Planning No Longer Blocks Development, Infrastructure Capacity Does

One line at the NatWest and Deloitte breakfast reframed the whole debate on Greater Manchester's growth zones.

Deloitte Office, 100 Embankment, Manchester

If the constraint has moved, so must the money.

For years the property industry has treated the planning system as the great brake on development, the thing that turns a viable scheme into a stalled one.

At the M60 Breakfast hosted by NatWest and Deloitte, that assumption was quietly dismantled.

Caroline Wright, head of strategic planning at Trafford Council, put it in a single line that reframed the morning: planning no longer blocks development, capacity does.

For Greater Manchester's growth zones, where the next decade of homes, jobs and investment is supposed to land, it is a diagnosis with real consequences. If the binding constraint has moved from consent to capacity, then so must the money, the governance and the order in which things get built.

The blocker has moved

Caroline's argument was that long-term, coordinated infrastructure is what creates investable markets, and that for too long infrastructure has followed development rather than leading it, storing up problems further down the line.

The result is a pipeline where consent is increasingly achievable but delivery is not, because the grid connections, transport links and physical capacity to support new floorspace are not there in time.

It is a subtle but important shift.

Planning permission is now closer to the start of the hard work than the end of it, and the schemes that move are the ones where capacity has been planned and funded ahead of need, rather than retrofitted once homes and jobs are already consented.

Why infrastructure capacity is the real constraint

Several blockers compound the problem.

Political short-termism sits awkwardly against development horizons of ten to twenty years, with national priorities shifting beneath schemes, as the fate of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail has shown.

Governance is fragmented, and as Caroline noted, capital moves fastest with one client rather than ten stakeholders.

Funding is fragmented too, with a clear need for stronger alignment with institutional and pension capital.

Deloitte framed the same picture as for challenges with potential solutions, pairing fragmented governance with integrated delivery bodies, the planning system with faster, rules-based consenting and, most tellingly, infrastructure constraints with an infrastructure-first model.

The thread running through all of it is that delivery capability, not permission, is now the scarce resource.

Atom Valley proves the point

Nowhere was this clearer than the Northern Gateway in Atom Valley, the Harworth-led scheme spanning Bury, Rochdale and Oldham and the largest planning application the north has seen in twenty-five years.

Dan Needham was candid that highways are the single biggest challenge.

The advanced manufacturing the site is earmarked for cannot proceed without highways upgrades, and the ambition for 40 per cent of journeys by public transport demands serious investment, not a handful of buses for a workforce approaching ten thousand.

Even smaller sites, he noted, can require tens of millions of pounds for highways alone. It is no accident that the scheme's timetable puts funding for initial highways infrastructure as a 2026 milestone, ahead of outline permission. The infrastructure is not a detail to be resolved later. It is the gating item for the entire project.

Infrastructure-first, and progress over perfection

If capacity is the constraint, the prescription follows.

Greater Manchester's devolved model, with the Good Growth Fund acting as a front door to de-risk the right locations and Mayoral Development Corporations giving schemes a single accountable delivery structure, is in large part an attempt to put infrastructure and coordination ahead of development rather than behind it.

It also demands patience, the kind of long-term, place-based investment that large sites need to ride out economic cycles. Wright's closing challenge was to be in the game of progress over perfection, a recognition that waiting for certainty can be its own form of failure.

Deloitte's Chris Langford made the same point from another angle: instability is the new normal, so the task is to identify problems quickly and get on with it.

The Insider Take

The reframe matters more than it first appears. If planning is no longer the binding constraint, due diligence has to change with it. For investors and developers, the question on any Greater Manchester growth-zone scheme is no longer simply whether it has consent, but whether the grid, the highways and the wider infrastructure are funded and sequenced to arrive on time.

The sites that de-risk early will be those with an infrastructure-first plan and a single accountable delivery body behind them.

For the public sector the implication is sharper still. Capacity, not consent, is what now needs solving at pace, and the growth zones that crack it will be the ones that attract the patient capital the whole strategy depends on. Read the infrastructure timetable before the planning status. On these sites, it tells you far more about whether anything will actually get built.

Rico Naylor (MRICS) - Founder of CRE Insider

CRE Insider covers investment, development, and regeneration across the UK's cities. Got a tip or want to contribute? Get in touch at rico@cre-insider.com