The planning system in Wales is a "Plan Led" system: Local Authorities produce a Local (or Unitary) Development Plan against which planning applications are determined. In theory, it is coherent and democratic. In practice, it creates a structural tension that works against the very thing we most need from it right now — buildings that demand as little energy as possible.
This paper argues that the fundamental challenge is one of misaligned risk: the planning system requires the highest level of effort at exactly the moment when the risk of failure is also at its highest, and when the design decisions that determine a building's energy performance are most critical.
The Problem with "High Effort: High Risk"
From a developer's perspective, achieving a detailed planning approval is universally considered the single greatest risk in a project's development. The planning application is the only stage in the development process that combines high effort with high risk — and that combination has unintended consequences for energy performance.
Developers, rationally, respond by minimising costs up to the point of planning approval. That means appointing the smallest practical design team on the minimum fee for the narrowest scope of work. In the extreme, this leads to "no win, no fee" appointments and bare minimum levels of service until the planning risk is resolved.
The problem is that the decisions which most determine a building's energy performance — its height, orientation, depth of plan, volume of glazing, interaction with the ground — are all made before detailed planning. A detailed planning consent then fixes those design fundamentals, preventing subsequent alterations that might yield a better low-energy outcome.
The planning system, as currently structured, makes it commercially unacceptable to allow sufficient time, effort and funding to produce the best possible low energy building design.
Rebalancing the Risk
The solution is not to rebuild the planning system from scratch, but to rebalance the risk so that it matches the effort required at each stage. With greater confidence in the risk-to-cost balance, developers and their financial backers can fund early-stage design work more appropriately — and designers, properly resourced, can deliver lower-energy buildings.
Three modest adjustments to the existing system would achieve this:
Much greater emphasis on the LDP, with widespread public engagement as the primary democratic input. With computer technology, "ghost" models of neighbourhoods after development should allow the general public to understand the consequences of the LDP — including massing and neighbourhood impacts — before any individual application is made.
Currently defunct in all but masterplanning, outline planning once provided a legally binding response confirming the basic principles of a proposal (use, scale and massing) without requiring the full detail that locks in design fundamentals. Reinstating it provides reduced risk for developers without constraining the design team's ability to optimise for energy performance later.
Detailed Planning currently triggers the only "publicly perceived" stage of planning — too late for meaningful public input, too late in the design process relative to the risk it creates. Detailed approval should be reduced to a technical compliance check against the LDP. Only genuine deviations from the agreed plan should require further democratic review.
Why This Matters for Low Energy Design
The integrated design process that produces the lowest-energy buildings is inherently iterative. Options analysis, building physics modelling, and performance optimisation all happen at a stage when, under the current system, developers are minimising investment. The result is that the sector builds to a standard — rather than to a performance — and the most important design decisions are made too quickly, too cheaply, and without sufficient expert input.
Rebalancing planning risk creates the commercial conditions for better early-stage design investment. It does not require new regulations. It does not require new tools. It requires only a modest reorganisation of a system that was designed for a different era — one in which the energy performance of buildings was not a defining concern.
Full Positioning Paper
Using Planning to Facilitate Low Energy Buildings — PDF (RevB, January 2012)