Another fine mess

The news that MHCLG ministers couldn’t even wait to get their wretched Planning & Infrastructure Bill through Parliament before announcing another tranche of attacks on England’s planning system will surprise no-one who read about the frequent visits of developer lobbyists to the ministry to drink its coffee and to demand more.

The latest thousand bomber raid was even graced with a quote from chancellor Rachel Reeves, to remind us that the 25-year assault on our vital planning system has been ordered and organised from HMT – the Home of Monetarist Theory.

Targets for Tonight, in the language of Bomber Command, are anywhere “near” a railway station, any proposal to build more than 150 homes, local authorities’ ability to plan on behalf of the communities who elected them and anything left of that great Labour innovation, green belts. Public planning inquiries for called-in applications will also go.

House builders are going to be allowed to build houses anywhere “near” railway stations.

In case you thought this was aimed at urban stations, think again. Even “Footnote 7” protected areas are in the frame. The new rules allowing building around stations “will extend to land within the green belt”, already shredded by the destructive “grey belt” fallacy,

Hello ministers, have you not noticed the shades of post-war Labour ministers glaring at you?

Apparently not. They’ll be “continuing efforts to ensure that a designation designed in the middle of the last century is updated to work today”.

Or, put another way, to stop it working today.

But another interesting Government document was slipped out recently – the very long and cynically delayed 2022-based household projections.

These suggest the Government believes around 2,400,000 new households (an admittedly bendy concept) will form in the 2024-34 period. About 240,000 a year in fact.

Coincidentally that’s about the level the building industry wants to build at and, despite its delight at the extreme gullibility of ministers, what it finds most profitable and what it intends to do.

All the new proposals will achieve is ensuring that new homes are bigger, costlier, more car-dependent and more environmentally destructive.

Steve Reed and Matthew Pennycook are mounting a strong challenge to earlier holders of the Laurel & Hardy award for the worst planning ministers of all time. The likes of Eric Pickles and the shade of Nicholas Ridley will have to look to their laurels.

Jon Reeds