Beauty and the Beast – New NPPF
I know it is still holiday season, but I hope you are all working VERY HARD on your responses to the new NPPF consultation responses. The deadline is 11:45pm on 24 September 2024. That is just over a month away… so I trust you have your sharpest quill in hand and your writing mittens on. This Government really does listen and they are ever so slightly more grounded in reality.
I have been doing my homework very diligently on the NPPF by reading all about it. It was very interesting to see analysis of Building Magazine and I am now ready to submit my coursework to Ms Rayner on time.
One of the things that I found really interesting while doing my course work are the deletions from the NPPF. ‘Beauty’ and the ‘beautiful’ that was in Govey’s version of the NPPF (Dec 23… doesn’t it feel long ago?) has been eradicated in its entirety.
Angela Rayner was questioned about this on Radio 2 and she defended the decision, describing the inclusion of “beauty” in the NPPF as “ridiculous” and “subjective”. She explained: “Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another… all that wording was doing was preventing and blocking development and that’s why we think it is too subjective.”
Angie added that there were plenty of provisions within the new NPPF to ensure that development would be in keeping with the local area. “So there are rules and protections in place,”
There is no doubt that the concept is vague and subjective, so much so that it is questionable whether it was really holding back development in any meaningful way.
One wonders whether this was more an effort on the part of Rayner and her department to draw a clear red line between her and her predecessor.
Within the limited specific design guidance contained in the NPPF, there were some small changes. The previous NPPF detailed that mansard roof extensions should be allowed “where their external appearance harmonises with the original building”, and that it should emulate the local style of mansard roofs from the time of the building’s construction. This lengthy, aesthetic rule has been replaced with a short parenthetical note explaining that mansard roofs are included as encouragement to allow upward extensions where the development is consistent with the form of neighbouring properties.
The new NPPF also propose to remove a paragraph which says that significant uplifts in average density of residential development, occurring as a result of minimum density standards, “may be inappropriate if the resulting built form would be wholly out of character with the existing area”.
It is a very sensible approach because let’s be honest, what is beautiful to me may not be beautiful to you…
Until next week,
Henry
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