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Err, yes, this is the point

Nearly 30,000 homes have been built in valuable areas of countryside despite local opposition because of confusion caused by the Coalition’s planning reforms, a report suggests.

Countryside campaigners accused ministers of allowing unwanted greenfield development “through the back door” after it emerged that planning inspectors are overruling hundreds of local objections to development.

That’s the point and purpose of the changes in planning law. To allow houses to be built where people actually wish to live.

6 thoughts on “Err, yes, this is the point”

  1. We need to see a list of sites they don’t like.

    Much of the opposition is of the kitchen sink variety.

    Our lot suddenly became concerned about the welfare of foxes and wallabies, for example.

  2. Surely the point of the objections is that these approvals are made “through the back door”.

    I’m surprised to find you on the side of the man from Whitehall systematically trumping the local government and local people.

  3. Councils were instructed to create a local plan with 5 years worth of home building penciled in. Councils that have not prepared a local plan that meets the requirements have fewer legal reasons to object to applications.(‘It’s not on the local plan’ being one of them)

    This is not a back door, it is the incentives of the policy at work – if a council doesn’t get its finger out it will be partially bypassed.

    If the councils wanted to protect greenfield sites what they should have done long before now is create a local plan in consultation with the public about where new homes could be built, that had the new homes penciled in for non-greenfield sites.

    Personally I think the policy is perverse in that it skews everything in the direction of horrible and ugly housing estates for convenience and is central planning rather than demand led but, it is working as intended.

  4. 30,000 unwanted homes eh? That’s awful. You’d have thought that the developers would have quit building at some point when they realised that nobody was buying what they were building. All those empty homes littering this green and pleasant land.. what a tragic waste.

  5. @TMB

    Planning is one of those areas where the dynamics (of nimbyism, etc) need to be bypassed by higher authority.. otherwise nothing gets built.

    People who live in nice unspoilt countryside generally want to benefit from the motorways, power stations, mines, factories and whatever else has scarred the previously-unspoilt country sides elsewhere. They are part of a national system. So they don’t get sovereignty. All they want to do is stop new development, they’re generally ok with the old stuff. I’ll take community concerns about the countryside seriously when they start offering to bulldoze their own places.

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