World Town Planning Day: the view from five planning systems

2026 has been a year of change for planning in England, with the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 now taking effect, a revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in August and a good deal more besides.

As we celebrate World Town Planning Day, two other reforms warrant special attention. The National Scheme of Delegation (NSoD) came into force on 31 October, and local government reorganisation, which remains subject to an ongoing government review, is already shaping behaviour.

I began my career as a resource consents officer in New Zealand. Three of my Boyer colleagues bring different perspectives. Lawrence Turner has been following reforms in the Netherlands, Christy Ng grew up in Hong Kong and Ananya Banerjee trained and practised as an architect in India. Their observations offer useful lessons for England, although none provides a model we could simply import.

Take committees as an example. In New Zealand, they work very differently from ours. They’re convened as and when they’re needed, and usually only for major schemes. And they’re stacked with professional commissioners; for example, planners, architects and air quality experts. Politicians still have their say and objectors are heard, but the technical commissioners can often outvote them, and the result is usually better-quality decisions.

What’s more, the cost of the committee, including its professional commissioners, is charged to the applicant. This deters frivolous and vexatious applications being taken to committee. They’re to be sorted out by applicants working with officers. 

I’ve been making that argument for years, and I was far from the only one, so it’s good to see the committee question tackled in part by the NSoD.

The Netherlands has taken a different route, and Lawrence Turner, Director at Boyer, has been following it closely. The Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet), which came into force on 1 January 2024, pulled together and simplified rules covering planning, the environment, nature, water and building that had previously sat separately for decades.

Lawrence says: “What I particularly like is their Environment and Planning Portal. An applicant can use one system to see the national and local rules that apply to a site, check whether permission is needed and submit the application. It sounds basic but compare that with the position in England. Understanding where you stand on a site can mean working through the local plan, the policies map, supplementary planning documents and neighbourhood plans, as well as validation requirements, national guidance and the NPPF. They’re often separate documents, spread across different websites.

“Each Dutch municipality now has one environment plan covering its whole area. Existing zoning plans sit within a temporary part of that plan, while municipalities work towards a fully integrated environment plan by 2032. That’s giving developers far more certainty about what is and isn’t acceptable. The lesson for us is that changing who makes the decision may speed up parts of the process, but delegation works best where the rules are clear in the first place.”

Hong Kong takes that principle further. Christy Ng, Principal Planner at Boyer, grew up there, and describes a system built around outline zoning plans that cover wide areas and set the parameters for development, rather like a master plan.

Christy explains: “Each zone has a schedule of uses set out in two columns. Column one uses are permitted outright, with no application to the Town Planning Board required, and those lists are broad. A residential zone can take flats and houses alongside a library, clinic and school, for instance. Meanwhile, column two uses do require permission from the board.

“If the proposed use is in column one and the technical requirements are met, the scheme can proceed; there’s no outline application, no planning committee and no section 106 negotiation. And if the proposed use falls in neither column, developers can apply to amend the plan itself, which is something we can’t do here once a local plan has been adopted.”

That gives developers confidence and certainty in potential development opportunities, and I understand the appeal. A zoned system uses rules set at plan-making stage to establish the permitted principle of use and grant automatic permission, provided the scheme fits the range of uses permitted, and it allows a developer to judge the value of land knowing precisely what they can and can’t do with it.

Still, this is where developers need to be careful what they wish for, because that certainty is bought at the cost of long-term flexibility. A zoned system also makes unusual and mixed-use schemes harder to bring forward, and it tends to favour the largest developers. One of the things I value most about England’s plan-led system is that you can apply for planning permission for some ambitious development, and where a scheme departs from the development plan it can, in theory, still be approved where material considerations indicate that a decision is justified. The benefits of a proposal can form part of the planning balance, with national planning policy itself an important material consideration. That lets the strongest developers with the boldest ideas, including some nobody had considered when the plan was written, do something with a site that no one else would have proposed. While it may not always be straightforward, the planning system in England does allow some challenging schemes to come forward.

Proposals here are considered on their merits, site by site, and that relies on up-to-date evidence. Given that national policy and development plans are updated regularly, planning policy aims to meet the latest market and local needs, which change over the years. That flexibility can make room for development even where it departs from the adopted plan, provided there’s robust evidence to support the need for it and its benefits. Greater certainty shouldn’t come at the expense of that capacity.

Ananya Banerjee, Director and Head of Boyer Design, brings a different comparison from India, where her work included residential developments, commercial buildings and a large township master plan. What struck her on moving to England was the attitude towards development as much as the formal process.

Ananya says: “In the projects I worked on in India, people living nearby were interested in what was coming forward. They wanted to speak to the architect or developer and understand what the development would offer. Sometimes they were interested in buying a home there themselves. There was a greater willingness to see development as an opportunity.

“People here take considerable pride in their communities, which is a strength. But it can become difficult to have a constructive conversation if change is assumed to be harmful before the proposal has been considered.”

Ananya’s account also challenges our acceptance of a lengthy sequence of approvals. In the urban projects she worked on in India, developers typically bought land outright and submitted a complete scheme to the municipal corporation, rather than progressing through separate outline and detailed applications. Approval was followed by checks on working drawings and inspections during construction.

She recalls permissions being secured within about a year and a 400-home development progressing from the start of the project to occupation in roughly two years. These are examples from her own practice, rather than a benchmark for India as a whole, but they illustrate a different expectation of how quickly development can move.

“The lesson I would take is to simplify the process and strengthen the relationship between the public and private sectors,” Ananya says. “Government needs developers to help deliver homes and infrastructure. That requires a willingness to work together and a process that allows investment to turn into development.”

Speed is only part of her comparison. Having moved to England in 2006, Ananya now follows changes in Indian development through return visits and conversations with her brother, who runs an architectural practice there. She sees buyers demanding more from new communities, including green space, schools, nurseries, sports facilities and places to work. Developers are responding to expectations that extend beyond the individual home.

At the same time, she values England’s emphasis on design, particularly the attention paid to history and local context. Her priority would be to retain that ambition while removing unnecessary complexity. She also favours involving communities while proposals are still being developed, when their views can influence the design, rather than leaving the first meaningful conversation until an application has been submitted.

Ananya spent time in Singapore too, on a 14-month secondment across 2005 and 2006. There she worked with an international team on the master plan for a development, and what stayed with her was the integration of nature into a dense urban environment.

“The approach that impressed me was to think about landscape from the outset, rather than create a square and then add some trees,” she says. “Nature was part of the place, including rooftop gardens that were properly maintained. That is a design principle we can learn from without trying to reproduce the whole planning system.”

For me, these perspectives point towards a more useful conversation about reform. Clearer rules, as Lawrence describes, can reduce uncertainty. Christy’s account shows the value of knowing which uses are acceptable. Ananya’s experience asks whether we have made the journey from proposal to construction unnecessarily complicated, while reminding us to protect design quality and involve people early enough to influence it.

World Town Planning Day is an opportunity to look beyond our own procedures. The purpose is to ask which changes would help us deliver well-designed places with greater confidence and less delay. Changing who decides can contribute to that, but it can’t do the whole job.