National Planning Policy Framework: The implications for freight and logistics
By James Hicks, Executive Director of Planning
In 2023 alone, the heavy goods vehicles that ceaselessly beat up and down UK roadways wracked up almost 17 billion combined miles. As a net importer, freight and logistics has always been a vital cog that has kept the UK economy turning, a truth only thrown into sharp relief during the Covid-19 years when supply chains found themselves stretched.
But despite the contribution of freight and logistics to the economy – providing employment for more than two million people, after all – the various iterations of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) remained curiously silent about the sector. On a local level, it wasn’t simply that plans were similarly silent, but that freight and logistics often encountered opposition from planners on the grounds that proposed developments weren’t aspirational. Science parks, industrial research hubs or data centres – the eye-catching symbols of the modern, digital economy – have largely been preferred over the mundane warehouses mistakenly believed to offer few employment opportunities. Things changed in December of last year with the publication of the new NPPF.
The eighty-two-page document contains much of importance for the UK’s planning system. Those in logistics, however, will have riffled through to Section 6, the amends to which usher in some fundamental changes both in the recognition of freight and logistics’ vital arterial and economic contribution, but also in how the sector will be treated by the planning system.
For one, paragraph 86 has been substantially rewritten so that planning policies should ‘now pay particular regard to facilitating development to meet the needs of a modern economy, including by identifying suitable locations for uses such as laboratories, gigafactories, data centres, digital infrastructure, freight and logistics’. This is a significant change for two reasons. Not only have freight and logistics been added to the NPPF for the first time – a vitally important amend when it comes to expediting the approval process for such projects – but the addition of a comma and ‘including’ provides for adaptability and flexibility over prescription and exclusivity. As the needs of the economy change and new sectors emerge the use of the word ‘including’ will ensure these are literally included in the support now afford by the NPPF.
Equally notable is the amend to paragraph 87, which makes an important change of emphasis, obliging planning policies and decisions to ‘recognise and address the specific locational requirements of different sectors’. In other words, developers now have the opportunity to promote what they want and – as importantly – where they want it, rather than where a local authority might. The door, in other words, has now been opened just enough to be pushed at.
The changes to paragraph 87 ‘b’ again codifies what many in the sector have long argued: that storage and distribution plays a huge role in the UK’s economic output, requiring attendant provision to be made in local planning policies for projects at a variety of scales, be it the mammoth sites or no less vital smaller projects. This, in short, is the most powerful change for anyone working in logistics.
Combined, the changes to Section 6 represent the first time that a positive tint has been applied to a sector that has all too often been overlooked. But though it will take time for the full effect of the document to be felt as local plans, often written in a very different pre-Brexit world, are slowly developed and freight and logistics find their way into the text the initial ripples of the NPPF can already be detected. There have already been cases, for instance, of projects that had been locked in the planning system for years that are now making progress thanks to the new NPPF which have removed certain grounds to object.
The direction of travel is clear; and that the new NPPF will provide freight and logistics with a significant fillip is clear. Vital new ground was broken in December that the sector will now look to fill.