As the property industry wakes to the historic General Election result, analysis from EG shows how planning trends across London and the UK have changed under different governments during the past two decades.
Using a combination of Radius Data Exchange, data released from the official House of Commons Library and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, EG has analysed planning trends in London and across the UK under governments dating back to Tony Blair’s landslide Labour victory in the 1997 General Election.
See also: Property industry reactions to Boris Johnson’s victory
The data shows that under the various iterations of Conservative governments since 1997, permission rates for all planning applications have stood at over 50% on average (figure 1). The green light was given most frequently under the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, with just shy of 70% of all applications signed off, streets ahead of the premierships of Blair and Gordon Brown, during which that figure only once rose north of 40%.
In the nine years since the Conservative Party has had a handle on power, more than half of all permissions have been signed off within a three-month period, a faster rate than Labour’s last 13-year stay in government, during which one-third of applications were granted within three months.
Further to that, Conservative-led executives have rubber-stamped nine out of 10 applications since 2010 inside of 12 months. Labour’s respective average is 77%.
Deeper analysis of the planning data shows that there is little between the three main parties in terms of which types of application readily receive a green light. With a focus specifically on London parliamentary constituencies since 1997, approval rates for the four primary property sectors – residential, office, retail and industrial – show that Labour-led constituencies are more likely to sign off on housing developments in the capital, while their Conservative counterparts are more receptive to ushering in office-led schemes.
Isolating those parliamentary constituencies in London, one-third of the 73 seats have changed party at least once since 1997’s general election, culminating in 37 switches of power since the Blair premiership in the 1990s. Of those, 40% have swung from Labour to Conservative, and 24% from Conservative to Labour. These swings in power have influenced planning in those particular constituencies.
Most noticeably, the data shows that a swing from Labour to Conservative is likely to increase permission rates in a constituency by an average of 16%, while a swing from Conservative to Labour is likely to decrease permission rates by an average of 8%. Therefore, according to London planning data, a switch to a Conservative-led constituency is better for developers’ hopes of getting applications approved.
It won’t be a surprise to see peaks in rates of permissions rising during the three months before an election compared to the three months after. Small increments in the percentages in the 2000s indicate developer unease given the fraught economy post-2008. The suppressed permission increase after the formation of the coalition in 2010 is probably owing to the nature of the government at the time, with the relative stability of a majority government from 2015 followed by more economic turbulence after the referendum in 2016.
There appears to be no clear correlation between how a London constituency ranks in terms of its deprivation, and the level of planning permissions granted. Our graph shows a combination of local authority deprivation analysis with the London parliamentary constituencies, layering the geographies of the former with the latter.
The deprivation stats from the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government’s “English Index of Multiple Deprivation” is based on seven indices. Income, employment, education, health, crime, housing and living environment are all taken into account to rank more than 32,000 areas in England, from most to least deprived.
Broken down into party lines, Labour has the most favourable permission percentage across London, at just short of 50% – while occupying 64% of the seats available since the 1997 election.
This election has been described as the Brexit Election. The polarising nature of the referendum result as well as the main two parties’ political stances means voting patterns are harder to predict than usual, and the outcome of 12 December expected to be more volatile than any general election in recent history.
Our analysis shows that a Conservative majority would give greater confidence in future development and planning, especially given the macro-economic permutations of Brexit, which are still veritable unknowns. But with the odds tumbling on a hung parliament as election day approaches, the outcome is far from clear.
To send feedback, e-mail james.child@egi.co.uk or tweet @JamesChildEG or @estatesgazette
