Sam Stafford's Blog

It would be interesting to know (and perhaps I'll ask at my next public exhibition...) what winds our NIMBY friends up more. The prospect of the green fields over which they have enjoyed a view being used to house the next generation, or the prospect of ' speculative developers ' benefiting from the process. The phrase, speculative developer, is an emotive one and one that I imagine sub-editors quite like because it instantly invokes an image of someone in a pinstripe suit waving a fifty pound note around. Notwithstanding the plain and simple fact that people profit from the development process (and I do like to ask NIMBYs at exhibitions whether they would promote any land that they owned for development...) the two component words represent an amalgamation of two distinct players in the process. The first word first. The dictionaries that I have just consulted define speculative in a number of ways, but common ones include ' a high risk of loss', and '...

Ah, Garden Cities. Like Matthew Le Tissier in an England shirt, everybody agrees that they should work, but nobody seems able to get them to. The Lyons Review has added to the growing body of support for the concept. The evidence is clear that Garden Cities will not happen without local support and therefore we propose that the process will be locally-led with designation proposed by local authorities; proposals from other parties including LEPs or private developers could be valid where the support of local communities and alignment with local plans is clearly evidenced. Regular readers will know that I regard locally-led Garden Cities as the planning equivalent of turkey-led Christmas dinners so I shan't dwell on the need for local support, but the suggestion that non-locally-led proposals should be clearly aligned with local plans demands closer inspection. Advice to the review has suggested that progressing through the Local Plan process is likely to take at least three years....

Putting aside the terrible title ("Mobilising across the nation to build the homes our children need" sounds like a key words were thrown into a hat and picked out at random) and the glaring difference between an identified need for 243,000 homes a year and an identified target of 'at least' 200,000 homes a year, there is much to commend the Lyons Review. Despite though a promise of 'national leadership', the key issue for many practioners, the return of regional planning, has been sidestepped.    On the plus side, of the ten key recommendations for planning reform summarised here by Planning Magazine there is merit in nine (I imagine that the policy of 'local homes for local people' was thrown in by a SpAd because I cannot think that any of the Commissioners felt that was a sound idea that is workable in practice). A "national spatial dimension to the NPPF to identify opportunities for substantial housing growth created by national infras...

Sitting here in limbo But I know it won't be long Sitting here in limbo Like a bird without a song Well, they're putting up a resistance But I know that my faith will lead me on Ok, Sam. I hear you say. What tenuous way have you found to crow bar a  Jimmy Cliff  song into a 50 Shades blog...  Well. Barbour ABI, a supplier of data to the construction industry, has announced that, while 238,000 homes received planning permission in England and Wales last year (September 2013 to August 2014), only 129,000 units started construction in the same period. This, it was stated, "indicates a significant disparity between planning permissions and builds starting on site". 24 Dash, a social housing and local government  website , went on describe 109,000 planned dwellings as...   wait for it...   "sitting in limbo". The suggestion that planning permissions can be implemented within the same calender year ...