
During the first months of COVID in England, media attention focused on the high rate of infection among Black and South Asian residents. The homes of Black and South Asian residents were more likely to be crowded and unaffordable.
Their homes were not spread evenly throughout the country. Rather they were concentrated in some neighbourhoods and communities. In a country that purports to provide equal opportunities, how do these geographic concentrations arise? And does land use planning, which determines what gets built where, have a role to play?
Amy Bristow, at Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh, has studied efforts to bring issues of discrimination and racial equality to bear on local planning decisions. As early as the 1970’s, planners were raising concerns that land use decisions were having a negative impact on the life chances of visible minorities. Planning professionals developed guidance to assess the potential for unequal impacts on minority communities. However, neither local councils nor the national government sanctioned the guidance and it was not used.
Bristow moves on to discuss the terrain in which land use planning is carried out today. Existing guidance and practice does little to address the negative effects of private land development. Nor does it consider how private land development will affect the housing chances of specific groups in the country’s population.
Local councils are expected to complete Equality Impact Assessments, which are supposed to have an influence on all planning and land use decisions, including new housing. The official language is “to have regard for” specific groups, which is hardly compelling.
As for the Equality Impact Assessments themselves, the list of groups to be considered includes Gypsies and Travellers, but does not include visible minorities. Bristow also notes that local planners are stretched to complete compulsory tasks. They simply don’t have the time create and apply assessment criteria to measure equality impacts for visible minorities.
Bristow also draws attention to Viability Assessments, which are part of every local planning process where councils are trying to build affordable housing. As she notes, the Viability Assessment allows private developers to abandon commitments to build affordable housing — which are a key reason why planning approval is granted in the first place. This undermines the ability of land use planners and local politicians to add “affordable” or social rent homes to a community’s housing stock. People of colour are over-represented among the people with low incomes, so every unit of housing lost through a Viability Assessment has a disproportionate impact on the Black and South Asian communities that have felt the impacts of COVID most acutely.
This research is rounded out with recommendations to change the land use planning systems to be more responsive to the inequalities that continue to persist.
Why does this report matter?
Bristow’s work will be of interest to land use planners, decision makers and advocates who are working to understand how the land use planning system affects outcomes for visible minorities. Although Bristow focusses on England, the report could also be relevant in other jurisdictions. Read more at I・SPHERE: Meeting The Housing Needs Of BAME Households In England: The Role Of The Planning System