You have to tell the system what you’re going to plant in hte garden in order to gain planning permission?
Kill the system with fire. Take off and dust it from orbit, it’s the only way.
You have to tell the system what you’re going to plant in hte garden in order to gain planning permission?
Kill the system with fire. Take off and dust it from orbit, it’s the only way.
On that McCartney one how the feck does a house in a hamlet of 10 buildings attract 65 ‘local’ objections. A major objection being that people who are on holiday might stay overnight. Shocking! So the applicants have to counter in the opposite direction by making up a stupid concept of it being a ‘forever home’, rather than just calling it a normal home.
Never minding all that, the roofs are to be covered in turf. This is functionally equivalent to being told we must live in a cave if we want a home of our own.
I agree, blow the system up.
No wonder farmland owners are leasing to solar panellers. Nothing else can get done in the countryside.
I have heard it said – only heard it said mind – that farmland, even Green Belt, to solar is a possible planning achange. Something that can be got through the system. And also that in 20 years brownfield solar to housing is going to be a possible change. Given the constipation of the planning system solar therefore is the fastest way of being able to build houses.
If you drive around the country you’ll see new housing estates going up everywhere. Places where there are no new jobs, infrastructure or services. The planning system doesn’t seem to be limiting house building. It is not the bottleneck you think it is, but it does act as a convenient excuse for, say, a government who can’t deliver on their housing promises and never will.
What we need isn’t more rabbit-hutch twenty to the acre houses. It’s fewer immigrants distorting the natural order. Humans can be invasive species too.
Exactly. There is no lack of development. In fact, the pace and extent of development is astonishing. I assume Tim doesn’t see it because he’s fucked off and lived somewhere else. Idealogical blinkers don’t help either.
I suppose being part of beautiful country and wanting to preserve it for your own people is the ultimate NIMBYism.
Wouldn’t it be a shame if the Reform government in 2029 decreed that farmland used for solar would only be allowed to revert back to farmland…
It would be convenient if after say 20 years the soil was contaminated in some way so it couldn’t go back to being farmland. Some leeching of the materials, a fire, rusting frames perhaps, definitely brownfield by then.
Who wants cadmium in their beans?
If the land isn’t safe to grow food in it isn’t safe to live on. So minimum fifty years back to nature for recovery.
20 years ago I saw farm outhouses being refurbished, bringing in electricity and water to support their farm use. We knew that ten years down the line these buildings would then sail through conversion to residential.
Near me a battery farm has just been given permission, overruling local planning authorities at local and county level and wall-to-wall objections. This is not a battery chicken farm but hundreds of container-sized lithium batteries to support the unreliables. Hundreds of ’em, acres of dodgy fire hazards from China. It’s all perfectly safe, they tell us. They definitely won’t catch fire. This is the flip side of doing away with planning.
OTOH, I’ve just planted some potatoes. Do I need permission from the council?
I read somewhere that car batteries are recycled as storage. Basically pull em out of one, stick em in the other. I can imagine. Fire hazards.
I wouldn’t want to be downwind of that when it pops off – definitely when not if, if it’s big enough.
That’s what I was thinking. If the prevailing wind puts you down wind, it’s time to move.
It’s time to move anyway. Being downwind of that in an unprevailing wind is just as lethal.
Yes. Prevailing wind only helps with the odds.
On that McCartney one how the feck does a house in a hamlet of 10 buildings attract 65 ‘local’ objections.
In 2012 when we were kicking off the government’s Mobile Infrastructure Programme (MIP)* to provide mobile coverage in rural areas where it was uneconomic and/or difficult for the operators to offer service one of the planners for the Lake District can down. I got chatting to him about the problems or providing coverage and long story short ….
The locals had been pushing the MNOs to provide coverage for years and the planners had been working with the MNOs and Arqiva, the mast providers, to find a suitable locations. It’s not easy because it’s not just about a site to provide coverage the MNOs had to be able to connect back in to their own networks and they needed electric, both very costly if at all practical.
They eventually found a site that everyone was happy with and it went for planning. The planners expected it to go through “on the nod” but they got an objection from someone in Kent and because it was a National Park this meant it then had to go in to full planning and eventually to the national planning inspector. The NOs had a lot of experience of losing these cases and as it was/is an expensive and very slow process they pulled out.
*(I was the technical subject matter expert)
Another planning anecdote from a different project, this time from around 2016.
After MIP I worked on a licence bid for a start up to provide national fixed wireless broadband and we won a large section of 3.5GHz spectrum.
As part of our commercial trials we wanted to offer service in Harrow where there were complaints that BT’s broadband service was crap.
We duly applied to put an installation on the telecoms mast there, in line with national and local planning guidelines, after we’s worked with the local planning officer. Again the planning officer expected it would go through on the nod, ha!
One of our surveyors went to the council meeting where it was going to be approved but there was an objection, this time from a local councillor who said: <i> </i> nobody else going to object, I will. She didn’t even need to give a reason.
We went to appeal and the national planning inspector was scathing in his commendation of the council when he gave us permission, but we still wasted 6 months and IIRC around £20k.
“She”. One of those wimmin who hold the phone at right angles to her ear, and mouth when talking, because “radiation”?
This is why I came off Planning and went on Licensing where the law is stronger and *requires* /evidence/ for an objection to be accepted. You can’t just turn up and say “residents don’t want it”.
They won’t be content until the UK is just one big heap of sand after the temperature rockets by 1.95C and all the new rulers feel right at home.No houses except for the 14 bedroom palaces for the immams while the peasants-us- live in tents.
But they will have to be just the right sort of tents…
Ironically it’s quite likely the new housing estate creeping up the hill to Blanchette’s current house that has prompted the move.
I think the right solution is putting the councils in charge of planning. And they run on their rates. The council can reject any development because it’s ugly, or blocks nice views, but the rest of the locals are going to pay more in council tax to pay for the lack of rates not collected. Sometimes, the view might be more important than the money.
How much could you squeeze out of Stella and her bloke per year for their “forever home” in a lovely location overlooking a lock? £50K? That would empty lots of bins for everyone in Fort William.
Sort of like a Land Value Tax, then? If the value of my ‘land’ goes down (which is what most NIMBYs are concerned about) because of a new development then I pay less LVT.
With the obvious consequence that it also goes up, over time, if said new development is rejected.
[dons flak jacket and helmet for incoming…. flak]
Sort of, yes. The revenue from the new rate payers helps to pay for various costs.
The rate payers can also not want an old building knocked down, or a park to be built on, and that’s fine. But they then pay more rates to cover the costs of running the town.
And the best way to decide this is locally not nationally. People in London, Bath, Preston and Highlands have different priorities. Who is best to decide how built up a town should be, what things should be in the town than the local people? It’s not something that can be done entirely individually, after all.
Well, yes, property should be taxed on absolute value, not in bands with a ceiling. If they want to build a £5m mansion, we’re having 0.5% of that, thank you very much. Not a fixed £1500.
There is, or at least was it may have been scrapped, a mechanism for people to claim compensation if a project causes their house price to fall. This happened when the M40 was extended in to Oxfordshire and created more traffic on the existing M40 near Stokenchurch. A number of householders were compensated for the extra noise and loss of value of their properties, although apparently the process was very bureaucratic according to the people we knew.
On the other hand, when a project favours homeowners, such as the Puddletown bypass, there is no mechanism for the state to claw back some of the increased property values of those who saw their house price rise.
So perhaps a limited LVT may be useful.
The objection to LVTs around these parts has generally been because those proposing one see it as the only tax needed and the panacea to all our woes.
Meanwhile down at the bottom of Stokenchurch hill we got nothing but moise. And of course we were grateful to our betters for it.
Repeal the following:
1909-1910 Finance Act – which established the Valuation Office as part of central government
Rating and Valuation Act, 1925– which established local ‘bill authorities’ effectively administration arms of a centralised state within a uniform national system.
This would mean property taxes and inheritance taxes would be local authority determined, and the revenues going on what local authorities want to do. Obvs not that simple but I did say it to the councillor canvassing yesterday who was saying not to base your vote on national issues but on who gets things done locally. .
There’s a viable idea in that – any development that is proposed must have a calculation attached as to how much tax (council tax + business rates) it would generate. If the application is refused that amount must be added to existing bills. Yes the local population can refuse any and all development, but they have to pay for the loss of revenue that would otherwise have been created. It costs you to be a NIMBY in effect.
And NIMBYism under those circumstances is fine. If you don’t want your rural idyll damaged by modernism, you have to cough up for that.
It also replaces the problems of listed buildings. If a town really loves a building, they lower the rates as it gives an aesthetic benefit to everyone else. A theatre might get zero rated as it creates trade for other businesses.
For a somewhat different reason than Western Bloke’s, that’s exactly what happens, which is why you get so many ridiculously inappropriate developments of crammed in houses and flats. It’s also one of the reasons you get so many immigrants. The reason is unfunded liabilities – pensions and such. They simply need way more council tax payers to pay for all the ongoing and upcoming unpaid-for shit. The current tax payers simply can’t afford to pay what’s “needed”, so more payers is the only answer.
But things that can’t go on forever won’t, so it’s going to be interesting times.
We are rather disappointed that one of our views has been spoilt by a new housing estate. Our own fault, of course: we and the neighbours should have bought the bloody field before the developers did.
On t’other hand, at least the housing estate means that the field won’t be colonised by “travellers”.
I can see the attractions of owning a small island though I’d need to be rich enough to own a small submarine for getting to-and-fro in bad weather.
deari, not all spoiling is by new development – my garden has been blighted due to three cunts in the next road planting a wall of leylandi at the end of their gardens which is now 60 feet high by 60 feet wide…….
Glyphosate is probably effective on Leyland cypress.
Shades of my Old Man. Bought his Sussex house because it backed onto the school playing field. Whereupon planning permission was then granted for a housing estate. The nearest house being 3 m from his hedge. He was mightily pissed. Rule #1 – Never buy anything near open ground. If it’s built on, at least generally you what you’ll be living near.
Of course, amusingly, his house was built on land to the rear of the houses lined the road to the village. So they lost their view. But that was different…
Opposite here. Bought a house next to woods. Nice. Four days after closing, bulldozers came for the forest.
If you buy a place with a view, make sure you also buy the view.
‘Fraid it’s (much) worse than that, Tim.
If you are ever feeling too happy and need to be be reduced to abject depression, go look at the conditions attached to planning applications that Our Dear Leaders deign to approve: bat survey, badger survey, biodiversity enhancement (i.e. a bung to someone elsewhere who’s planted some trees so you don’t have to), CARBON reduction & Net Zero, water conservation, etc., etc, maybe twenty hoops or so.
All of this is hiding in plain sight, just go look on a typical District Council’s website, under “Planning”. In the case of South Cambs though, it has to be in the week as the website gets tired at the weekend and doesn’t work.
That’s even before you get to the exciting and challenging opportunities presented by Building Regulations.
To top it all, and presumably for their own amusement in baiting the plebs, they don’t even do a “proper job”. They just churn out incompetent, error strewn garbage and, when caught red-handed, obfuscate, lie and cheat (and never suffer any consequences).
So, mere “killing with fire” is not nearly enough…
The insanity is probably not restricted to planning commissions.
Here in US, businesses get same chit from federal government. I did a “what if” evaluation of starting a particular business, and I determined that I would need to involve 68 federal agencies. I figured that is the key reason why this particular business had moved to China. And why government actions to get business back fail to understand why they left.
Commie Democrats say it’s lower labor cost, because they are commies.
Labour cost is a factor, but yeah.
Everyone complains about how long it takes to build a railway here, as if China has magicians, but the truth of it is that China builds like we used to. We used to just work out a route and get a railway or motorway down. Anything in the way was bulldozed. Bats, rare orchids, old shitty buildings gone.
Nowadays in Britain, a project like HS2 has an army of archaeologists filling warehouses with more fucking Roman coins and helmets, making sure that bats don’t fly into trains. Are the seats recyclable? Has everyone in the supply chain ticked all the boxes on all the forms.
All that shit costs money and takes time. It’s going to take far longer to finish HS2 than it took Brunel to build the Great Western Main Line with navvies back in the 1840s.
Oddly the Great Western takes the route it does because Earl Abingdon was a NIMBY. Brunel wanted to take a more northerly route but it went into the Earl’s patch. Apart from a brief branch line, Abingdon ended up getting no trains and is still schit for trains today.
Learned this from a Paul Whitewick YT.
He’s very good, Paul Whitewick.
It also wasn’t supposed to go to Swindon originally. He wanted the works near Burbage, by the Kennet and Avon canal but he couldn’t get them to sell the land, so he had to find somewhere north of the ridgeway with a canal, and there was the Wilts and Berks canal. The old wharf is where the Magic Roundabout is now.
And it’s critical to remember that EU has another stack of goofball rules.
Stay out.
However many of ’em simply supranational regulations distilled down to EU level. Not being in the EU gives no escape if you are still signed up to e.g. Codex Alimentarius. See Richard North and what he describes as the “Double Coffin Lid”
“it has to be in the week as the website gets tired at the weekend and doesn’t work”
A couple of weeks ago after getting home in shooting pain, after recovering on the settee for a couple of hours I thought “sod this, it’s time to get a sick note and get some time off”.
I went on to my local GP’s website to submit a request. “We cannot accept sick note requests outside 8am-2pm”. WTF???? The WHOLE POINT of doing stuff online is so to not be tied down to when humans happen to be around, they will pick up the request when they get back in. WTF is a website turned off outsite office hours?
Gamecock complained to Jr about medical system seemed to be designed to PREVENT service. He said it’s intentional. He should know; he used to work for them.
“WTF is a website turned off outsite office hours?”
Probably because there’s no tech support outside of hours (something you have to pay for) and so the GP surgery decided to do it on the cheap. And the supplier switches it off at that time, so no-one is rushing around at 8am the next day because the system was crashed overnight.
If this was a properly thought through SaaS service, every GP would use the same system, centrally managed, and it would just have a couple of blokes on call to fix it. The cost across all GPs would be fuck all.
But the Stalinist wonder that is the NHS manages to get all the inefficiencies of being a huge organisation, without any of the scale advantages.
Ironically, I used to work for the CCG and did the IT refresh for my GP practise, and it *IS* a devolved shared communally managed service. It’s individual practice policy whether they turn the system off or not.
“First do no harm”, eh?
Jesus. Another reason for scrapping GPs work then. Let Boots and Superdrug do more of the work, when I can actually visit them.
My local NHS is encouraging us to go to pharmacists for all minor complaints so that the GPs have less work to do. None of the GPs at my local surgery work a five-day week: mostly 4 days but one only works three days.
We don’t need people with 3 As at A level and 7 years of medical training to do the routine shit that GPs do. You need people who are bright, responsible. Work out the top 7 or 8 complaints and train someone for 6 months in doing them. Knock out the basic shit on the cheap. Anything else. go to hospital. Top 7 or 8 problems probably make up 90% of their workload.
You’d be able to put more doctors into hospitals, and from the start have them specialising in one type of medicine. Whether it’s ear problems, lumps, whatever. Which is what you need. Not “general” people who only see the odd lump and don’t have the equipment that the oncology or ENT department has, don’t know the symptoms of one thing or another.
Call centres work on levels. L1 is warm bodies, people above village idiot level. And they are trained to do the biggest 7 or 8 problems. They’re cheap, and that knocks out 90% of the calls. Anything beyond that gets escalated to L2. They’re smart people. Bit more expensive. They sort out over 90% of what’s left. And beyond that, you have L3 which is the uber geeks of telecoms. Very expensive people. But the stuff that gets to L3 is 1% of the problems. You need better people with medicine as it’s more serious, but you don’t need super geniuses to diagnose strep throat and hand someone some antibiotics.
I would scrap GPs and have these trained medical people as L1. Hospital doctors in a department as L2, and finally specialists as L3.
Here it’s “physicians assistants” taking over. Old white doctors are retiring. All new GPs are Indian women. If you want care from a ‘Merican, P/A is the only choice.
And they have chips on their shoulders. Because they are young, female, and not real doctors.
I can top that. I worked for CSC, that did a fine system for NHS 15 years ago.
I take no credit. I was in a different division. Internal chatter was perpetual scope creep. NHS didn’t really know what they wanted, so changed requirements all the time.
It’s a common thing in government because no-one gets their goolies chopped off for a project being late or over budget. So there is never that sharp focus in terms of working things out before getting the software started.
Private sector systems, we’re barely changing anything at user testing. A bit of polishing around the edges, generally.
Ha! Try working on military software, even worse.
Charity I was on the Board of, we had to put in a bicycle rack to get planning permission. In housing for old people who aren’t capable of looking after themselves.
Tim, have you seen this?
”
the Welsh building standard forcing all new builds to have sprinklers installed, despite their own cost-benefit analysis that found the policy had an NPV of -£190m”
https://x.com/i/status/2041226731118264620
Why bother to do a CBA if you’re not going to believe the answer?