How important are Design Guides in planning appeals

With design rising up the agenda, how many planning appeals actually cite local or national design policies?  Last month some commentators suggested that the National Design Guide provided, “50 pages of reasons for refusal”.  We put this hypothesis to the test and assessed how many times the NDG has been directly referred to in appeal decisions in the first 10 weeks since its publication.

Early evidence of appeals citing the National Design Guide

In the ten weeks since the National Design Guide was published on 1st October, there have been around 4,000 appeal decisions published by the Inspectorate.  Surprisingly, the “National Design Guide” was only mentioned in 8 of all the decisions published.

Is the National Design Guide positive or negative?

Even more surprisingly, 5 of the first 8 appeals referring to the National Design Guide (NDG) were allowed.  As this is higher than the average appeal success rate, the evidence so far suggests the NDG is being used positively rather than negatively, to support rather than undermine developments.  Having said this, eight is too small a number to be statistically significant and therefore we will repeat this exercise when there is more data.

References to the NDG

Most references to the NDG in the first 10 weeks use it largely to give weight to existing local design policies, referring to how the NDG reiterates or reinforces Local Plan design policies.  Others refer to the NDG only to mention that it builds on Chapter 12 of the National Planning Policy Framework. Others note that they have considered the NDG and it does not detract from the merits of the development. References have been brief, like swimmers testing the water.

Comparison with appeals citing Local Design Policies

In contrast, “Design Guide” (as in the “local design guide”, or “x Council's design guide”) appeared in 320 appeal decisions over the same 10 week period.  This is forty times more frequent than the 8 mentions of the National Design Guide in the first 10 weeks since its publication.  It will be very interesting to see what the balance is in twelve months' time.

Familiarity with Design Policies

Over time, we can expect Inspectors to be as familiar with the National Design Guide as they are with the National Planning Policy Framework.  The number of references to the NDG are likely to increase significantly, and similarly references to Chapter 12 of the Framework may also increase.  Using Appealfinder's powerful search facility, we searched the full dataset for “Chapter 12” + “Framework” and found it used in approximately 4% of all the appeal decisions over the 10 week period since 1st October.  Interestingly, "design guide" was referenced in 8% of all appeal decisions in the same period, whereas "national design guide" was mentioned in only 0.2%.

Importance of Design in appeals?

At this point in time, we can speculate that design will be of increasing importance in appeals over 2020.  We will test this out in twelve months' time and see whether the Government's desire to give greater weight to design is borne out in practice.  If you can't wait, simply use the relevant keywords to search for yourself on our Home page.