Why the Government is right to revise planning rules
Beware of middle-class nimbys. Led by such respected institutions as the National Trust, the battle drums are increasing their tempo as opposition mounts to the Government’s proposed new planning guidelines. Listening to their arguments, you could be fooled into believing that our much-loved British countryside is going to be irrevocably destroyed. But that’s not the case.
The Government wants to simplify the planning rules by reducing them from 1,000 pages to just 50. And about time to. Anyone who has ever dealt with local planning authorities will testify to how time-consuming, expensive and – in the case of commercial developments – uncertain the process is. Now the Government is calling for the default response to any application to be approval – unless there are very sound reasons for refusal. It believes that the present system is stifling growth by making the planning process a lottery.
Recently I have been involved in advising a gas exploration company which wants to build a gas processing facility outside Thornton le Dale. Inevitably the roar of protest has been deafening (although not unanimous). The situation is that the company, having been awarded an exploration licence, has found a fairly large reserve of gas in the North York Moors National Park. Naturally, it believes it is entitled to exploit this reserve and wants to pump it into the National Grid’s National Transmission System (NTS), which runs underground just outside Thornton le Dale. The proposed treatment facility is located alonside the NTS.
I don’t propose to argue the merits of the company’s case – although I believe they are compelling – as the matter will now be decided by the Secretary of State following a public inquiry which is due to start on October 25. However, this company’s experience is typical of what many developers have to go through. It applied for planning permission in April 2010, but by June this year had still not received any indication from North Yorkshire County Council as to the likely date when the application would be discussed. In the meantime, it had held two public exhibitions, provided shed loads of information and paid for ecological, archeological and environmental surveys. Inevitably, the estimated cost has soared from £50m in March 2010.
Fed up with this bureaucratic procrastination, the company appealed to the Planning Inspectorate on the grounds of non-determination. As a result, the public inquiry is to be held, involving both the company and the cash-strapped council in further unwelcome expense. However, the move has at last forced NYCC into discussing (and, unsurprisingly, rejecting) the application.
Most companies cannot afford the time and money involved in submitting contentious planning applications. As a result, there is now a desperate shortage of affordable housing in the country. Years ago, the then chief executive of the Halifax explained that house prices were unstainable when they reached 4.5 times average earnings. The multiple is now six, which is why we need more homes to be built, which is why the planning rules have to be revised. QED
I of course understand you would be looking at planning from the perspective of those who help you get rich quick from advising them, however, thank goodness for the regulations and restrictions on companies such as those you support. If it wasn’t for those democratic processes England would have no green belt, no natural beauty and no accountability when get rich quick schemes such as the ones you provide research for rape and plunder our lives and countryside.
There are plenty of brownfield sites in city centres, as well as many homes left vacant as their owners buy them up cheaply and live elsewhere, while locals who needed those homes are outbid for them. There is plenty of room for housing development and quite honestly there are already thousands of empty homes around over 50 on streets near where I live alone, and in towns villages as well as cities I regularly visit, so stop deceiving yourself and others that it doesn’t exist.
As for promoting the idea that we should somhow feel sorry for companies that can’t afford controversial planning submissions, I can only ask where your moral compass and aesthetic and historical sensitivy was laid to rest or did you ever have any Simon? Thank goodness the planning process holds up such abysmal schemes as the one at Thronton Le Dale…Quite frankly there are many other more suitable locations for this development, though many I am sure would rather live without this enterprise that seeks only to blot the landscape and put profits in your and the company directors profits….the argument about jobs, much needed gas etc don’t wash with the rest of us.
The scheme is about plundering the natural landscape in the name of big bucks…nothing else.