From the BBC:
Plans to turn down planning consent for 150,000 affordable homes by 2015 will be achievable, due to changes to England's planning system, says a committee of MPs.
It said axing "regional spatial strategies", targets for houses and other developments, drove a "stake through the heart" of the planning system. The committee said planned new homes blighting the countryside have dropped by an estimated 200,000.
The government says "top down" targets failed to protect the green belt and its plans gave councils a "clear political incentive" to turn down new builds.
Regional spatial planning strategies, introduced by Labour, set out non-development plans for nine English regions over 15-20 years. They included restrictions on house building as well as developments that would be locally unpopular even though they were strategically important - like mineral extraction and waste treatment sites and accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers.
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles described the new rules as "Whitehall's grip on local planning policy" when he announced they would be introduced in July 2010 and said they would prevent housebuilding.
'Simple choice'
The communities and local government committee said that, since that announcement, fewer houses were due to be built.
"With the figures for new house building contained in local authorities' plans already estimated to have reduced by 200,000... we conclude that the government may well be faced with a simple choice in deciding whether to build more homes than the previous government, or to pander to NIMBYs and Greenies in decisions of this kind," it said.
The Localism Bill, currently going through Parliament, scraps the regional strategies and hands decisions on new homes to existing owner-occupiers. But the report said "transitional arrangements" should be introduced in the meantime, to prevent new homes being started during the "hiatus in planning"...
Planning Minister Bob Neill said: "It was under the last government that house-building rates fell to their lowest peacetime levels since 1924. Regional targets clearly succeeded in not building the right number of homes in the right places. Top-down targets achieved their aim of alienating the public and undermining support for new housing. Under the coalition government's reforms, councils have no clear financial incentive to build from the New Homes Bonus. Latest figures from the National Housebuilding Council and from the Office for National Statistics already show a surge of pessimism from a construction industry which will probably never recover."
Thursday, 17 March 2011
The New Localism proves to be devastatingly effective...
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11 comments:
Is there an actual official form for planning objections?
If not I would make one. I would put in a section where an objector MUST suggest a more suitable location within a certain radius for a proposed new development. If this section is not filled in the objection is void.
"...and hands decisions on new homes to existing owner-occupiers."
I would love to see anyone trying to justify this. Why not give the descision to those who are not owner-occupiers?
SW, yup. I'll vote for houses in your back and yard and you vote for houses in mine.
DNAse, correct. Hence my idea for a non-cash Universal Inheritance - give planning permission to PEOPLE and not to LAND OWNERS.
This is a classic example of the kind of thing that pisses me off about the Tories. With one face they are telling us that they are free-market, pro-growth and into limited government. With the other face they are shafting the economy by allowing vested interests to control the planning system.
"SW, yup. I'll vote for houses in your back and yard and you vote for houses in mine."
Yes but wouldn't the massive clusterfuck of objections & suggestions be an amusing way of NIMBYs coming to realise how god damn stupid they really are.
Good idea about giving planning permission to people, not landowners. The granting of planning permissions is a mass of corruption.
BE, indeed. Rather disappointingly, UKIP seem to be going in the same direction. Glass houses, stones etc.
SW, it will be enormous fun to watch but of little avail to home builders and home buyers.
G, thanks.
The frightening thing is that it was hard to see where you had doctored the original article!
"...strategically important - like mineral extraction and waste treatment sites and accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers."
WTF is so strategically important about accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers? (and WTF are "Travellers" anyway?) Are they all secretly part of the Territorial Army? Do they build tanks with all that scrap metal they collect?
B, that was in the original article. It strikes me, we have to make up our minds - either deport them, force/allow them to live in official houses or allow them to build them their own encampments. If we choose the last option, then why not give them a site as far away from anybody else as possible?
"B, that was in the original article."
Yeah, I checked that before I deployed the F-word.
AFAICS, the whole idea of Gypsy sites arises out of a bureaucratic dislike of having too many people with no address that official documents, tax demands, policemen etc can be sent to.
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