Angela Rayner has certainly hit the headlines and rattled a few cages with her proposals to scrap planning controls and rip up the Green Belt to achieve the government’s house building goals.
Like many politicians, she seems to think in terms of soundbites and bold generalisations of a big picture without looking at the detail.
I have been involved with town and country planning for over forty years, first as a council officer and then as a member and finally committee chair. I know the system: its strengths and weaknesses, and how it can be so easily abused.
In spite of many frustrations, I came to admire the British system years ago. Just compare, for example, the ribbon of concrete along so many Mediterranean coastal areas with the more ordered appearance of British sea-side resorts which retains local character.
One hopes M/s Rayner is able to distinguish between the function of planning policy and control and the open market. The market determines demand, and the planning system determines where and how the demand is to be met.
One also has to take into account the financial interests of the development industry. House builders build for profit. It costs them more to develop “brown-field land” than green field sites. So, many areas are left derelict for years.
Developers keep huge land banks of land with planning permission, but they decide when it is best to build. Clearly, if too much land is released at any one time, the selling price for each plot will be less than if the same land is held back so as to create a shortage which will eventually increase the price to their advantage.
Having researched government data relating to the number of planning permissions granted for new homes since 2009/10, the Local Government Association in 2020 found that only 1,530,680 of the 2,564,600 units granted planning permission had been completed in the following decade.
M/s Rayner is right to criticise NIMBYism. For example, Councils were told that, if they had an approved local plan, they would be protected. So, I attended a public examination in2012 of a local plan which prohibited almost all housebuilding in country areas and allocated huge areas of land within a few small towns, where the infrastructure for new development was inadequate.
The purpose was clearly to treat the country areas as though they were National Park and prevent any expansion of village development limits. The inspector approved the plan. He could not have cared less where the new houses were to be built, provided the council allocated the required amount of land for new houses somewhere.
The result ten years later: overdeveloped congested towns with overloaded Victorian sewerage systems; villages hollowed out with holiday lets and second homes and houses which local people can’t afford to buy or rent; the death of local communities as village pubs and schools close, church parishes merge, villages lose their cricket teams and local shops disappear; and a local plan which was last reviewed five years ago and will not be reviewed for another five years as a result of Mr. Jenrick’s disastrous county reorganisation.
The privatised statutory authorities are no help. One council has been blackmailed into accepting a new development of 672 new houses to pay for a much-needed new road, which government would not fund. The town’s sewers are already totally inadequate and regularly discharge untreated sewage into an SSSI. Nevertheless, Yorkshire Water will not object provided the discharge from the new estate does not exceed 10 cubic meters per second.
To summarise, the planning system certainly needs tweaking, and NIMBYism and infrastructure are issues. However, no government can force developers to build if they don’t want to, and a drastic reform of the planning system is unlikely to produce more houses. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Doesn’t the answer lie with councils and housing associations? These can be controlled by government and government can provide funding and incentives to build on undeveloped and derelict “brown-field” land.
Clearly, few people are going to pay exorbitant rents for privately rented houses if they can get a council house with a cheaper rent. Councils used to finance council house building by borrowing from central funds and repaying the loans out of rents. This was done after the war when public finances were tight. So, why not now?
The more council houses are built, the less the demand for houses generally, and this should bring house prices and rents everywhere down to a level which ordinary people can reasonably afford.
ENDS
