A Planning System on Autopilot
On 20 March 2025, East Hampshire District Council approved an outline planning application for 62 homes on land west of Beechlands Road in South Medstead1.
At first glance, this might seem routine — outline permissions are a common step in the planning process. But this decision revealed something far deeper: a planning system no longer functioning in the public interest, and a leadership culture unwilling to take responsibility for its own failures.2
As an outline application, this proposal included no binding plans for layout, drainage, access, or ecological mitigation. All the critical factors that should determine whether development is appropriate — road safety, sustainability, infrastructure capacity, biodiversity impact — were either missing or deferred to an unspecified future stage. In a village like Medstead, which has already experienced significant and largely uncoordinated population growth, this absence of detail makes it impossible to assess cumulative harm.
And yet, the application was treated as though no significant impacts were expected — a textbook case of the absence of errors fallacy: assuming there is no problem simply because no proper effort was made to test for one. Without meaningful investigation, there can be no reliable conclusion that adverse impacts would not occur — a condition that must be satisfied before any presumption in favour of development can apply, even under the ‘tilted balance’.
Yet councillors still voted to approve it. Why?
Because the application was assessed under Paragraph 11(d) of the National Planning Policy Framework, also known as the “tilted balance.”
This clause is triggered when a local authority — in this case, EHDC — cannot demonstrate a five-year supply of housing land. When that happens, the default assumption is that planning permission should be granted, unless the harms “significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits.”
But — and this is critical — the tilted balance only applies to proposals that are demonstrably sustainable. That is not a formality. It is a legal threshold. If a site fails that test, the presumption does not apply. And in this case, even councillors themselves admitted that the proposal was not sustainable — and approved it anyway.
More fundamentally, the tilted balance was only triggered because EHDC failed to meet its statutory housing targets. And yet no one has been held accountable.
In any other profession, repeated failure to meet essential objectives leads to consequences. You lose the contract. You resign. You step aside. But in EHDC’s case, failure is absorbed into the process and repurposed to justify even more harmful outcomes.
Are the national housing targets unrealistic? Possibly — but only if we keep building the way we always have. This is where leadership matters. Local authorities must challenge flawed policy, yes — but they must also act with urgency and imagination to reduce the harm it causes.
That means planning around real-world constraints. It means embracing design innovation. It means adopting tools already in use across better-balanced housing markets — where land is used more efficiently, infrastructure is prioritised, and communities are strengthened, not sidelined.
EHDC has done none of that. Instead, it has hidden behind a hollow framework — and left the consequences to fall on the very people it is meant to represent.
The site was declared “sustainable” not because of robust evidence, but because of its proximity to a scheme approved nearly a decade ago. That’s not planning — that’s assumption.
Yet under Paragraph 11(d) of the National Planning Policy Framework — the so-called “tilted balance” — the presumption in favour of development only applies if the site is demonstrably sustainable to begin with. That’s the first test. Only once that bar is met should any weighing of harms and benefits take place.
In this case, sustainability was simply presumed — without new data, without a real-world access assessment, and without public validation.
There is a dangerous fallacy in treating past approvals as proof of present-day suitability. The fact that something was permitted before does not make it right now — or even right at the time. Especially when:
- No mechanisms exist to track the cumulative environmental and social impacts of multiple applications in the same area;
- No environmental baseline was established;
- And no Environmental Impact Assessment was ever triggered, due to the strategy of fragmenting development into smaller parcels.
Without these tools, any conclusion about “sustainability” is speculative at best — and misleading by design.
Paragraph 11(d) of the National Planning Policy Framework is supposed to tilt the balance in favour of sustainable development — but only if the harms do not “significantly and demonstrably” outweigh the benefits.
Yet with outline applications, there is no full picture of harm. The data simply doesn’t exist — not because it’s unavailable, but because it was never required. Despite Medstead undergoing cumulative expansion across multiple developments in recent years, no Environmental Impact Assessment was triggered. As a result, there is no environmental or infrastructure baseline against which this application — or any like it — can be properly assessed.
To make matters worse, the planning officer relied on consultee responses that were based on incomplete or uncoordinated data. In some cases, such as GP provision, reports appeared to assume available capacity without accounting for parallel applications already in the system. This distorts the evidence base, misleads the public, and places councillors in a position where their decisions are shaped by flawed or partial information. Residents are expected to object to a concept, not a plan. Councillors are expected to vote without full clarity. Developers, meanwhile, are given the benefit of the doubt — and a green light to proceed.
Several councillors admitted during the meeting that the site was unsustainable — but approved it anyway, citing pressure from officers and referencing past appeal losses in Four Marks. In some cases, they even implied that sustainability was irrelevant under Paragraph 11(d), or that proximity and superficial similarity to other developments justified approval.
This is a fundamental misreading of the policy.
Under the tilted balance, the presumption in favour of development only applies if the site is demonstrably sustainable in the first place. If it fails that test, the tilted balance should not be engaged at all. Sustainability is not a detail to be bypassed — it is the starting point.
Even more troubling is the reliance on other decisions — past approvals or Inspector rulings — as a stand-in for proper analysis. That approach undermines the very foundation of the planning system, which requires individual, case-by-case assessment. No two sites are identical in infrastructure, access, context, or environmental sensitivity. Applying someone else’s logic to this application is not planning — it’s deferral.
These errors raise serious questions about whether key EHDC stakeholders fully understand the legal and procedural framework they are tasked with upholding. And if they do understand it, but continue to misapply it, the implications are even more concerning.
It’s time to take back control — to prevent the creeping oligarchy of developers from draining our environment and resources unchecked. The system, as it stands, does not prevent them from doing so. And as the saying goes: where there’s a hole, there’s a leak.
The answer is clear: developers benefit. Not communities. Not infrastructure. Not biodiversity. This is not just about bad planning — it’s about the complete absence of local control. As I wrote recently to MP Damian Hinds:
“This is not a functioning regulatory framework. It is a corruptible environment that benefits developers at the expense of our natural resources, infrastructure, and the wellbeing of local communities.”
The country is facing a housing crisis — but that crisis will not be solved by repeating the mistakes that created it. And it certainly won’t be solved by handing private developers the freedom to build wherever they wish and profit as they please, without meaningful obligations to the public good.
There is one tool that East Hampshire District Council has consistently failed to explore: a local profit cap.
This is not a complex policy. It’s a simple mechanism that would allow councils to reclaim developer profit once it exceeds a reasonable threshold — with surplus funds redirected toward local infrastructure, affordable housing, biodiversity restoration, or public services.
But more importantly, a local profit cap would give authorities a genuine lever of control. It would allow planning decisions to be shaped around local needs — not developer margins — and give councils the power to influence how development happens, not just where.
Because if national housing targets are unlikely to change significantly, then we must change how we build — and that can only happen if local authorities are allowed to lead on quality, purpose, and long-term value.
Right now, that isn’t possible. Developers set the tone, the speed, and the standard — and they are incentivised to do so with short-term gain in mind. There is no economic structure in place to reward innovation, modern design, or optimal land use. Technologies and strategies that are standard in other countries — from energy-efficient homes to better density planning — are left off the table, because there’s no incentive to include them and no penalty for ignoring them.
A profit cap wouldn’t stop development. It would simply re-centre the public interest in a system that has drifted far from it. If EHDC were serious about reform, it would have acted already. But it hasn’t. And that silence speaks volumes.
This is not just a local issue. It is a national failure with deeply local consequences.
Until we put an end to fragmented, opaque approvals — and restore democratic control over how and where we build — we will continue to see decisions like this: rushed, unsupported, and quietly harmful.
Medstead is not disposable. Neither is the countryside that surrounds it. If our planning authorities can’t protect us, then we must find another way.
That process has already begun — through direct challenges to decision-makers, coordinated community organising, and the groundwork being laid for a Judicial Review.
Residents are sharing knowledge, building alliances, and refusing to be silent. We (residents) are not against homes. We are against the erosion of democratic planning. And we are not going away.
One solution we put forward was the introduction of a local profit cap — a simple, practical mechanism that would limit excessive developer profit and allow local authorities to reclaim surplus gains for community infrastructure, affordable housing, and environmental restoration. It would offer councils a lever not just over how we build, but also where, and for whom.
I proposed this idea to East Hampshire District Council. But rather than treat it as an opportunity, they folded it into their habitual modus operandi — repeating a broken process even when handed the chance to rethink it.
So I took it to our MP, Damian Hinds, who in turn raised it with the Minister for Housing. In her formal response, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage confirmed that the proposal has been passed to her officials for further review — alongside broader reforms to Section 106 contributions and the National Planning Policy Framework.
It is now part of the national conversation. But change will only happen if we keep pushing — locally and nationally — with a clear message:
Communities are not obstacles. They are stakeholders. And they deserve a system that treats them as such.
If the current leadership cannot meet the targets they committed to — and refuses to engage with credible, community-led proposals for reform — then they must ask themselves whether they are still fit to lead. Leadership is not about surviving systems. It’s about challenging them when they fail.
Notes:
