Practical Questions Persist On Zonal Planning Proposal

This month's Fixing the Foundations 'productivity plan' commits the government to 'an urban planning revolution on brownfield sites'.

Ministers have already pledged to create a register of brownfield land suitable for housing, and the plan says there will be legislation to grant automatic planning permission on registered sites. It notes that this will give England a "zonal" planning system.

The government has already asked local authorities to bring forward local development orders (LDOs) on brownfield sites, in its Building More Homes on Brownfield Land consultation in January. That proposal was always fraught with difficulties, not least over the need for scarce local authority planning resources to be diverted into preparing and promoting LDOs and likely disagreement about what can properly be classed as brownfield. However, the proposed zoning system appears to go further than LDOs, offering a permitted development regime on identified sites. In principle