The first bit
On the day that I started writing this the Prime Minister has confirmed in a move considered intellectually incoherent by some that hundreds of new oil and gas licenses will be granted in the UK, which signals that it is ‘Energy Week’ on the Government’s summer recess comms grid. A line appears to have been drawn from the role of an Ultra Low Emission Zone policy in securing a marginal win for the Conservatives in the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election to the softening of commitments to a net zero energy strategy.Seven days ago the Prime Minister launched the grid’s ‘Planning Reform Week’ by announcing that the Government will meet its manifesto commitment to build 1 million homes over this parliament, which would represent “another important milestone in the government’s already successful housebuilding strategy”. It is notable given the ground that Labour has gained on housing in recent months that the first week of the parliamentary recess was devoted to trying to push back the red tanks from what has hitherto been seen as a traditionally blue lawn.
Maths was never my strongest of suits, but I
do know that 1 million homes over a five year parliamentary term represents only
two thirds of 300,000 a year, which was also a manifesto
commitment, but may or may
not still be depending upon which member of the Government you speak to on
any given day.
(Setting oneself two targets in this way is
quite canny to be fair and an approach that I might adopt myself over the next
couple of months. I could tell my Managing Director that I will respond to all
of the consultations that were launched last week and will respond to at least one
of them. Upstairs for thinking. Downstairs for dancing.)
Looking
back my tendency towards verbosity was better suited to English (and planning…),
but I remember little of my GCSEs apart from a pathetic fallacy being the attribution of human emotion to the weather or a season to reflect the mood
of a character or to create a tone. As the cavalcade of Planning Reform Week announcements emerged I was listening to rain bounce chaotically off the roof of a static caravan under a
melancholic Devonshire sky. Make of that what you will.
Housing and planning professionals do though represent quite
a small proportion of the electorate and it is instead to the non-housing and
planning professionals, which represent a much larger proportion of the
electorate, that the Prime Minister is speaking. The comms strategy being
adopted by the people responsible for the comms grid is presumably that if you repeat
something sufficiently frequently and assertively enough, such as Labour
wanting to concrete over the countryside, then people will eventually be ground
down into believing it.
The Prime Minister’s announcement, it soon became apparent, was actually only the appetizer to ‘Planning Reform Week’. The main
course, served by Michael
Gove was, to continue the tenuous culinary analogy, a smorgasbord of reheated leftovers and whatever else could be cobbled
together from the back of the cupboard.
A mere ten days after the LUHC Select
Committee published the findings of an inquiry into reforms to national
planning policy and requested the Government response to the last consultation on the NPPF, the Secretary of State cocked a snook at the Committee’s concerns
about the stop-start nature of the different proposals since 2019 by announcing
a new “long-term plan for housing”.
The “long-term plan for housing”
Fans of Mr Gove will have been pleased to see references in
his speech to Winston Churchill, the Medici model, Gaudi’s Barcelona, Haussmann’s Paris and Nash’s Regent’s Park,
but will have been disappointed that the B.I.D.E.N. principles did not get a
specific mention.
The first of the long-term
plan’s ten principles (which is a nice round number) is the regeneration and renaissance of the hearts of 20 of our most important
towns and cities.
There is reference in London
to “Docklands 2.0”, which would be an eastward extension along the Thames (with
reference, naturally, to the original Heseltonian vision) taking in Charlton
Riverside and Thamesmead to the south and the area around Beckton and
Silvertown to the north. There is reference elsewhere to a “programme of 20
city-centre renewals” that will “focus on the Midlands and particularly the
North”. Three areas of Leeds get a mention in relation to future development,
as do parts of Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle in
relation to recent development and recent disparate funding streams of which
more are promised.
Most surprisingly Barrow-in-Furness
gets a mention too. There is no doubt a compelling case for Barrow to become “a new
powerhouse for the North, extending beyond its current boundaries with
thousands of new homes and space for new businesses to benefit from the scientific
and technical expertise already clustered there”, but one wonders what the good
people of Barrow made of that. The comments underneath an article breaking the
news on a local news website express a healthy degree of scepticism.
News that “supercharging” Cambridge, “Europe’s science capital”,
certainly seemed to take Cambridge City Council by surprise, perhaps because
when asked about the OxCam Arc proposition just last year Mr
Gove reportedly mimed sitting on a lavatory and pulling the chain.
Peter Freeman, the Chair of Homes England, is
to lead a ‘Cambridge Delivery Group’ tasked, in concert with national and local
partners and backed by £5 million, to scope out a (as yet unidentified) major
new quarter for the city, built in a way
that is in-keeping with the beauty of the historic centre, and to advise on a long-term
delivery vehicle for it.
Cambridge City Council’s Twitter
account posted when news of the proposals were first mooted in The Sunday Times
a few weeks ago that the “the Council has not been consulted on these ideas,
which we note are described as being at the ‘concept’ stage”. A statement on
the City Council’s website posted on the day of Mr Gove’s speech stated that “the emerging Greater Cambridge Local Plan proposals to 2041 have
an emphasis on meeting housing and employment needs through sustainable
development, climate change, environment and wellbeing, and creating great
places to live” and that “the Government requires councils to plan ahead in
this way to better ensure that new homes, services and infrastructure are
delivered by partners in the right way and in the right timeframe.”
Will this be plan-led development? Perhaps if
top-down, transformative change is to be delivered by way of a development corporation-type
model it can be done out with the local plan process? Who knows. Somebody
hopefully.
The news also seemed to come
as a surprise to Conservative MP for Cambridge South Antony Browne who swiftly
derided the idea as “nonsense”,
but, 30 miles away in Peterborough, another Conservative MP, Paul Bristow, welcomed
the plans as “great
news” and made an immediate pitch for a fast transport link of some kind between
the two.
All being well Mr Gove will take
up an invitation from Peter Usborne, chair of the Cambridge Association of Architects, to go to Cambridge
“to understand how our historic city, its skyline and green belt will be
protected and explain how he proposes to safeguard sustainable goals and
community engagement.”
Cambridge also got a mention in Mr Gove’s
speech in relation to a new “supersquad” (a
working title I am led to believe) of “expert planners”, backed by £13 million
of new funding, to “unblock major housing and infrastructure developments”. “This
team will first land in Cambridge to turbocharge development that contributes
to the (as yet undefined) vision for the city, but it will also look at sites
across the eight (mostly undefined) Investment Zones in England, to help
provide high quality homes which complement the high-quality jobs that are
being created”. One can only speculate as to how news of the imminent arrival
of a “supersquad” was received within the award-winning Greater
Cambridge Shared Planning
service.
Just to recap then on the
first of the long-term plan’s ten principles, there is seemingly a programme for
the renewal of 20 city centres, but it is not known yet where they will be.
They could be the centres with the most transformative local and national
economic potential. They could be the ones most in need of transformative
social change. They could even be ones that are subject to the 35% urban uplift
included in the current construction of the standard method (which would have a
modicum of logic), but then the reference to Barrow, which is not one of those, suggests
that they will not make up the list. Who knows. Somebody hopefully.
The flippancy with which the
last few paragraphs is imbued masks a few points that are worthy of comment.
Firstly, it is, of course,
manifestly sensible, logical and desirable to focus development in the most
sustainable locations, to redevelop and regenerate under-used
previously-developed land, and to densify existing areas as and where
appropriate. Matthew Spry has written about the drive for ‘urban renaissances’
under the last Labour government (and the implications of ‘brownfield first’
being interpreted as ‘brownfield only’), but there are clear differences
between then and now in that then there was a policy commitment at the heart of
Government rather than the periphery and a backing up of that commitment in
policy and guidance. The “long-term plan for housing” has been published seemingly
out with those factors.
It also goes without saying,
but I will say it anyway, that the regeneration
and renaissance of the hearts of 20 of our most important towns and cities is
not and cannot be a substitute for full local plan coverage and meeting housing
need across the whole country; cannot and will not meet in full the needs of
the housing market areas of which those towns and cities form the heart; and that
the need of those market areas cannot be met on previously-developed
land alone.
That being said, an
accompanying press statement to Mr Gove’s speech notes that, “densification, done the right
way, will transform the opportunities available to people across the country –
our inner cities have much lower population densities than comparable Western
countries, impacting our productivity”. The right way to my unsophisticated
mind is positively-prepared, inclusive, collaborative area action plans, or local
development orders, or masterplans adopted by way of supplementary planning
documents, or brownfield registers, or any of the other myriad existing dusty pieces of kit in the planning tool box.
Mr Gove stated that the
“failure to turbocharge the redevelopment of inner city London is putting
further pressure on the suburbs. If just 5% of the capital’s built-up area had
the density of Maida Vale, it could host an additional 1.2 million people
without the need to expand outwards”. If that is the ambition for ‘street votes’
and permitted development rights (more of which below) then it betrays a narrow
understanding of both the issues and how to address the issues without creating
new ones.
Just
finally in relation to densification and the coherence of recent announcements,
it has been suggested that the Government’s intention to mandate second staircases in new residential buildings above
18m will compromise the viability of the kind of flatted developments that would increase densities. It has also been suggested that Mr Gove’s
recent decision in relation to Marks
& Spencer’s flagship Oxford Street store will increase the scrutiny
being placed on the embodied carbon associated with the demolition and re-development
of existing buildings.
Another point worth dwelling on is one made by Daniel
Slade, which is that these proposals were actually spun into something approaching a
spatial vision for England. As Daniel notes, “it might not be the spatial
vision that many want, and its outcome will depend on a huge number of
practical considerations, but it does prioritise a kind of spatial development
– densification – and name particular places across the country that are being
targeted for urban transformation”.
A clearly defined urban policy would obviously be a very
welcome thing, as would at some point a sensible conversation about the future of
Green
Belt policy. Now imagine if those two
things were amalgamated, with, for example, other greater-than-local initiatives like Local Nature Recover Strategies, into a Plan
for England to shelter national and regional priorities like the Oxcam Arc
and the Garden Communities programme (remember that?) from the vagaries of election cycles. It’s easy if
you try…
Coming back down to earth, I
shan’t dwell on the other principles of the “long-term plan for housing” other
than to highlight that despite a clear steer from the centre that Barrow and
Cambridge should be a focus of future development it remains the Government position that communities take back control
of their future. Oh, and Green Belt protection gets a mention because Labour
want to concrete over the countryside. Oh, and we need to make architecture
great again.
In a nod to what we might look forward to from the next draft of the NPPF as, when and if it emerges, there are three points of note in the accompanying press statement. The government is apparently clear that:
- “Development should proceed on sites that are adopted in a local plan with full input from the local community, unless there are strong reasons why it cannot;
- Local councils should be open and pragmatic in agreeing changes to developments where conditions mean that the original plan may no longer be viable, rather than losing the development wholesale or seeing development mothballed (PPG has subsequently been updated in relation to this); and
- Better use should be made of small pockets of brownfield land by being more permissive, so more homes can be built more quickly, where and how it makes sense, giving more confidence and certainty to SME builders.
- A national scheme of delegation raised the threshold at which applications on allocated sites or reserved matters submissions pursuant to outline consents were referred to planning committees;
- The Levelling Up & Regeneration Bill (LURB) can be further amended to support the use of drop-in planning applications in the wake of the Hillside Parks decision in the Supreme Court; and
- Much, much more use of the afore-mentioned brownfield registers can be fostered.
If the Prime Minister’s announcement was the appetizer to ‘Planning Reform Week’ and Mr Gove’s speech was the main course we were also treated a number of amuse-bouches (or unamusing-bouches depending on your point of view) in the form of new consultations, responses to past consultations and other missives.
Permitted development rights
A consultation has been launched on permitted
development (pd) rights across a range of sectors, including a number to
support housing delivery.
These include the doubling of the present 1,500m² cap on
the amount of commercial, business and service use that can be converted
without the need for formal consent; the removal of the need for such premises to have been vacant for a
continuous period of at least three months; the change of use of hotels,
boarding houses and guest houses; and more flexibility for the conversion of food
takeaways, betting offices, pay day loan shops, launderettes and agricultural
buildings.
Nothing exposes the divide
between paternalistic and laissez-faire thinking than a conversation about permitted
development rights, but it is perfectly right and legitimate to question the quality of places and homes created by way of pd rights to date and how the
extended use of such rights can be reconciled with aspirations for quality in
the built environment, communities “being in control” and contributions to infrastructure
and affordable housing.
The consultation material
states that the proposed changes “will support the delivery of additional homes
across England that might otherwise have not come forward through a planning
application”. Again, this planner’s unsophisticated mind wonders whether some
of the other afore-mentioned dusty tools in the planning box might encourage
development in a way that is actually consistent aspirations for quality in the
built environment, communities “being in control” and contributions to
infrastructure and affordable housing.
It is acknowledged in the
consultation that hotels and guest houses play an important role in the tourism
industry, helping to stimulate economic activity and drive footfall in their
localities. The Government argues though that in areas of high housing need,
these buildings may better serve their local communities if repurposed as
housing. Is that not a decision best taken by LPAs since, you know, communities should be able to take back control of their future?
The answer to most questions is better
planning, not less planning, but then I suppose that every unit waved into an
existing building is a home that does not need to be fought for anywhere else.
Plan-making
A consultation has also been launched on the implementation of plan-making reforms, which is worthy of a 5,000 word blog in it's own right.
(Such a blog could also take in the history of plan-making reform. A Planning Advisory Group was established to make recommendations on simplifying the process of producing plans and increasing the speed at which they were prepared in 1964.)
At the front and in the centre of the consultation is a proposal to set a timeframe of 30 months to prepare and adopt a plan, which, it is noted with delightful understatement, “is much faster than currently”. Five years faster to be precise.
As far as I can see the 30 month timeframe is an 'expectation' rather than an obligation, but, regardless, to my, again, unsophisticated mind there are broadly three ways of getting anywhere near it.
The notion of a 30 month plan process was promulgated in 2020’s now mythical, seminal, perhaps even legendary ‘Planning for the future’ White Paper, which also introduced us to National Development Policies: Growth, Renewal and Protection Areas; National Development Management Policies; the Infrastructure Levy; and a centrally-set, binding housing requirement. In the magical, mystical planning system of the future imagined by the authors of that document, with all of those elements introduced and operating harmoniously in tandem, a much shorter process, if not a 30 month process, might very well be achievable. Let us put that option in the 'maybe' pile.
Coming back down to earth again though, the second way of getting closer to 30 months would be to address the reasons why it takes an average of 7 years to adopt a local plan at the minute. These invariably involve housing requirements and / or the distribution of unmet need across administrative boundaries, which also invariably expose the Green Belt elephant lurking somewhere in the room (and Labour want to concrete over that, remember). Both Mr Gove’s “long-term plan for housing” and the consultation on the implementation of plan-making reforms are silent on the intended approach towards the standard method, the urban uplift, and the alignment test that is to replace the Duty-to-Cooperate. Until those nettles are grasped the average time taken to adopt a local plan will not decline, so let us put that option in the 'too difficult' pile.
The third way would of getting closer to 30 months would be to simply make it easier to get plans found sound.
The consultation states that "the amount of evidence produced to support a local plan or minerals and waste plan takes a significant amount of time and resource to produce and can often feel disproportionate".
This is the argument for removing the ‘justified’ test of soundness as proposed in the NPPF consultation, which requires a local plan to be “an appropriate strategy, taking into account the reasonable alternatives and based upon proportionate evidence."
As some commentators (me) stated in response, it would be interesting to see the evidence that the ‘justified’ test itself is adding to the burden upon LPAs because it might reasonably be contended that it is in situations where an LPA is pursuing a strategy that does not take into account reasonable alternatives that it finds itself having to provide ever more evidence for doing so.
The need for a local plan to consider reasonable alternatives is a fundamental plank of plan-making and it cannot be assured that it would addressed in relation to the remaining tests of soundness. Whilst alternative approaches can be considered by the environmental and sustainability assessments regimes, these, as the current consultation, would change over the time because of the move from SEA to EOR.
Plan-making is a laborious process less because of the evidence required to show that the approach taken to meeting housing need is a reasonable one and more because of the greater than local obstacles that local plans have to address.
A drive for proportionality is a welcome one, but this should not be expense of the robustness of the overall plan and the rigour with which it is examined locally. A drive for a greater quantity of local plans should not be at the expense of the quality of local plans, but, with one option on the 'maybe' pile and the other option on the 'too difficult' pile there are likely to be fears amongst the development community especially that this might be this Government's preferred option.
All of that being said (and cognisant of actually adding another 5,000 words about local plans), regardless of the merit of some of the proposals in this consultation (and if the are the policy planners in place to implement them there is certainly merit in, for example, a focus on visioning at the start of the process, monitoring at the end, gateway checks in between, and standardisation and digitalisation all the way through), it is arguably the timing of this consultation that is most concerning.
As the LUHC Select Committee recently noted, uncertainty around
the reform agenda has resulted in 58 LPAs publicly stalling, delaying, or
withdrawing local plans, 28 of those since the December 2022 NPPF consultation
endorsing the effective dis-appliance of the standard method. These are just
the LPAs with a public position remember. “Contrary to the Government’s
objective of facilitating local plan-making”, the Select Committee notes, “the
short-term effect of announcing the planning reform proposals has been to halt
the progress of local plans in many areas”.
Plan-making is unquestionably at a modern nadir. The number of plans published in draft, submitted for examination and adopted in 2022 was already the lowest for a decade and it is inevitable that 2023 will be worse. the mere mention of the words ‘roll out’ and ‘transition’ will be manna from heaven for recalcitrant LPAs more than content to ‘await clarity before proceeding further’.
Before moving on to application fees it is worth me highlighting that Community Land Auctions (CLA) get their own chapter in this consultation document. The LURB, you may know, provides for time-limited CLA pilots.
In the same way that pd rights expose the divide between paternalists and free-marketeers, CLAs expose the divide between progressive think tankers obsessed with public policy in Scandinavia and development professionals that have to make a living in the real world. I very much subscribe to Simon Ricketts' view that the introduction of CLAs would inevitably be harmful to to the principled operation of the planning system.
Land buyers should always be cautious of sites that look good upon first inspection but have not come forward despite being marketed multiple times because there is clearly a real problem lurking somewhere beneath the surface. CLAs are described in the consultation as a "longstanding idea" and caution should be applied to them for same reason.
Application Fees
The statutory instrument required to increase planning
application fees was tabled on the day Parliament rose for the summer recess
and the Government published the response to the consultation on so doing
alongside the “long-term plan for housing”. The two areas that seem to
have attracted the most attention, perhaps unsurprisingly given the unanimous pan-sector
agreement that fees need to increase, relate to ringfencing and the free go.
88%
of respondents agreed with the proposal to ringfence the additional income
generated by the increase, but the Government “will not take ringfencing
forward through legislation as this would impose a restriction on local
authorities when they are best placed to make decisions about funding local
services, including planning departments”. This has long been the government
position and so comes as little surprise, but it does beg the question as to
why ask the question if the answer was already known.
Instead
there is an expectation that LPAs “would protect at least the income from
the planning fee increase for direct investment in planning services”. This might be easier to achieve if each planning team was being
led by a Chief
Planning Officer reporting
directly into an authority’s Chief Executive.
Even when the
fees have gone up though a continued deficit in the provision of development management services;
the clear and compelling need for planning teams to undertake non-statutory and non-fee generating activity; and the ongoing pressure on local authority budgets will all
remain and all make the case to put the resources available for all
planning functions on a long term, self-sustaining basis.
The removal of the free go divided opinion. 38% agreed that it should, 34% thought that it should not, 18% supported retention subject to a reduced fee, 7% disagreed with
all these options, and 3% did not know.
Free go applications might not be necessary as part a coherent and
operationally functional planning system, but are considered by the development
industry to be a very important component of the UK planning system.
As was noted by recent
PAS research, substantive, prompt and
reliable pre-application advice can be very difficult for applicants to secure.
The ability to withdraw an application so as to make an amended one to address
issues that do arise post-submission means that a LPA can protect performance
targets and an applicant can still secure approval locally without the need for
a potentially costly and lengthy appeal. Even if substantive, prompt and
reliable pre-application advice is received there will almost always be
unforeseen issues or changes of circumstances that arise on the part of both
LPA and applicant and a ‘free go’ affords the ability to deal with them.
As some commentators (also me) suggested in response to the fee consultation, the ability to make a free go application should not be withdrawn until substantive,
prompt and reliable pre-application advice is available as the norm rather than
the exception.
Just finally on fees, whilst there was unanimous pan-sector
agreement that fees need to increase, there is likely to be some disappointment
amongst the development community that commitments around commensurate service
improvements have seemingly been rowed back from.
The consultation
material stated that:
The government
is only prepared to introduce fee increases if planning performance also
improves. We want to ensure that all applicants experience a high-quality and
timely service. This consultation therefore also proposes a new approach to how
the performance of local planning authorities is measured across a broader set
of quantitative and qualitative measures. This will provide greater
transparency of service delivery and earlier and more targeted support to local
planning authorities where needed.
The government response
states that:
We are clear
that an increase in planning fee income and resourcing to local planning
authorities must lead to improved performance. It is our intention to introduce
a new planning performance framework once we have increased planning fees and
invested in supporting the capacity and capability of planning departments.
However, we recognise that local planning authorities need a period of
adjustment to any new planning performance framework, and we would reiterate
our commitment to consult further on detailed proposals, including thresholds,
assessment periods and transitional arrangements from the current performance
regime.
LPA resources
Penultimately,
Planning Reform Week included an announcement on “building planning capacity and capability to support local planning authorities to
attract, retain and develop skilled planners”. This short announcement
included:
- a LPA skills and resources survey, the results of which are expected in the autumn;
- an extension of the RTPI bursary scheme that that provides 50 students with £5,000;
- support for the LGA’s ‘Pathways to Planning’ graduate programme that will place an initial 30 people;
- a £24 million Planning Skills Delivery Fund to tackle application backlogs and boost internal capacity and capabilities;
- a £13 million programme that will deploy teams of specialists into LPAs, starting with the “trailblazing pathfinder” in Cambridge;
- £1 million for Public Practice to help councils recruit and develop skilled planners;
- funding for PAS; and
- funding to support delivery of targeted technical training, to address both the current skills gaps and to build readiness for change that will be required to meet the needs of the future planning system.
All of which I am sure is welcome, but is not the “comprehensive resources and skills strategy for
the planning sector to support the implementation of our reforms” promised by the 2020 White Paper and which the Select Committee was told was being worked on as recently as May last year. Tellingly in more recent
correspondence between the Government and the Committee there was no reference
to such a strategy.
In
its recent report the Committee recommended that the government “should publish
a comprehensive resources and skills strategy for the planning sector, in line
with its commitment to us. The strategy should clearly explain how the
resourcing and skill needs of local planning authorities will be met; and
should be published before future reforms to national planning policy are
implemented.”
Rather
than holding our collective breaths for that we might perhaps all be as well
asking what we and our respective organisations can do to champion the role of
planning such that next government might be encouraged to value it more than
the present one evidently does.
NSIPs
Finally
insofar as the cavalcade of Planning Reform Week announcements is concerned, a
consultation has also been launched on reforms
‘to ensure the existing Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) system can support our future
infrastructure needs by making the consenting process better, faster, greener,
fairer and more resilient by 2025’.
This strays a fair way from
my narrow area of limited expertise and is probably notable from a housing
point of view only because, despite what Mr Gove had to say about “the spirit
of Poundbury animating new garden towns and villages across the country”, major
new residential-led developments are still not part of the NSIP regime, which,
linked to more formal status being afforded to the afore-mentioned Garden Communities programme in a ‘Plan for England’, could expedite the delivery
there of.
The last bit
So there we are.
Just another week in the fast-paced, ever-changing,
rock ‘n’ roll world of town and country planning.
The LUHC Select Committee noted that “the
housing sector is hungry for clarity, consistency and certainty over the
Government’s national planning policy”, but, as stated right back in the first bit, the Government is not
speaking to us.
As the Observer noted in an editorial at the end of Planning Reform Week, “some of
his (Mr Gove’s) ideas sound good, but on examination his proposals look less a
serious effort to address the huge and complex issues of housing and planning
than an attempt to curry favour with voters worried about development in their backyards”.
Such is the febrile politics of all of
this that the Government is simultaneously trying to bring together two wings
of the Conservative party that have very different ambitions for housing policy
whilst at the same time trying to portray a clear divide with a Labour party intent
on concreting over the countryside.
A line also appears to have been drawn from the role of planning reform in securing a resounding win for the Lib Dems in the Chesham & Amersham by-election to the softening of commitments to getting anything built anywhere. All things are being said to all people.
As well as London, Leeds, Cambridge,
Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Barrow, the
other two places in this country to get a mention in Mr Gove’s speech were
Barnet and Bromley.
This is because “making sure
we unlock all the potential of London’s urban centre – while also preserving
the precious low-rise and richly green character of its suburbs such as Barnet
and Bromley – is critical to the nation’s future success”.
Really?
Seriously?
Preserving the precious low-rise character of Barnet is
critical to the nation’s future success?
At this point all we can really do is doff our collective caps and admire the chutzpah of it all.
For it was, of course, Conservative MP for Chipping Barnet Theresa Villiers who was sufficiently emboldened from campaigning against development on the car park at Cockfosters tube station (and is now campaigning against the sensible-looking redevelopment of the Spires shopping centre) as to exploit the ‘top-down target’ farrago by tabling the fateful standard method-related amendment to the LURB that would have prohibited mandatory targets, which precipitated the NPPF consultation, which the Government still has not responded to.
(Bromley's mention may simply have been down to Mr Gove's journalistic flair for alliteration. Conservative MP for Bromley & Chislehurst Bob
Neill was not a signatory of the Villiers amendment, although he does not appear to have been a fan of the 2020 white
paper reforms.)
Planning is politics, as they say, and politics is planning,
and we can look forward to at least another twelve months of this knockabout chicanery.
The afore-mentioned Simon Ricketts suggested to me last week as I was
trying to keep up with the “long-term plan for housing” that it will not
happen, that the proposals will change again before we are all back from holiday,
or that will happen regardless of what anybody has to say about it.
That may be the state of affairs that we have come to
expect, but that is not to say that we should not demand a lot, lot more.
We would like to speak with you if you have a solid portfolio that highlights your abilities and are knowledgeable about current web technologies.
ReplyDeletehire remote front end web developers