Housing supply and planning controls: the impact of development control processing times on housing supply in England

The National Housing and Planning Advice Unit commissioned Professor Michael Ball of Reading University to undertake empirical research into how long it was taking to obtain planning consent for major housing sites in England. The focus on sites as opposed to planning applications is important because it is sites that generate housing.

Process planning methodology: dynamic short-term planning for off-site construction in Slovenia

Planning is a vital element of project management but it is still not recognized as a process variable. Its objective should be to outperform the initially defined processes, and foresee and overcome possible undesirable events. Detailed task-level master planning is unrealistic since one cannot accurately predict all the requirements and obstacles before work has even started. The process planning methodology (PPM) has thus been developed in order to overcome common problems of the overwhelming project complexity. The essential elements of the PPM are the process planning group (PPG), including a control team that dynamically links the production/site and management, and the planning algorithm embodied within two continuous-improvement loops. The methodology was tested on a factory project in Slovenia and in four successive projects of a similar nature. In addition to a number of improvement ideas and enhanced communication, the applied PPM resulted in 32% higher total productivity, 6% total savings and created a synergistic project environment.

The costs and benefits of digital dermatitis control on UK dairy farms

Digital dermatitis is a significant problem in UK dairy herds and the cost to farmers has not yet been fully quantified. Under the current farm health planning initiative there is a need to demonstrate to farmers the costs and benefits of disease control. This paper presents the first attempt to quantify the costs and benefits of digital dermatitis control on UK dairy farms through the use of an interactive model.

Innovative approach to building systems integration problems: Using systems theory, technological forecasting and scenario planning

Building services are worth about 2% GDP and are essential for the effective and efficient operations of the building. It is increasingly recognised that the value of a building is related to the way it supports the client organisation’s ongoing business operations. Building services are central to the functional performance of buildings and provide the necessary conditions for health, well-being, safety and security of the occupants. They frequently comprise several technologically distinct sub-systems and their design and construction requires the involvement of numerous disciplines and trades. Designers and contractors working on the same project are frequently employed by different companies. Materials and equipment is supplied by a diverse range of manufacturers. Facilities managers are responsible for operation of the building service in use. The coordination between these participants is crucially important to achieve optimum performance, but too often is neglected. This leaves room for serious faults. The need for effective integration is important. Modern technology offers increasing opportunities for integrated personal-control systems for lighting, ventilation and security as well as interoperability between systems. Opportunities for a new mode of systems integration are provided by the emergence of PFI/PPP procurements frameworks. This paper attempts to establish how systems integration can be achieved in the process of designing, constructing and operating building services. The essence of the paper therefore is to envisage the emergent organisational responses to the realisation of building services as an interactive systems network.

Planning rigid body motions using elastic curves

This paper tackles the problem of computing smooth, optimal trajectories on the Euclidean group of motions SE(3). The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem where the cost function to be minimized is equal to the integral of the classical curvature squared. This problem is analogous to the elastic problem from differential geometry and thus the resulting rigid body motions will trace elastic curves. An application of the Maximum Principle to this optimal control problem shifts the emphasis to the language of symplectic geometry and to the associated Hamiltonian formalism. This results in a system of first order differential equations that yield coordinate free necessary conditions for optimality for these curves. From these necessary conditions we identify an integrable case and these particular set of curves are solved analytically. These analytic solutions provide interpolating curves between an initial given position and orientation and a desired position and orientation that would be useful in motion planning for systems such as robotic manipulators and autonomous-oriented vehicles.

Singularities of optimal control problems on some 6-D lie groups

This paper considers the motion planning problem for oriented vehicles travelling at unit speed in a 3-D space. A Lie group formulation arises naturally and the vehicles are modeled as kinematic control systems with drift defined on the orthonormal frame bundles of particular Riemannian manifolds, specifically, the 3-D space forms Euclidean space E-3, the sphere S-3, and the hyperboloid H'. The corresponding frame bundles are equal to the Euclidean group of motions SE(3), the rotation group SO(4), and the Lorentz group SO (1, 3). The maximum principle of optimal control shifts the emphasis for these systems to the associated Hamiltonian formalism. For an integrable case, the extremal curves are explicitly expressed in terms of elliptic functions. In this paper, a study at the singularities of the extremal curves are given, which correspond to critical points of these elliptic functions. The extremal curves are characterized as the intersections of invariant surfaces and are illustrated graphically at the singular points. It. is then shown that the projections, of the extremals onto the base space, called elastica, at these singular points, are curves of constant curvature and torsion, which in turn implies that the oriented vehicles trace helices.

Perspectives on the role of UK planning in land and property markets

There is a popular view that land use planning regulations (‘planning’) is hostile to both development and the development industry. Part of the reason for the prominence of this view is the homogenising of the notion of ‘planning’ and its reduction to development control. This paper argues that panning controls in the UK are far more sophisticated and, drawing upon empirical evidence of key property interests proposes a more complex and nuanced view of planning controls that, in large part, has the support of the developers and others.

Path planning of robots in noisy workspaces using learning automata

The problem of a manipulator operating in a noisy workspace and required to move from an initial fixed position P0 to a final position Pf is considered. However, Pf is corrupted by noise, giving rise to Pˆf, which may be obtained by sensors. The use of learning automata is proposed to tackle this problem. An automaton is placed at each joint of the manipulator which moves according to the action chosen by the automaton (forward, backward, stationary) at each instant. The simultaneous reward or penalty of the automata enables avoiding any inverse kinematics computations that would be necessary if the distance of each joint from the final position had to be calculated. Three variable-structure learning algorithms are used, i.e., the discretized linear reward-penalty (DLR-P, the linear reward-penalty (LR-P ) and a nonlinear scheme. Each algorithm is separately tested with two (forward, backward) and three forward, backward, stationary) actions.

The impact on housing supply in England of planning delay and uncertainty

The time taken to consider development proposals within the English planning system continues to provoke great policy concern despite a decade of inquiry and policy change. The results of an extensive site-based survey and hedonic modelling exercise across 45 local authorities are reported here. The analysis reveals a slow, uncertain system. It identifies planning delay as a serious problem for housing supply and its ability to respond to increases in demand. Only a relatively limited set of factors seem relevant in explaining differences in times and the results suggest that 80% of councils’ performances are statistically indistinguishable from each other. These findings question the policy emphasis put on rankings of local authorities, though some influence from local politics is apparent. Development control is consistently a lengthy and uncertain process due to its complexity. Therefore, success in lowering planning delay is only likely through radical simplification.

Change, rigidity & delay in the UK system of land-use development control

The British system of development control is time-consuming and uncertain in outcome. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly overloaded as it has gradually switched away from being centred on a traditional ‘is it an appropriate land-use?’ type approach to one based on multi-faceted inspections of projects and negotiations over the distribution of the potential financial gains arising from them. Recent policy developments have centred on improving the operation of development control. This paper argues that more fundamental issues may be a stake as well. Important market changes have increased workloads. Furthermore, the UK planning system's institutional framework encourages change to move in specific directions, which is not always helpful. If expectations of increased long-term housing supply are to be met more substantial changes to development control may be essential but hard to achieve.

UK planning controls and the market responsiveness of housing supply

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. Hedonic analysis indicated that there is considerable variation in time it takes local authorities to process planning applications, with the worst being four times slower than the best. Smaller builders and housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time intensive. These results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of UK housing supply to upturns in market activity.

Housing supply and planning delay in the South of England

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. If these results are representative of the country as a whole, they indicate that planning delay could be a major cause of the slow responsiveness of British housing supply.

Planning delay and the responsiveness of English housing supply

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing. Most research focuses on the supply impacts of prescribed limits on land use but housing supply may also be affected by the process of planning monitoring and approval but this is hard to measure in detail. The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it, but does offer the opportunity of detailed site-based investigation of planning delay. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. Hedonic modelling indicated that there is considerable variation in the time it takes local authorities to process planning applications. Housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time-intensive. These results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of UK housing supply to upturns in market activity.