Successive governments have an unenviable track record of jumping in to the middle of problems and dealing only with the here and now and not the root causes.

The planning system is very much a victim of this knee jerk approach.  Labour bulldozed into it, with its impossible to produce Local Development Framework process, remnants of which still remain with us policy wise and on the ground, literally.

The Conservatives spent all of their time in opposition, listening to their grass roots members whinging on about the Labour government’s planning system and vowing to reform it as soon as they took back control.

This promise saw the demise of regional spatial strategies and the rise of the ludicrously described ‘streamlined’, National Planning Policy Frame, the NPPF.  This was claimed to bring us everything we ever wanted to know about planning, in 52 easy to read pages.  In reality,  every page contained footnotes leading to other planning documents, containing hundreds more pages.

The NPPF was quickly followed by a technical guidence of twenty plus pages, so that professional planners could actually make some sense of its vague and ambiguous statements.  It has also been followed by a number of ministerial and chief planner letters, offering yet further and necessary clarifications.  Then of course there’s the inevitable high court rulings that have occurred, because of the poor drafting and ambiguity of this badly drafted document.

However, none of this planning policy interference, has helped to deal with the issues raised in the article below.  The excuse used as always, is that such matters are best determined locally.  What they really mean is that government doesn’t want to upset the development industry, or be directly responsible for reducing the returns on land prices that come with planning permission.

Expecting individual local planning authorities, to build the evidence base required to prove that a development should be built in an attractive and user friendly way, is a nonsense.  The public often attack planners for not listening to local concerns, or of not using common sense when approving a development, because they don’t understand the severe constraints and limitations they are required to operate under.

Ugly housing is a product of many things, lazy and greedy developers, being only one.   Lazy and expedient politicians, unwilling to create effective national standards for room sizes, a requirement for internal and external storage spaces, minimum road widths, adequate levels of off street parking and high quality amenity space, are an even bigger cause.  Likewise, the use of parking courts and private drives, no matter the housing types, all add to the drop in the quality of housing development and a trend that can only lead to the building of the slums of the future.

latterly, the use of leasehold agreements for the purchase of family homes and the buy to let initiative, have ultimately damaged the establishment of traditional communities.  Such arrangements turn housing developments into nothing more than transit camps, full of people with little, or no interest in their local community and simply waiting to move on to the area, or property they really want.

Copied from Sunday Telegraph online Sunday 3 Sept 2017

PLANNING
‘Ugly new homes will create more Nimbys’
By Edward Malnick and Steven Swinford
BRITAIN risks creating a new generation of Nimbys unless the Government stops “ugly” Sixties-style modernist designs being imposed on communities, a senior Tory MP will warn this week.
Neil Parish, the chairman of the environment select committee, will tell ministers that a drive to build a million more homes by the end of the decade risks “killing any sense of goodwill” in local communities if the new buildings are inappropriate. The MP, a former council planning officer, will suggest that parish councils and neighbourhood forums are given funding to draw up binding “design codes” based on ­input from residents to ensure new developments reflect their views.
His intervention comes after ­research uncovered concern across ­Britain about “poorly-built” and “unattractive” new properties appearing around the country.
The Conservative manifesto reaffirmed a pledge to build a million new homes by 2020. But there are fears among some MPs that the move could prompt a backlash in local communities if the homes are unsightly.
Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, warned in July that the Government needed to “avoid the disastrous design choices of the past” in order to build “local support” for additional construction.
In a Westminster Hall debate on Tuesday, Mr Parish will warn that some communities are “terrified” of new buildings “because they have seen how previous developments in the last 50 years have left communities with homes totally unsuitable for their area”. “If we fill our towns and cities with housing people feel is totally inappropriate for their area, we will kill any sense of goodwill,” Mr Parish is ­expected to say.
“We can’t go back to the mistakes of the Sixties and Seventies. It damaged trust in new housing for a generation.”
Research published last month found that 60 per cent of people feel there are too many “poorly-built, unattractive new-builds”. Two fifths of people feel that newly built properties are eyesores, according to the survey of 2,000 people.