Planning is not keeping pace with the rate of change in
people's experience of home, work and leisure, where boundaries are
increasingly blurred. The significant increase in home working over the
last ten or more years is being largely ignored in planning for
employment, despite its potential contribution to sustainability
objectives. And employment land studies and related policies continue to
focus mainly on the B Use Classes, despite the fact that a declining
minority of jobs are located on land designated for these uses.
A
sustainable relationship between home, work and leisure has always been
fundamental to planning. Traditionally this has entailed a close but
clear physical separation of residential and employment uses – mainly
for good amenity reasons. This separation is effected in the Use Classes
Order and is being maintained in most Core Strategies, although with
less rigour than in the previous generation of plans.
However, the increasing prevalence of home working (defined as people
working mainly at or from home) is challenging these traditional
approaches to planning. According to the Office for National Statistics,
about 13% of people now work primarily from home in the UK. Since 2001,
there has been an increase of over 21% in the number of home-workers,
compared with an increase of 5% in the total labour force.
The highest proportions of home working in the labour force are in
the South East and South West, and the lowest in the North East and
Scotland.
Many more people work at least one day a week from home, particularly
in business, professional and financial services: facilitated by rapid
improvements in access to broadband, encouraged by employers anxious to
minimise office costs, and stimulated by steep increases in commuting
costs.
Our experience of recent work on major urban extensions is that local
authority planners are very reluctant to regard home working as 'real
jobs' – despite a clear policy commitment in many areas to reduce
out-commuting, and experience which demonstrates that people who start
working from home one day a week often end up working there the majority
of the time, and travelling elsewhere at non-peak times.
As a consequence of this blind spot, there is also a failure to
promote positive planning for home working, for example through the
design of homes (e.g. discouraging open plan ground floors which leave
no separate space for a home office, or ensuring roof spaces are
designed to facilitate conversion to office use if desired, or designing
garages to be convertible to workshops), ensuring high speed broadband
really is available to every home, and making provision for work hubs
which are easily accessible on foot from new homes. These provide social
and business facilities and services for people who may otherwise be
deterred from home working because of the resulting isolation. They are a
variation on traditional managed workspace and innovation centre
environments, providing much more communal desk and meeting space, more
networking activities, and less space devoted to separate business
units.
Planning needs to adapt, otherwise it will continue to make too much
provision for imaginary jobs on employment land, and not enough for real
jobs in and around people's homes.
* Source: Office for National Statistics. Data are for Q4 of each year.
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