Tag Archives: NIMBYism

Something every planning committee already knows

Posted on by • Posted in Development, District council stuff, Government, local government, Local Plan, NPPF, public sector, South Holland • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Copied from Local Government Chronicle online

Homeowners prevent housebuilding, report finds
24 October, 2014 | By David Paine

House-building rates are lower in local authority areas with higher proportions of homeowners, according to analysis by the Institute for Government (IfG).

The report,‘Housing that Works for All – The Political Economy of Housing in England’, covered the period from 2001 to 2011.

It follows the publication of the Lyons housing review, which outlined how up to 200,000 new homes a year could be built by the year 2020.

The IfG said there was a risk of planning decisions being biased in favour of current homeowners.

This was in part because of a lack of city or region-wide planning co-ordination, which meant planning policy operated “exclusively at the local level and is responding to the interests of local residents”.

It said new developments often created new infrastructure costs for councils, and extra demand for public services, yet the increase in revenues from developments was “limited”.

The report also warned that the requirement for planning permission to be granted for any change of land use made decisions “slower and more uncertain”. Homeowners were among the most likely groups to oppose new homes, it said.

Miguel Coelho, IfG fellow and co-author of the paper, said: “A common accusation is that planning decisions tend to cater for the interests of current homeowners, rather than allow for a wider, more balanced set of interests. New empirical presented in this paper lend support to this hypothesis.

“Our analysis shows in particular that in the decade to 2011, housing stock grew significantly less in local authorities where there were higher proportions of owner-occupiers amongst local households.

“Credible proposals to reform the planning system should address this problem and ensure that planning decisions allow for the full breadth of interests affected by development.”

However, the paper acknowledged reforming the planning system would be difficult.

It claimed there had, so far, been a lack of public support to do so, and that the wealth of households and health of the UK financial sector had “become inextricably intertwined with the macro-economy, thus undermining the case for fast, radical reform”.

It also claimed that “successive governments have struggled to find a sensible balance between regional/national planning co-ordination and local democratic legitimacy”.

HAVE YOUR SAY

Is localism preventing the development of new homes?

Posted on by • Posted in Development, District council stuff, Environmental, Government, local government, Local Plan, NPPF, planning, public sector, South Holland • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Copied from housing network website article by Hannah Fearn
Friday 1 August 2014 10.33 BST

They are both government priorities, but involving communities in planning decisions appears incompatible with housebuilding

Redbridge Council has taken planning decisions out of the hands of elected councillors.

It was the big idea of the coalition government, a cornerstone of localism, a foolproof way of getting things done without scaring off the traditionalists in the Conservative heartland. But after just three years, is neighbourhood planning already dead?

There are few signs of life left in the policy. Nick Boles sounded the first notes of funeral dirge when he admitted that the scheme, which involves local people designing and signing off new housing schemes, was too complex to function. He found that multiple objections from local people actually holds up the development process (who’d have thought it?). Instead he called on councils to who had already given up and come up with a better idea to share their it with other authorities.

The Financial Times reported this week that Kate Barker, who conducted a review of housebuilding for the Labour government in 2004, does not blame government policy for the slow rate of development in recent years. Instead, she says, it’s partly the result of nimbyism.

The turning of the tide against localism in planning goes even further: now even councillors can’t be trusted to make the right decisions. In Redbridge, the council has ruled that all future decisions on planning applications will be made by staff in the planning department because they have the skills and training to ensure they are qualified to make the right decisions; elected members simply do not. Redbridge also claims the move will save £45,000 a year.

Council leader Jas Athwal told his local newspaper that councillors added nothing to the planning process. “These planning officers have a huge amount of education and it seems egotistic that councillors can overrule them,” he said.

Meanwhile, central government is meddling again: it’s offering a slice of a £3m funding pot to councils with the largest number of planning applications for new homes in the pipeline, to speed things up and get those homes built. It’s a reward, but it’s also another opportunity to bypass the planning process that this government put in place.

This is not the first example of government finding new ways to get out of its own promises. Plans to create a new generation of garden cities mean the establishment of development corporations or sub-regional planning bodies which will be tasked with getting these new settlements built; there will be little room for debate once the decision to create a new town has been agreed upon.

In fact, writing for Planning magazine, former Whitehall advisor and planning consultant Ben Kochan says that the best way to win approval for a new garden city is to involve a whole host of organisations which are about as far removed from the neighbourhood planning process as you can get – not just urban development corporations, but also local enterprise partnerships, which give the business community funding and powers to boost economic growth.

It’s somewhat inevitable that in focusing on the end result – seeing more homes built in areas where there is an urgent need – will mean taking difficult decisions that not everyone in the community welcomes. Removing these decisions from the responsibility of local councillors (or simply by circumventing the planning process) will either be seen as a wise attempt to force progress or a cynical attempt to avoid blame for unpopular developments.

Whether you’re in favour of neighbourhood planning or not, it is being quietly removed from the pre-development process in the run-up to the 2015 election. This might be a good thing for housing in terms of numbers, but it’s also a blow to the heart of democratic localism.

Personally, I don’t agree with Redbridge, if they have indeed completely killed of their committee, as officers don’t always give the right weight to the concerns of non-planning experts. Local people are ‘experts’ when it comes to local concerns and local knowledge and you ignore this at your peril.

I do however agree that the system is becoming too vague, the government’s approach far too developer friendly and the overall process too open to abuse by vested interests, to remain as it is.
Telling councillors that they can still make the decisions, even if they’ve campaigned against it. Also suggesting that being pre-disposed to an opinion, is not the same as pre-determination, is complete nonsense and falls apart as defence, as soon as the high court gets involved.

Locals to get wind farm veto

Posted on by • Posted in Development, District council stuff, Government, planning, South Holland • Tagged , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Daily Telegraph 6th June 2013

By Robert Winnett, Political Editor

LOCAL communities will be given the power to block wind farms under planning rules to be unveiled today.
Senior Conservatives claim the move will effectively end the spread of the controversial turbines which have been blamed for blighting picturesque landscapes.
Ministers will announce that residents will have to be consulted over new wind farms with applications barred if there is significant opposition.
Councils are currently prevented from even considering applications for larger turbines.
However, under the plans, energy firms will be able to offer “incentives” – such as discounts on electricity bills – to persuade communities to agree to new wind farms.
When planning applications are submitted, officials will have to take into account topography and the impact on “views” and historic sites. Inspectors will also have to assess the “cumulative impact of wind turbines” amid fears that some areas are being overwhelmed by applications.
Currently, councils can be forced to accept new wind farms as national planning guidance states that renewable energy schemes should usually be permitted.
A senior Conservative source said: “The Prime Minister strongly feels that this is a real local issue and if people don’t want to have wind farms they don’t have to have them. This is a bombproof set of safeguards to protect the wishes of local people.”
Eric Pickles, the local government secretary, will today announce that legal planning guidance is to be altered and he will write to all councils and the Planning Inspectorate demanding that they use the new principles in current decisions.
Last night, Mr Pickles said: “We want to give local communities a greater say on planning, to give greater weight to the protection of landscape, heritage and local amenity.”
Despite senior Conservatives heralding the end of new onshore wind farms, the Liberal Democrats – including the Energy Secretary – believe that the new system of incentives could actually lead to an increase in turbines.
The Energy Department says that a community agreeing to a modest wind farm could see their power bills fall by an average of £400 per household.
Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, said: “We remain committed to the deployment of appropriately sited onshore wind, as a key part of a diverse, low-carbon and secure energy mix and committed to an evidence-based approach to supporting low carbon power.
“This is an important sector that is driving economic growth, supporting thousands of new jobs and providing a significant share of our electricity and I’m determined that local communities should share in these benefits.”

Actions required not just fine words Mr Clark

Posted on by • Posted in District council stuff, Government • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Greg Clark gets more than his fair share of column inches in today’s Daily Telegraph, continuing to promote his already much criticised National Planning Policy Framework.

The minister demonstrates his myopic view of this issue with comments like, ‘I can’t think of a single place I’ve been to where they don’t want housing’. What he doesn’t tell us is where he is getting these rose coloured views from. My suspicion is, that it was either the Party faithful, who would never dare to question the minister who has honoured them with a visit. Alternatively, it was through orchestrated meetings with local landowners and developers, who already see him as the second coming and think the NPPF is his version of the Holy Bible.

Mr Clark is obviously a very clever man, but his naivety with regards with the public’s attitude to large scale development is writ large by the statements he makes on the subject. Although he has been elected and must therefore have a regular postbag with at least some of this correspondence relating to development proposals, it’s clear from his CV that he has never been a local councillor and therefore has never been at the sharpest end of the planning process. Also, his CV shows little in the way of proper jobs, with all of his ‘working life’ being spent in the rarified world of politics. A spell with the BBC as some sort of policy wonk hardly qualifies.

If Mr Clark had spent any time as a local councillor, he would of come face to face with ordinary local people, those who don’t own land or build houses, expressing real concerns, something he dismisses as NIMBYism, about the impact a development could have on their community. I don’t believe there’s anything unique about my experience of the less than enthusiastic public response when a new housing development is proposed. That response is magnified six-fold when that development is for affordable or social housing, just the thing Clark is claiming will be promoted by his policies and our communities are supposedly so desperate to see happen.

Having passionately promoted the merits of localism and how important it is for communities to take back control of how their area develops, Mr Clark goes on to reveal the actual limits of localism when it comes to the development process. Apparently, where a local council, having listened to the local people and written a local plan to reflect these views, attempt to avoid large scale housing development, they will be ‘directed’ to think again, as per the Eric Pickles’s version of ‘guided Localism’ no doubt.

There are however a couple of comments attributed to Clark that, if true, would offer me some hope, if only they were clearly refelcted in the NPPF. He talks of better design, greater individuality and, most significantly, a drive to eliminate the shoe box sized houses foisted on the British public, by our greedy development industry, since the second world war.

Unfortunately, his fine words do not appear to be supported by anything substantive in the NPPF. If my own local planning authority were to produce a policy requiring room sizes to return to their pre-war dimensions, would it gain the support of the planning inspectorate the first time this was challenged by a developer?

Mr Clark, If you want the public, not just the landowners and the developers, to turn your naive words into reality, you need to confirm to us that the quality of new housing is just as important to you as the quantity.