One of the aims of the draft National Planning Policy Framework is to simplify the planning system and reduce the legislation from over one thousand pages to just 85. This sounds good, especially if you are a lawyer.
One of the central aims of legislation is to ensure that the law is unambiguous, and this often requires text to spell out the precise meaning. Otherwise the law is unclear, which leads to contests in court, and fat lawyers cheques.
So planning law will become vague as it becomes simpler. One example – the NPPF lists applications which would be ‘not inappropriate’ on Green Belt, and one of these is ‘engineering projects’. So what is an engineering project? I fear that they were thinking of one particular project, namely HS2 high speed rail which will cross many acres of Green Belt, and will be challenged in the courts at every possibility, and the intention is to prevent that. But of course ‘engineering projects’ is simply undefined. For example, surely a nuclear power station is an engineering project? So NPPF would regard nuclear power stations as being appropriate for Green Belt?
Hands up if you’d vote for that.
