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There is an excellent opinion piece in today’s Times by its former editor, Simon Jenkins, currently chairman of the NT. Essentially he is refuting the argument put forward for the reform of the planning laws in the UK and on the face of it he makes a compelling case.
The proposed reforms would take away many of the protections currently enjoyed by Green Belt areas on the grounds that the whole system is rotten, impedes new housing and, to quote an assortment of chief executives and tycoons who wrote a collective letter to the paper yesterday, “puts a brake on UK business” and harms growth.
Apart from the fact that the authors of the letter failed to cite a single example of a “worthwhile project” that had failed because of the planning rules, they didn’t let that stand in the way of their attempts at creating a new orthodoxy.
I don’t think anyone doubts that a new way needs to be found to plan new projects, particularly large ones, such as power stations, motorways and docks, but ploughing over agricultural land is not necessarily the answer. He points out that the figure of £3 billion lost to the economy because of planning failure and much bandied by George Osborne, is completely unsourced.
The Royal Town Planning Institute maintains that 80% of all planning applications are approved and 90% of the bigger commercial ones. Almost all of them within the target period.
Commercial vacancies are running at 14%, with business parks 17% empty and 1.6 million square feet available for letting. The decline in manufacturing has left moiré derelict land available close to pre-existing infrastructure and population centres than at any time in British history.
Concerning houses, well that has nothing to do with growth.
If lack of land was a curb on building, developers would not have a back catalogue of 300,000 unbuilt homes and this doesn’t even begin to address the 750,000 houses lying empty; the majority for over 6 months.
Building on Greenfield sites is simply more profitable than recycling Brownfield sites. And it has nothing to do with infrastructure: on Brownfield sites much of it is already there and on Greenfield sites the slack is picked up in one form or another by the State.
The large number of unbuilt approvals and empty buildings may be more to do with VAT and other taxes than restrictions on planning.
And potentially more worrying is the supposedly comforting assertion that ‘no one is talking about building on green belt areas or areas of outstanding natural beauty’. The Green Belts etc cover 14% of rural England. The unspoken suggestion is that the rest is up for grabs.
Localism might act as a brake in its own right, but that’s assuming that any semblance of a local plan emerges. The possibility for local referenda, should add months of delay to planning applications, not to mention squabbles between parishes, local authorities, and government inspectors. Of course half of England is not covered by a local plan, so the presumption that consent is implied in its absence rather gives developers a head start to ignore local wishes and fill up that pesky space between London and Reading for a start.
The proposed reforms would take away many of the protections currently enjoyed by Green Belt areas on the grounds that the whole system is rotten, impedes new housing and, to quote an assortment of chief executives and tycoons who wrote a collective letter to the paper yesterday, “puts a brake on UK business” and harms growth.
Apart from the fact that the authors of the letter failed to cite a single example of a “worthwhile project” that had failed because of the planning rules, they didn’t let that stand in the way of their attempts at creating a new orthodoxy.
I don’t think anyone doubts that a new way needs to be found to plan new projects, particularly large ones, such as power stations, motorways and docks, but ploughing over agricultural land is not necessarily the answer. He points out that the figure of £3 billion lost to the economy because of planning failure and much bandied by George Osborne, is completely unsourced.
The Royal Town Planning Institute maintains that 80% of all planning applications are approved and 90% of the bigger commercial ones. Almost all of them within the target period.
Commercial vacancies are running at 14%, with business parks 17% empty and 1.6 million square feet available for letting. The decline in manufacturing has left moiré derelict land available close to pre-existing infrastructure and population centres than at any time in British history.
Concerning houses, well that has nothing to do with growth.
If lack of land was a curb on building, developers would not have a back catalogue of 300,000 unbuilt homes and this doesn’t even begin to address the 750,000 houses lying empty; the majority for over 6 months.
Building on Greenfield sites is simply more profitable than recycling Brownfield sites. And it has nothing to do with infrastructure: on Brownfield sites much of it is already there and on Greenfield sites the slack is picked up in one form or another by the State.
The large number of unbuilt approvals and empty buildings may be more to do with VAT and other taxes than restrictions on planning.
And potentially more worrying is the supposedly comforting assertion that ‘no one is talking about building on green belt areas or areas of outstanding natural beauty’. The Green Belts etc cover 14% of rural England. The unspoken suggestion is that the rest is up for grabs.
Localism might act as a brake in its own right, but that’s assuming that any semblance of a local plan emerges. The possibility for local referenda, should add months of delay to planning applications, not to mention squabbles between parishes, local authorities, and government inspectors. Of course half of England is not covered by a local plan, so the presumption that consent is implied in its absence rather gives developers a head start to ignore local wishes and fill up that pesky space between London and Reading for a start.