Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC) has called for planning reform to be led by major regional cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, as well as other mayoralties, where faster approvals could help unlock stalled redevelopment, housing, and infrastructure projects.
In its latest report, A Few Good Regulators, PIC has recommended that the UK learns directly from Singapore on fast-tracking planning approvals, with a more streamlined planning process. This process could then be trialled at city level, allowing Manchester, Birmingham, other mayoralties, and development corporations to pilot a Singapore-style planning process.
For directly comparable planning data, PIC said Singapore completes construction permit approvals around 59% faster than the UK, a difference that, applied to the UK's planning and consent stage, equates to saving roughly 10.5 months per project and around £18,167 saved per unit for homes currently in the planning system, or £6.4bn in total.
“The new government should now consider giving ambitious city-regions the tools to test faster planning approvals, borrow the best policy approaches from other countries and prove that regulatory reform can deliver practical redevelopment on the ground,” PIC stated.
“Public land holdings in those city-regions should be audited and, where possible, land owned by different public bodies should be combined to unlock larger developments - replicating some of the benefits of Singapore's predominantly government-owned land model.”
The report further recommended that every UK regulator is benchmarked against its best peers globally. This would allow them to fast-track services and products that these foreign regulators have already approved.
HM Treasury estimated there are over 100 bodies involved in UK regulation with overlapping mandates. Under PIC's proposal, each UK regulator would nominate one or more world-leading "peer regulators", selected as best-in-class against independent criteria. UK regulators would track those peers' decisions and report quarterly on how their and the UK’s approaches compare. For areas where no equivalent foreign regulator exists, the report suggested questioning whether the UK needs that regulator at all.
