Tag Archives: local plans

The end of the rabbit hutch, but will it bring any quality?

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Rabbit hutches to go after Easter

Birketts LLP

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Nicola Doole

United Kingdom March 31 2021

For many years there has been a real need to address the severe shortage of residential accommodation in England; as the homeless numbers rapidly increase the need for affordable accommodation is at an all-time high.

With developers being blamed by the Government as being unable to build at the pace required to meet the housing needs and demands of the growing population, the Government decided a decade ago to take action and saw an opportunity for the housing supply to be boosted by allowing commercial buildings to be converted into residential dwellings. The Government said they recognised that there were many vacant and redundant office and industrial buildings, no longer serving any useful purpose that could readily be converted into a residential use and therefore ticked another box in which the Government wanted brownfield sites to be redeveloped – a win-win scenario apparently and so in the March 2011 budget, the Government’s Plan for Growthwas introduced.

After supposedly consulting the masses the Government has, since 2013, permitted the conversion of office buildings and light industrial buildings into homes without the developer first going through a full planning application process. Housing Ministers last summer then extended the scope of permitted development even further to include additions of two storeys on top of existing houses, and replacement of vacant commercial, industrial and residential buildings with homes. This news was announced the very same day as the Government published research showing that many of the homes that had been created by the permitted development route were substandard.

Six professors and lecturers from UCL and the University of Liverpool reviewed 240 planning schemes, 138 of which were change of use projects authorised as permitted development and 102 of the schemes were granted planning permission through the usual application process. Collectively, they reached the conclusion that:

“Permitted development conversions do seem to create worse quality residential environments than planning permission conversions in relation to a number of factors widely linked to the health, wellbeing and quality of life of future occupiers…These aspects are primarily related to the internal configuration and immediate neighbouring uses of schemes, as opposed to the exterior appearance, access to services or broader neighbourhood location. In office-to-residential conversions, the larger scale of many conversions can amplify residential quality issues.”

In addition their research found that as little as 22% of the dwellings created through the permitted development route actually met the nationally described space standards as opposed to 73% of those dwellings created via the application route. Furthermore, the permitted development properties not only had small internal areas, only 4% of the permitted development dwellings had access to outside private amenity areas.

It was becoming increasingly apparent that whilst the Government said it wanted to deliver high-quality, well designed homes, in reality, by changing the permitted development rights, local planning authorities were unable to do anything to prevent those unscrupulous developers from converting buildings into substandard homes with some flats being of a size no bigger than a budget hotel room, or the proverbial rabbit hutch. Until now, when, after the Easter Bunny has visited us all at the weekend, with effect from 6 April 2021, Regulation 3 of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 comes into being and includes the new requirement that all homes built through the permitted development route must meet the nationally described space standards. These standards set out the minimum floor spaces permitted for numerous configurations and start at 37 sqm for a new one bed flat with a shower room rather than a bathroom. This change is long overdue and will hopefully stop those rabbit hutches from being constructed, but the debate about delivery vs affordability vs standards continues…Birketts LLP – Nicola Doole

It’s called throwing the baby out with the bath water

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I can’t believe that these councillors can be so naïve as to think they would gain support from the planning puppet master, Nick Boles. How can they not realise that the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) is simply doing what it is told by DCLG and it’s current incumbents, Eric Pickles and the hyperactive Nick Boles? They in turn, are of course under the thumb of George Osborne, who seems to believe that building hundreds of thousands of houses,min a short space of time, will be the saviour of the UK economy.
If you want to improve things in planning terms, don’t throw out what’s been proven to work over many years, instead, get rid of the ‘external elements’ that are undermining it.

PINS fulfils a vital role, by addressing the sometimes aberrant behaviour of some planning departments and their associated planning committees. How else would an applicant, with a perfectly reasonable planning proposal, gain redress against a council that had refused that application, despite it being in compliance with both local and national planning policies?

Until you can be sure that elected members will always behave in a totally professional and unbiased manner, when considering an application and that planning officers will get it right every time, PINS will continue to be an essential element of the planning system.

Copied from Local Government Chronicle online
Leader urges Planning Inspectorate abolition
12 March, 2014 | By Mark Smulian

A council leader has called for abolition of the Planning Inspectorate after being sent a “bitterly disappointing” letter by planning minister Nick Boles.

A delegation of North Devon DC councillors (pictured) led by local MP Sir Nick Harvey (Lib Dem) handed in a letter at 10 Downing Street and met Mr Boles to highlight problems created by government planning policy on their community.

Council leader Brian Greenslade (Lib Dem) said that while the minister had been encouraging when they met his follow-up letter was short, unhelpful and evasive.

“I think he was got at by civil servants after our meeting,” Cllr Greenslade said.

The council delegation, led by local MP Sir Nick Harvey (Lib Dem), raised concerns about the refusal of planning inspectors to count inactive sites with planning permission towards councils’ required five-year land supply for housebuilding, and inspectors’ habit of substituting their own decisions for those of councils.

North Devon also objected to proposals to deprive councils of the New Homes Bonus where planning permission is given only after an appeal to inspectors.

“We were all bitterly disappointed with the short response from the planning minister, who avoided all of our main points, despite making positive comments to our councillors at the time of the meeting,” Cllr Greenslade said.

He added: “We believe that the localism agenda and the restoration of democracy to planning will be greatly enhanced if Mr Pickles were to follow the example he set when he scrapped the Audit Commission by also scrapping the Planning Inspectorate.

“I understand this is a course of action favoured by a number of Conservative MPs.”

Tear up all planning policies, then blame councils for the lack!

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The government are looking at how to introduce a transition period to give councils time to produce a local plan, but they are resisting any attempt to introduce a reasonable time period for doing so. One excuse given by one of their tame peers, is that councils have had 8 years to produce plans, but the majority still haven’t, so why give them any more time now?

This reasoning, which is actually no reasoning at all, but simply a smoke-screen for wanting to get their own way as soon as possible, ignores the fact that the whole process of plan making is extremely complicated and highly expensive. It also ignores the fact that, until recently, councils could use the default position of using the national policies detailed in planning policy guidance and statements. Unless there was pressing need, such as special local circumstances, why would a council spend large amounts of their taxpayers money producing a local plan?

Successive governments have lulled councils in to what now appears to be a false sense of security, by burying them under multiple layers of planning policy and guidance, for the last 60+ years. Now the current government is throwing all that policy in the bin and then blaming councils for not having any of their own policies. Just to add insult to injury, the government has now produced the sloppily worded NPPF, as a replacement for all that planning policy, with a statement in it designed to ‘punish’ councils that don’t have their own policies; where a plan is silent, indeterminate or out of date, planning permission should be given without delay.

The double whammy of no plan and no time to produce one, is potentially as damaging as the presumption in favour statement that we are all getting so hot and bothered about. I hope as much effort is put into getting a sensible timescale put in place, as has been expended to date, in exposing the NPPF as a flawed document.

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