Our corrupt planning system needs rebuilding

And to a greater degree than most former advisers, ex-planning officers can make serious money for clients — for example by calling up their friends at the council to wangle an extra storey on a proposed high-rise, or getting a planning application looked at more speedily.

• Can Britain get building? These planning problems stand in Labour’s way

Over the past few years our stiflingly bureaucratic planning system has become a major political issue because of its ruinous impact on housebuilding and the way it’s driven up the cost of new infrastructure.

An underdiscussed aspect of the broken regime is that lucrative planning decisions depend on back-room access to local bureaucrats and councillors. It’s a recipe for rampant corruption, as I saw first-hand when I started the creative workspace company Second Home after leaving Downing Street. (I stopped being a shareholder in 2022.)

Most of the time this works in a very British way. Rather than bribing a planning officer while they’re in their role, property developers hire them as consultants as soon as they quit the council — meaning their contacts are still fresh and no bribery laws are broken. One head of planning I know went straight from a London council to earning £40,000 a month as a consultant to the very same developers he’d been dealing with in his local authority role.

With Second Home, we were constantly pressed to hire consultants who had worked for whatever London borough we were trying to get planning permission through. The more recently they’d left their council jobs, the more they charged for their contact book and clout. Once we were even told to hire a planning consultant who’d been dating a senior planning official at the council we needed an approval from.

• What will Labour do now? Policies and plans explained

This kind of sleaze is endemic. I remember meeting the chairman of a London council planning committee to chat about an application my company had made. He steered the discussion towards a “perfume business” he wanted to start — and asked me if I could help him “get a loan of ten thousand pounds”. I earnestly told him about the government’s small business loan scheme, at which point the conversation fizzled out.

I met up afterwards with my more streetwise business partner and recounted the story. “You idiot,” my partner said with a smile, “that was the bribe moment.” Suffice to say, we never paid the ten grand and we never did get that planning permission.

Another consequence of the torpid planning regime is the deadening effect on architecture. In every planning process Second Home was involved in, the first question from the planners was the same: what’s the precedent for this design? In other words, they wanted us to show them another building in London that looked like the one we were proposing. So if you wanted to do something new, like we did, the system was against you.

Time and again I saw experienced developers self-censor and veto interesting architectural designs because they knew it would be far easier to get approval for a sterile grey box. After all, there’s no shortage of “precedents” for those in London. If you want to know why new buildings in Britain are so ugly and dull, and why there’s so little world-class modern architecture in our capital in contrast to other global cities, there’s your answer.

With Second Home, we once tried to renovate a privately owned derelict piano factory in north London. We paid a bunch of money to be allowed to engage formally with the relevant borough council and they told us they liked our vision. Off the back of this preliminary nod, we commissioned architects and got to work.

• Labour’s housebuilding plan backed by countryside charity chief

After months of further meetings with the borough, and half a million pounds spent on architects and other consultants, the council’s head of design showed up. He hadn’t come to any meetings up to that point, so we were sideswiped when he flicked through the architects’ drawings and declared: “I don’t like these designs — I think the main material should be rust-coloured metal.”

It was an arbitrary demand by an unelected bureaucrat with terrible taste. It meant we had to scrap all our design work. As a small company, we couldn’t afford to continue, so we abandoned the project — and never attempted another one in London. (Predictably, that former piano factory is still derelict several years later.)

It’s an aesthetic disaster that planning officials can exercise this kind of veto over creative designs. Britain used to have this kind of bureaucratic censorship in other artistic realms. Until the late 1960s the state censored theatre productions. Pioneering plays like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot premiered abroad. It’s much the same with innovative architecture today — our regressive planning system simply won’t allow it.

I’m sorry to say that when I worked in No 10 I didn’t realise how much damage the planning rules were causing. Now Sir Keir Starmer has admirably pledged to take action, in contrast to the craven way recent Tory governments shirked the problem.

The planning system is the last unadulterated vestige of postwar socialist utopianism, created in 1947 by the Town and Country Planning Act and founded on the well-meaning but ultimately flawed belief that a small group of people should dictate the development of complex systems, like an economy. Or a city. So real reform by Starmer will mean taking on cherished ideas of the left.

Other pillars of postwar socialism have been dismantled or have undergone market-oriented reforms, from state-run industries to the NHS, but the planning rules are essentially untouched. If Tony Blair deleting Clause 4 was totemic, Starmer liberalising the planning system would be historic. I sincerely hope he succeeds.