Playing the field

PPG3 (Housing) has caused a great deal of angst among housebuilders. Persimmon recently failed to persuade the High Court that North Hertfordshire District Council should not have withdrawn a deposit local plan part way through its process of consultation. Its rethink on advocated land for 2600 houses on green field near the M1 motorway had been prompted by PPG3.

But in their understandable concern to protect their greenfield strategic land banks, are housebuilders overlooking some of the plus points in PPG3? For example the guidance:

• encourages housing which makes more efficient use of land (between 30 and 50 dwellings per hectare net)
  
• seeks greater intensity of development at places with good public transport
  
• allows for significantly lower levels of off-street car parking
  
• defines previously developed land as covering the curtilage of the existing development.

Appeal decisions are a good barometer of how this advice is being put into practice. Planning inspectors appear to have been particularly brave in allowing high-density schemes in suburban locations despite vociferous local opposition. Berkeley Homes piloted through a five-storey block of flats on a former petrol station site off The Broadway in Thorpe Bay near Southend. Most of the surrounding area was either single or two-storey development.

A hundred miles away in the leafy Chiltern Hills another inspector dismissed appeals in the villages of Naphill and Great Kingshill significantly because "low density was less likely to sustain local services or public transport ultimately leading to social exclusion".

Low density also went against a previously developed Green Belt site near Caterham in Surrey. The Secretary of State disagreed with his inspector and rejected a scheme supported by the local planning authority which had been called in.

There is considerable debate among local authority planners over whether the reference to 30 dwellings per hectare is a target. According to a DTLR adviser involved in drafting PPG3, the aim was to raise the average density from 25 to 30. Thirty was therefore not a target in its own right.

Nevertheless the schemes that are winning awards are achieving these densities. The RIBA's 2001 Housing Design Awards saw a record number of private sector developer entries. Among the winners, the eight-storey Deansgate Quay in Manchester developed by Crosby Homes, London's Greenwich Millennium Village (Phase 2a) built by the GMV consortium of Countryside and Taylor Woodrow, and the greenfield site developed by Bryant Taywood at Manston Road in Sturminster Newton, Dorset, all achieve the preferred density range set out in PPG3.

A glance at the winners' list also shows that architectural practices whose past housing work has been almost exclusively for registered social landlords are now pursuing major commissions for the private sector. And firms whose reputation has been in the commercial field are now branching out into housing.

The message seems clear. The reason some housebuilders are not responding is probably more to do with organisation and finance than planning. A high-density scheme, particularly on a brownfield site, will take longer to complete and require more work in progress than a conventional lower density scheme.

Useful ideas on assessing urban capacity can be found in the DETR document, Tapping the potential, published last December. Design exercises on typical sites are used to explore different policy and density schemes with regard to provision and layout. One scenario applies existing local plan parking and density standards, a second reduces car parking expectation, enhances the design and increases densities, and a third (that assumes highly accessible locations) removes parking altogether. The study found that parking had a significant influence on potential densities, to the extent that the second scenario increased densities by 50% and the third doubled them.

Architects have long been suspicious of the volume housebuilding sector with its emphasis on standardised housetypes and wafer-thin fee margins. PPG3 gives them more clout. Good design sells, provided local authority planners can persuade their political masters not to be frightened of high density.