The culprit is named at the start of this piece, one Eric Pickles, now Sir Eric Pickles, his reward as is often the case, for such people when leaving chaos in their wake, when in a ministerial position. Given the damage he managed to do in such a relatively short space of time, I’m amazed he wasn’t elevated to sainthood, although I did anticipate a lordship at least for the Bradford wrecking ball.
As a reminder, just a couple of things of Pickles did to make the planning system the mess it is now and blight the housing estates built in the last ten years are. He trashed regional planning, because it was a top down system dictating housing numbers, this being replaced by the farcical duty to cooperate and objectively assessed housing need figures that tie every local Plan examination in knots.
He changed the density requirements, so that even the most rural locations had to build at 30 to the hectare, almost double in many cases. If developers and house builders had a track record of working to such densities and knew how to design sympathetically to such densities it might not have been such a problem. However, they didn’t and the y still don’t.
All they did, was build small houses on smaller plots, with smaller garden, more cramped parking arrangements and then serve many of these estate with private and therefore unadoptable roadways.