New planning regs

[arl]

>We don't need a lot more housing

There's no shortage of people looking to buy, so I guess they think we do. Grownups living with their parents as well.

Britains excessive housing prices also seem to suggest supply is well below demand.

We certainly have lots of empty housing around here. On my cycle home tonight i will pass 5 roads of empty victorian terraces and yet they are still keep building

> There must surely be some planning brakes?

I believe there are, yes. Far too many as well.

http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_headline
=35--of-city-centre-flats-are-empty&method=full&objectid=18953338&siteid
=50061-name_page.html

 

[Nemesis]

Sir Simon J in today's Groan:

http://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2086103,00.html

The Tesco clauses betray big business's grip over Labour


Brown clearly intends to complete the dismantling of local, democratic planning. It is hypocrisy of the highest order

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday May 23, 2007
The Guardian


Kissin' don't last, cookin' do, says the old matrimonial saw. In government, politics don't last, planning do. It is for all time. Allocating a nation's scarcest resource, land, has been the default mode of politics throughout history. The true memorial of any ministry is how it affected the face of Britain.
Tony Blair's will be remembered not just for Iraq, but for giant warehouses and hypermarkets on urban fringes and for pepper-potting the capital with carbon-guzzling glass towers.

Monday's white paper from the planning secretary, Ruth Kelly, does two things. It limits the scope for local councils and protesters to impede projects deemed "national", such as motorways, pipelines and power stations. At the other end of the spectrum it frees individual property-owners from detailed planning control.
What is strange is that all this was supposed to have been done under John Prescott's draconian 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, dubbed the "Luftwaffe act" at the time. It, too, speeded planning applications. The proportion of major applications handled in the recommended 13 weeks has risen in three years from half to three-quarters, as have minor applications dealt with in eight weeks. This is hardly unreasonable. The act also abolished local structure plans and handed them over to Whitehall officials, who were even given veto rights over local community plans.

Assuming the white paper passes into law, Britain will be the only nation in the free world where citizens and their democratic institutions will enjoy no discretion over the pace and pattern of change of their communities. If Kelly wants a factory estate outside Cirencester, a hypermarket in the Weald, or a wind turbine on the Pennines, she gets it.

The words national interest will be rubber-stamped on planning applications as national security is stamped on government documents.

The white paper is right to draw a distinction between truly national projects and those of local import. It makes sense to have a national argument about whether a major project is needed and a separate, and focused one, about how its local impact should best be handled. The road and rail network, power generation, and distribution and locating defence installations, cannot be vulnerable to piecemeal local opposition every inch of the way.

The need for the gas pipeline from Milford Haven to the Midlands is a different debate from that over its route. Anyone concerned about global warming - rather than their next donation from the wind turbine lobby - knows that Britain must replace its defunct power stations; but that debate is separate from where they should go. I doubt if the government really means to leave either decision to an "independent" commission. If a debate is national, it should surely be resolved by responsible politicians. Kelly's proposal for major decisions to have no recourse to any democratic institution at all is so bizarre that miles of new motorway will probably end up before a European court.

Beyond these few big decisions, the government's craving for ever wider powers over land-use planning is megalomaniac. But the 2004 act, which Kelly appears not to have read, already allows her to pursue her strategy of directing yet more growth towards the over-heated south-east. Meanwhile, central not local government is to blame for the slow progress on England's biggest new city, on the Thames estuary, just as it is responsible for biasing taxation against urban restoration and towards new-build, which inevitably encounters greater opposition.

I am afraid the real motivation behind this white paper is revealed in its "Tesco clauses". These ludicrously equate retail superstores to nuclear plants and gas pipelines as national infrastructure projects. The hold of the big supermarkets and construction firms over Gordon Brown, Kelly, and her planning minister, Yvette Cooper, is clearly mesmeric. There is no national planning need for out-of-town hypermarkets, and an overwhelming climate change case against them. The pattern of retailing is a local concern and, besides, to bias planning against low-carbon urban density and towards transport-rich dispersal is archaic and nonsensical.

As for the diminution of local development control, what seems a good idea may well end up bad. Planning delays have been reduced and, in some degree, are a cost of democratic decision. The chief cause nowadays is the slowness of the appeals system, run by the government. British development control, compared with that in France or Germany, is already lax. The sprouting of cottages and caravans in meadows, the use of cheap rather than local materials, the erection of phone masts, advertising hoardings and wind turbines are not, as Cooper has implied, of concern only to snivelling nimbies. They affect every citizen's sense of control over his or her surroundings and quality of life.

Why this interest should be regarded as contemptible, as against the profitability of Tesco and McAlpine, is a mystery known only to Downing Street's lobbying culture. Development control matters far more, and to far more people, than where a motorway or nuclear power station might go. Like the decision to bring community planning under the aegis of Whitehall, so releasing property-ownership from development control may well prove counter-productive. Supposedly a nod by Kelly towards the neo-conservative cult of "non-planning", it is more likely to lead to development followed by legal action.

Planning is seminal to democracy and as such is vulnerable to human rights and European law. This vulnerability will not diminish. The probability is that decisions will now pass from locally accountable planning committees to the courts, from those who care about the future of their communities to those who care about fees and lobbyists.

There is always a case for streamlining bureaucracy. But the regulations that cram the files of building and planning inspectors can be rewritten without stripping away the rights of those whom the regulations are supposed to protect. Blair's dismantling of local planning under the 2004 act is clearly to be completed under Brown. His ambition is simply to de-democratise the future development of Britain. When he next makes a speech about wanting "empowered communities and enabling rather than centralising government", someone in the audience should blow a raspberry and shout "hypocrite".

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk