Special Development Orders in the Town and Country Planning Act not only show zoning of the past but also look to the potential of the future.
John Myers writing in Red Brick Block
When people speak of planning, England typically emerges as a global anomaly in two senses. First, it has an unusually restrictive system. The result: among the most expensive housing in the world, but very little invested in the structures of our homes. Much of the value of our housing lies not in the structures themselves but in the planning permission for those structures to exist at all. Second, the English system lacks precise rules and relies on vague ‘policies’ whose application is unpredictable, costly and slow. Of course, many other planning systems have some element of discretion. In the US, it is called ‘discretionary review’, and it is common in unaffordable areas. Many pro-housing Democrats complain about this ‘discretionary review’ as a barrier to building more affordable homes. But the US also has development regulations that explicitly map out permitted and prohibited development—a system known as ‘zoning’. England’s planning system is almost entirely discretionary, because the ‘policies’ that set out what is acceptable are so unclear and often in conflict.
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