The planning minister wants to be shot. I’m not making this up. At the Conservative Conference he was asked about Tory proposals for further planning reform after the next election (£). The minister replied: “I’m going to answer it very simply. If I’m still planning minister after the next election, I want you to shoot me.”
Of course, planning minister Nick Boles has form in this territory. Back in May, he said that “if anyone comes to me with an idea for new planning legislation I am going to shoot them” (£). Putting aside the fact that new planning guidance and permitted development rights are gushing out of his department like an overflowing sewer, he’s obviously a man used to swaggering around Whitehall with a gun in his pocket.
But then, as I have noted before, Nick Boles is Mr Quelch from Billy Bunter reincarnated.
But please don’t tempt us by inviting us to shoot you Nick. The badger cull is controversial, but I suspect that culling planning ministers would be a hugely popular move.
The reality is that we don’t need to shoot planning ministers. What we need to do is curtail their powers and those of the planning inspectorate.
I’m tuned in to BBC Radio Shropshire as I type this and residents of the small town of Ellesmere are venting their anger at the planning system. They say that a planning application that’s been turned down twice keeps coming back. They fear their voices are not being heard, that people are losing faith with a system where their voices are not heard. They say that localism isn’t working. Sir Mike Pitt from the planning inspectorate is responding on air to their concerns. It’s a mixture of flannel and technical jargon. He says that the planning system is “entirely fair”. That’s just not the case. Community voices matter little in the planning system.
Recently one of Pitt’s inspectors said a housing scheme in Tarporley, Cheshire should be turned down because it would undermine a community’s neighbourhood plan, Eric Pickles gave it the go ahead anyway.
Pickles, a man that ought to be taking the big strategic vision, is also busy approving gypsy and traveller pitches (£). His junior, Nick Boles is equally busy turning them down, at least when they are in Pickle’s own constituency (£).
Both ministers need to step back. We need rules that limit the powers of ministers such that they only intervene in planning decisions on matters of clear national importance. The planning inspectorate must be distanced from Whitehall control, with its own independent board of governors, including representatives of communities. And communities need a right of appeal against developments that breach the local plan, national rules or pour cash into the coffers of the local council awarding planning permission.
Meanwhile, please don’t shoot Mr Quelch. It will make an awful mess. That might just remind us that the planning system is also an awful mess and current ministers are making it worse.
* Andy Boddington is a Lib Dem councillor in Shropshire. He blogs at andybodders.co.uk.
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9 Comments
if an application is approved in breach of the local plan you can always seek a judical review.
otherwise, although 3rd party rights of appeal sound inviting, you’ll remember that , despite both coalition parties promising it in 2010, they looked into it and found it to be unworkable.
i wouldn’t say that ‘community voices matter little’ int he planning syste, the bbc show ‘the planners’ showed numerous examples of where an application was made which was perfectly in line with local and national planning policies, was recommended for approval by officers and it was overturned in committee by members because of vocal locals expressing strong opposition.
The problem with the planning system is that it gives too much power over, say, new housing to those who already have housing, and none to those who don’t.
There is a huge problem in reconciling the national demand for housing with the local demand that it be not in my area.
Under the much maligned regional planning targets under both Labour and before that Conservative Governments there was a shortage of housing to meet demand. Since then the idea of incentivising communities (councils) to accept more development with the new homes bonus has been a total flop.
When the last regional planning targets were being drawn up there were plenty of councils willing to say the number of new homes they need in the next 20 years was zero or there about. No one has ever won more (net) votes from supporting more house building.
Now either we can have localism and fewer houses or we revert to some sort of centralised planning targets. The alternative is to start considering how we allocate the existing housing. Is it right to support single elderly people in 4-5 bedroom houses. Should people be able to own 5,10, 20, 100, 1000 buy to let properties ? Should people sell their home to pay for care in their old age. Should we continue with council tax – where a £56 million house in Westminster cost less than a band D property in many other places.
The trouble is that when people with houses oppose more being built, they are very rarely the ones to directly miss out. It is the people without houses who lose, and there are fewer of them. My local Council just had a decision overturned by Pickles – but it was a political decision to oppose housing on land already proposed by the same council to be in the Local Plan which is running 4 years late and not yet in place. It must be a novelty for Pickles to make the right decision – but community don’t stop at the Council Boundary.
I agree with Dominic and Caracatus.
The Planning Inspectorate is doing crucial work at the moment in its scrutiny of local plans, most of which have been found to be underbaking their housing targets.
Localism is important, but it can only work if all interested parties are included. That means the voice of the people who would have a new home if development went ahead needs to be heard in the planning system.
I’m part of the PricedOut first-time buyer pressure group and we’re trying to give young people a voice on the cost of housing. NIMBY campaigns against new homes are dominated by existing homeowners, but our members find it very frustrating when local politicians seem to respond to their wants and not young people’s needs.
The problem with ‘community voices’ is that they always say the same thing: ‘don’t build homes near us’.
I like Nick Boles. He seems to be the only one who understands the problem: that we have an under supply of housing in areas where people wish to live. I hope nobody shoots him, because he may be our only hope.
P.S. Duncan is bang on and I back Priced Out all the way.
Middle-aged people can oppose building new houses now, but let there be no doubt that the enemy they are fighting against is their own children, and they shouldn’t be surprised when as old people they find they have to go to Brisbane or Boston if they want to visit their grandchildren.
I agree that nimbyism is a problem, but my view is that a good deal of this arises because people have long been disenfranchised from the planning system. I was still a school when I went to my first planning meeting. We were disenfranchised then, we still are.
Localism and neighbourhood planning were designed to bring people back into the system. Its worked well in towns like Thame, which has managed to plan for 770 homes and gain a 76% vote in the referendum. The story is told in Planning Magazine (and sorry, it’s a subscription site).
http://www.planningresource.co.uk/Neighbourhood_Planning/article/1186029/how-allocating-sites-neighbourhood-plan/
But up the road in Hook Norton, Eric Pickles has just approved a housing scheme in the teeth of near united local opposition. He said that while work has started on preparation of the Hook Norton Neighbourhood Plan, “little weight should be attached to prematurity” – pre-empting the neighbourhood or local plan – “or local opposition against the scheme.” Whatever the merits of the decision, the good people of Hook Norton feel disenfranchised, so we can expect a ramp up of nimbyism in response.
There are few good surveys of the levels of nimbyism. One that gives food for thought was conducted by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in 2012. Only 8% of respondents said that their neighbourhoods should have no housing development at all. Of the 2,102 respondents, 40% would prefer to see new homes in the existing built area; 19% suggested a combination of locations in the built area and outside built areas; 12% of respondents would prefer to see new housing outside the built area.
http://www.rbwm.gov.uk/public/pp_blp__consultation_report.pdf
This survey is of opinions before the consensus building that occurs during the neighbourhood planning process.
So my view is that the was to reduce nimbyism is not to increase central imposition, it is to accelerate localism.
Dominic Curran
I haven’t seen The Planners but as I understand it, it deals with local council decisions. I am happy with those with one caveat. That’s when local councils approve schemes that benefit the council in cash terms (because, for example, it owns the land). For that I want a community right of appeal, as when decisions breach the local plan.
The government rejected a third party right of appeal during the NPPF and localism debate but I can’t recall any evidence that it would be unworkable. They just didn’t want it and Bob Neill said in the Commons:
The Localism Bill… does not include a third party right of appeal because the coalition considered it, but believed that the better route… is to give communities greater control over what is considered to be appropriate development for their areas at the very beginning, through our neighbourhood planning system.
A judicial review is not a good method of appealing. Applicants stand a high risk of huge costs unless they can bring the case on environmental grounds under the Aarhus Convention. That said, my impression is that planning judicial reviews are increasing rapidly as people get angrier with the way the planning system works.
A judicial review can’t make a planning decision. Case law has made it clear that judicial reviews cannot challenge the inspector’s judgement on the balance of material considerations, only errors in the process, or a significant oversight or misinterpretation. The community right of appeal would allow a reassessment as in the current appeal system. In a paper yet to be published, I’m arguing that this right of appeal should be extended to the Natural England and English Heritage too.
>There is a huge problem in reconciling the national demand for housing with the local demand
I think this is in fact a major part of the problem. Local authorities tend to be good at determining their local needs, however, these don’t necessarily translate into what central government wants. We saw this very clearly in some London boroughs, that had credible plans to handle local needs, but because of the daftness of government over levels of immigration, they were swamped with demands for housing from a large number of recent immigrants, which they could not have reasonably been expected to forecast.
I think until central government actually develops a population strategy and policy, that is driven from the bottom up ie. local to national, rather than just rely on the ONS forecasts (ie. the ONS says the population will increase, so we must just do as the ONS says, without realising that the ONS is only projecting the effects of the current strategy and policy vacuum), we will continue to see a divergence between local need and provision and what central government perceives as being needed.