a cinema room and a basement gym. But that's not going to solve the housing crisis.

The proposals suggest that 60% of votes would be needed to approve the code, and at leat 50% of households must have voted. Simple maths to show that only 30% of residents might need to be in favour in order for it to pass. Imagine being one of the residents who voted against a street design code, and then being surrounded by building sites like a 'nail house'. The proposal says that rights to light would be unchanged, but if a code stated that development could extend to a building line significantly in front of the existing frontages, or significantly behind existing backs, you could find a very tricky situation ensuing where retained homes had their views and daylight curtailed. It would be more sensible for the 'deal' to be that the whole street had to be redeveloped at once, or not at all, but again, there's a reason that kind of project - with the decanting of residents to temporary rental accommodation, like a private estate regeneration scheme - is a rarity.

Most people know that I'm fairly sceptical of neighbourhood planning, because it raises unrealistic expectations among residents about what can be achieved. With honourable exceptions, many neighbourhood plans, which take years to produce, are poorly drafted and practically meaningless as a result, because funding is limited so residents work with minimal professional advice or input. Groups are then understandably frustrated when proposals they oppose go through despite their neighbourhood plan, and end up blaming planners.

I'm all for a streamlined system, particularly for householder applications and simple typologies. There is far too much time wasted in planning departments assessing applications which are boring and repetitive, making the same mistakes again and again. And I definitely want to see suburban intensification- for climate, for social and economic sustaibility, and to meet housing need. Clearer rules and good pattern books - which, in effect, would be what a street code would be - would help no end. But asking residents to develop these themselves, with the added machinations of no win, no fee developers muscling in, could result in bad codes, warring neighbours, confusion and more delay in the process. Like neighbourhood plans, this proposal could result in very few codes actually being passed and a lot of wasted effort and disillusionment among residents. 

 

An alternative approach would be for government to fund detailed, professionally produced pattern book designs for existing neighbourhoods, which could be consulted on through proper process, and result in fairness, certainty and speed for all - and yes, value uplift for homeowners too. But that wouldn't sound quite so much like power to the people, would it.