It’s possible to wonder more than just a little here about the intellect being deployed by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. They’re worried that recent changes in the planning regime could mean that some green belt land is built upon. They then warn that this could happen. The lack of intellect being that the purpose of changing planning law has been so that green belt land can be built upon. For that’s where people want to live so that’s where we should build the houses, right?
Green belt land will be under threat from developers because of new Government planning rules designed to speed up house building, campaigners claim.
Councils will lose some of their powers to control development if house building falls below 75 per cent of Government targets, under a new National Planning Policy Framework.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England warned yesterday that builders will be able to “game” the system by sitting on land to slow down the rate of development, which would trigger a relaxation of planning rules.
Meanwhile council leaders said the new policy would “punish communities” because more than half of all new houses could bypass local development plans.
In fact, the point of recent changes in planning law is exactly so that all of those restrictions upon who may build where can be avoided. For the underlying analysis has been – and I’m one of the people that has been doing that analysis this past decade – that current planning laws make it too difficult to build anything anyone wants to live in where they’d like to be living. This and this alone explaining why we’ve areas of the country where an entire house can be had for £1 and other where the total earnings of the next three generations won’t buy a 2 bedder.
The solution, in such a situation, is obviously to rip up many if not all of those restrictions. Local development plans being just as pernicious as green belts in limiting what may be done.
CPRE complains that new planning laws mean green belt may be built upon, entirely missing the fact that the point of the new laws is so that green belt may be built upon.
My town suffers from this from the other direction. We are a small town entirely surrounded by a national park. People want the bucolic national park countryside living, but they can’t build in the nation park, so every last bit of land in the town up to the national park boundary is being built on, promoting some of the typical land rush crap you get in these circumstances. Either put the whole town in the national park so the same planning rules reign across the whole area, or get rid of the planning rules in the national park, so the… Read more »
Planning, they say, means we have “preserved” the land. (Especially when we deed it over to Quangos so that we can “preserve” it even if the majority party loses a future election.) Whereas immunity from planning means we have “lost” the land. It would be nice to let the land go back to belonging to its owners by eliminating land use regulations. If the most we can do is eliminate them contingent on statistics, very well. But let’s not fault developers for stage-managing statistics that are useful to them. Elimination was not made contingent on developers changing their attitudes or… Read more »
I’ve long thought the CPRE ought to be honest and rename themselves the Campaign to Preserve Rural English House Prices and Keep the Oiks Out, but CPREHPKOO is a bit of a mouthful.
CRAP-E?
“Because Green Belt” is one of my favorite examples of Begging the Question.