Murdering the village

One of my least favourite television programmes is Escape to the Country. This usually features a couple who plan to sell their house in London and buy a larger one in a rural setting. They express surprise at the lack of street lights and corner shops, and distress that the countryside is not as quiet as they had hoped. Cows moo, farm machinery operates, children play, and church bells ring. Their disappointment is that, even in the countryside, it is not possible to escape from people altogether.

Those of us who actually live in a country village see things differently. For us, a village is a community of people who know each other and who help each other out. Help can include things like friendship for the recently-bereaved, advice on how to deal with official agencies, and shared concerns about how to maintain poorly-built speculative housing. My own village has an amazing number of local organisations. In addition to our parish church, they range from sports clubs, fitness classes, groups for mothers and toddlers, friendship groups, the Women’s Institute, a monthly coffee morning to raise money for various charities, a gardening club, a Geology Society, the Young Farmers, the British Legion and several others. A group of volunteers maintains our footpath network, the volunteer who runs our ‘Oil Syndicate’ reduces the price we pay for heating oil, and a volunteer taskforce tidies the place up. Our village hall provides a warm space for people in the depth of winter, while one of my neighbours helps to run the Worcester Food Bank.

This alternative view of village life as a participative community is one reason why the most unlikely places proclaim their village status. Manhattan has a Greenwich Village, East Village and West Village. Closer to home, Birmingham has a new ‘Edgbaston Village’, while the St Johns area in Worcester has been promoted as a ‘village in the city’. These urban villages usually have older and more distinct architecture than the surrounding mediocrity, and this contributes to a sense of separate identity.

Quaintness is a factor in defining rural villages too, at least in the mass media. These usually show an ancient parish church, vicarage and manor house, some old cottages, all surrounding a large village green. This vision of rurality appears at its purest in the television series Midsomer Murders, whose villages are almost empty of traffic (apart from people riding horses), and where the inhabitants usually include a snobby family living in straightened circumstances in a grand old house, a wealthy but unpopular parvenu, an unhappily-married couple running the soon-to-be bankrupt local pub, a rather weird local vicar, and various surly adolescents. All village organisations in Midsomer are the scenes of factious and usually murderous conflict.

This should all put people off wishing to move to the countryside, but this is not the case. Our villages are under siege from speculative house-building firms, so that the old village cores (often designated as a conservation area) are increasingly surrounded by estates of suburban-style houses, mostly built on high-quality agricultural land. Developers are keen to build in rural areas because farm land is cheap (at least until it receives planning permission) and does not have the complications of brownfield sites, but also because there is a real demand for country living. Demand is high because the countryside is seen as safer and cleaner than cities and with better schools. The disadvantages of commuting to work are partly alleviated by using the Internet to work from home, for banking, and for ordering home deliveries from supermarkets and other online retailers.

The resulting estates may be located in a country village, but look like they could be anywhere. The same pattern-book houses, usually detached and about two metres apart, all with garages too small to house a car. The estates usually include a few larger and more expensive houses which have two small garages - too small to house two cars. Despite their price, new houses have limited garden space, usually smaller than found in an interwar council house. New estates do have ‘green spaces’, required by local planning policies. But ownership is usually retained by the developer, who then leases them to a management company. These keep costs low by limiting their work to planting a few short-lived trees and mowing the grass, all for which they charge residents a management fee which increases each year.

Planning obligations require that a proportion of new houses (usually 40%) are ‘affordable’, but this only means that the sale price or the rent is 80% of market rates. This is still beyond the means of many families, particularly those in rural areas where there may be limited local employment opportunities. It is not surprising to find that local surveys carried out for neighbourhood plans often find an unmet need in villages for rented social housing. Another unmet need occurs among elderly people who find their homes too large or too expensive to manage, or too far from local services. Building smaller dwellings close to village centres to enable old people to downsize would have the beneficial effect of releasing larger family homes for those who need this type of accommodation.

All this means that we are not getting the type of house that we most need in rural areas, indicating a failure of our planning system. The new Government proposes to introduce changes, but these look unlikely to benefit rural areas.

The Coronation before last

Like almost everyone in Britain, I spent some time last month watching the Coronation. But I am one of a diminishing number of people who remember the previous Coronation, in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned. Few people at that time had televisions, and so the event largely took place through street parties. I was six years old, and the family then lived in a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road, Shirley, Solihull. My memories of the event are uneven. The weather was cold and wet, but I can not remember if there were any tables laid in the street or any party food. I do remember that there was a children’s fancy dress competition and that I won first prize. I was dressed as what we then called a ‘chinaman’, complete with traditional robes that did indeed look Chinese. I carried a pole over my shoulder, holding what I was told were two genuine Chinese lanterns. Second place went to a girl dressed as Britannia, who shivered from the cold. My younger brother and the girl next door were three years old and carried a bucket between them, as Jack and Jill. This was the last time I ever went to a fancy-dress event.

I have better memories of my later years in Stroud Road, which I eventually left at the age of 11. Street then had few cars, and children played outside at any available time. It was possible to walk to woods and open countryside and fish for sticklebacks in a local stream. Shirley still had some quirky older buildings, inherited from its time as a country village. In the next few decades, the fields became housing estates, and the older cottages were demolished. I became an inhabitant of the staggering blandness of the English suburbs.

At this most recent Coronation, I live in a country village in a neighbouring county. But suburbanisation has followed me. A new estate of suburban houses has just been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. This, like all the others, will be a group of breeze-block houses on minimal plots, arranged in cul-de-sacs, with patches of ‘green space’. It is promised that the latter will be landscaped, but we have had promises of this kind before. What the residents of such estates usually end up with are mowed lawns, with some fitful planting of trees, most of which soon die. There are fortunes to be made in developing such estates, in planning and promoting them. But those who make such fortunes choose to live far from what they have created, in land they have yet to despoil.

This (not very) old house

The oldest construction in my village is an iron age fort, which now resembles a series of mounds on a hilltop. The oldest building, the parish church, is much more recent, dating from the 12th Century. The oldest house, called the ‘Old Hall’, started life two hundred years later and was extended in the later Middle Ages. Dotted round the parish are several farmsteads and cottages built from 1500 onwards. This might give the impression that the English build to last. But of course most houses in the past were insubstantial hovels, most of which fell down before they were demolished. This tradition persists with modern housebuilding in England.

My wife and I moved into our house in 1983. We were the first occupiers of a three-bedroom bungalow on a recently-completed estate. The house was constructed of breeze-block with a brick outer layer, and low-pitched tiled roof. The low pitch meant that there have been longstanding problems with leakages and the resulting damage to ceilings. The windows were single-glazed and there was only a thin layer of loft insulation. The bathroom suite was an awful orange colour (‘sunburst’) and there was a gap between the bath and the wall, and a hole in the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. The en-suite toilet had a toilet and washbasin in a grim brown colour, and the basin did not sit properly on its plinth. The tiles in the bathroom and in the en-suite began falling off the wall in a matter of weeks. The internal walls were plasterboard and provided no sound-proofing. The front door had a simple lock and could easily have been kicked in. All the floors (even in the bathroom and en-suite toilet) were covered by a cheap bottle-green carpet. There were persistent problems with condensation. The garage, like almost all those that were and still are built in England, was too small to house a car.

We spent our first few years getting repairs done under the NHBC guarantee, and every year after that in making the house more habitable. We have employed squads of roofers, followed by a plasterer to repair the ceiling. We have replaced all the windows (now all double-glazed) and had a conservatory built. The boiler, front door, internal doors, garage doors, soffits, barge boards, kitchen fittings, curtain rails, bath, toilets and washbasins have all been replaced. We have installed wooden floors and ceramic tiles and a much thicker layer of loft insulation. We replaced the paving along the side of the house and all the fencing in the back garden. We installed a dehumidifier to cure the problem with condensation.

Why did we not just move house instead? Mainly because short-term contractual employment made it risky to increase debt. But there were other reasons. We have had good neighbours, the house faces woodland but is still close to the centre of a small rural village surrounded by hills. We can walk to the shop, the garage, the bus stop, and the GP clinic. The village has a good primary school, a good high school and a large sports centre. My children always walked to school, at first accompanied, and then proudly independent.

An estate of new houses has since been completed in the village. This has an attractive layout, and building regulations have improved considerably since 1983. The houses all have double-glazing, better insulation and central heating. The kitchens were fully-equipped on completion, and all were decorated in the currently-fashionable black, white and anthracite. But there were still problems with the construction, requiring residents to move out for a short period while corrective work was carried out. One major change from our house is the diminished size of the gardens. New houses, apart from the most expensive, now have just a small patch of front garden, and a back garden only large enough for a trampoline and a barbecue. The total plot size is sometimes half that found in interwar council houses.

In place of proper gardens, new estates have ‘green space’. This is a planning requirement that 40% of the land area must be allocated for open space. In the past, this would have been looked after by the district or parish council. But to cut costs, district councils now allow developers to set up contracts with maintenance companies which charge the residents a monthly fee. The fees keep increasing, but most green space usually amounts to little more than flat plains of mowed grass and a few short-lived spindly trees. This is so much less than could be achieved, and a challenge to those of us who believe a house is characterised by its setting as much as by its contents.

How to improve the design of new housing developments

Government reports can include contradictory objectives, usually resolved locally by officers and councillors. This is particularly true of planning policy, which typically promotes the approval of many more dwellings, a high standard of design, the protection of agricultural land and wildlife, the preservation of the countryside, and sustainability. In reality, meeting housing targets set by Government has usually trumped all the other considerations, and large areas of farmland in England have been concreted over with badly-designed high-density estates. Even where local planning authorities have refused consent for schemes of this kind, planning inspectors have usually approved appeals on the grounds that they meet a local ‘housing shortage’.

There have been recent signs, however, that the planning pendulum may be swinging back to favouring quality over quantity. One recent report that has influenced this trend is Living with Beauty, which was commissioned by the Government from the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, and published in 2020. The Commission was chaired by the eminent philosopher Sir Roger Scruton (who died just after the text was finalised). The report is very critical of the design and layout of new housing:
    “It is widely believed that we are building the wrong things, in the wrong places, and in defiance of what people want... At a time when there is an acute shortage of homes, there is therefore widespread opposition to new developments, which seem to threaten the beauty of their surroundings and to impose a uniform ‘cookie cutter’ product that degrades our natural and built inheritance. People want to live in beautiful places; they want to live next to beautiful places; they want to settle in a somewhere of their own, where the human need for beauty and harmony is satisfied by the view from the window and a walk to the shops, a walk which is not marred by polluted air or an inhuman street. But those elemental needs are not being met by the housing market, and the planning system has failed to require them”.

The report states that beauty exists at three levels:
1.    Beautiful buildings (windows, materials, proportion, space).
2.    Beautiful places (streets, squares and parks, the ‘spirit of the places’)
3.    Beautifully placed (sustainable settlement patterns sitting in the landscape).

    “This means accepting that new development should be designed to fit into the life and texture of the place where it occurs; and also that it should aim to be an improvement of that place, regenerative not parasitic, an illustration of the way in which a new street may be more beautiful than the buildings or fields that preceded it”.

The most persuasive parts of the report for many people are its photographs of good and bad design in recent developments. The report diagnosed the ugliness of current building as being due to the dominance of the motor car, the mass production of houses rather than local vernacular production, and the emphasis by governments on quantity over quality. It notes that developers make promises of attractive tree-lined estates which they then fail to deliver. Instead, they build standardised houses on tiny plots in cul-de-sacs packed with cars, with resultant poor air quality and little incentive to walk or cycle. This gives little opportunity for neighbours to meet in the street and develop a sense of community.

Living with Beauty makes many recommendations for changes to the planning system, most of which relate particularly to towns and cities. The most important for rural areas are:
1.    To place greater emphasis in assessing planning applications on the quality of the design and the creation of places as well as houses. These should meet locally-developed design codes, to ensure new dwellings conform to local patterns of building.
2.    Local plans should identify sites pro-actively rather than respond to the results of call for sites or to speculative applications. Planning should not be by appeal.
3.    Faster approval for applications which are in accord with the local plan, meet design codes and have local support.
4.    More effective enforcement of planning decisions.
5.    More sustained local consultation and engagement.
6.    Planting more trees in streets, with funding provided to parish councils to do this. This should include new orchards and tree-lined squares.
7.    Councils should measure the outcomes of new developments.

The Government response largely supported the recommendations of the report, and stated:
    “...we have made beauty, design quality and placemaking a strategic theme in proposed revisions to the National Planning Policy Framework, positively supported design quality as a key issue in consenting schemes, made it clearer that poor quality schemes should be refused, and where appropriate extended references to ‘good design’ to ‘good design and beautiful places’.”

The most recent version of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) does indeed include an enhanced chapter on design. This includes a statement on trees:
    “Trees make an important contribution to the character and quality of urban environments, and can also help mitigate and adapt to climate change. Planning policies and decisions should ensure that new streets are tree-lined, that opportunities are taken to incorporate trees elsewhere in developments (such as parks and community orchards), that appropriate measures are in place to secure the long-term maintenance of newly-planted trees, and that existing trees are retained wherever possible. Applicants and local planning authorities should work with highways officers and tree officers to ensure that the right trees are planted in the right places, and solutions are found that are compatible with highways standards and the needs of different users.”

The NPPF also states that:
    "Development that is not well designed should be refused, especially where it fails to reflect local design policies and government guidance on design, taking into account any local design guidance and supplementary planning documents such as design guides and codes.”

The main Government guidance on design is the National Design Guide, which was published by the Ministry of Communities, Housing and Local Government in 2021. This incorporates the same principles as Living with Beauty, but set out in a more systematic way with many examples of good practice. The NPPF proposes that local planning authorities should develop their own design guides, and the Government has issued lengthy design codes to guide this task.

There are some problems with Living with Beauty. In the first place, the most attractive estate designs have generally been the work of either small local builders or non-profit organisations such as Bournville Village Trust, the garden cities, and some local authorities. But most houses in England are now built by a small number of very large development firms, which have standardised design and construction: assembling rather than building houses. Secondly, it is not clear that the public share Roger Scruton’s aesthetic sense. Some people think beauty means big and shiny. Some residents rip out their front gardens and uproot their trees to provide car parking spaces. The authors of Living with Beauty are aware of this danger, and review options for ‘stewardship’ to protect the quality of the built environment. The report makes detailed recommendations for changes to taxation to encourage continued and positive engagement by landowners.

Another relevant report for housing design is Building Car Dependency, completed by the multi-agency Transport for New Homes Steering Group in 2022. This surveyed 28 recently-completed housing developments, with a specific focus on their impact on transport. But the photographs also illustrate the ugliness and inconvenience of many developments. The report found that most urban housing estates on brownfield sites were well-integrated with local public transport, walking and cycling networks. Rural greenfield developments, however, were based on the assumption that residents would use a car for virtually every journey. A high proportion of the land in such developments was therefore required for car parking.  Front gardens were often absent and back gardens tiny. Promised community developments had not been built, and few people walk to schools or shops. There were few usable footpath networks and cycling was often dangerous, along narrow country lanes with increased motor vehicle traffic. Public transport was infrequent or not available.

The report proposes that new housing estates in rural areas are inappropriate and government targets forcing local authorities to accept this kind of housing should be abolished. New housing should not be in places which increase car-dependency and houses should instead be located where people can walk or cycle for many of their journeys. There should be more mixed-use development with opportunities for local cafes and shops.

It is possible to use these documents to prepare a simple checklist that can be used when assessing planning applications for new housing estates in rural communities.
1.    Housing density. Is the density of dwellings similar to that in the rest of the village, or is more similar to levels found in suburban or urban areas?
2.    Setting. Does the proposed estate fit in the local landscape, or does it block views that are valued by local people?
3.    Connectivity. Do the footpaths and cycle routes connect easily to those in the rest of the village, or are they largely self-contained within the proposed estate?
4.    Proximity. Is it possible to walk a safe and short distance to the local shop, primary school and bus stop, or are these facilities more than walking distance (usually taken as being 800 metres) from the furthest point in the proposed estate and/or accessible by narrow footpaths along public roads?
5.    Character. Are the proposed dwellings in a style similar to those typical of local villages, or are they in a standard design similar to those built elsewhere by the developer?
6.    Diversity. Are the proposed dwellings diverse in size and ownership, or are they predominantly of one size (eg ‘four-bedroom executive homes’).
7.    Arboreal. Are the proposed streets lined with trees, or would someone looking down the street see mainly brick, concrete and paving?
8.    Protecting biodiversity. Are existing trees and hedges protected, or is it proposed to build close to their roots and/or damage their health?

How to object to a planning application

Introduction
People most frequently come into contact with the planning system by two routes: when they or their neighbours apply to make alterations to their houses; or when there is an application by a developer to build a nearby housing estate or commercial development. There are many more of the former than the latter. In a single year, a typical rural local planning authority (Malvern Hills District Council) determined 1462 planning applications, of which only 52 were for ‘major developments’. Almost all applications for alterations are uncontentious, unless changes are proposed to a listed building or a building in a conservation area, or when a neighbour believes the alteration will cause a loss of amenity.

Most opposition to planning applications therefore concerns proposals to build major developments, usually where these are for villages or in open countryside. This paper gives some guidance on how to oppose such planning applications most effectively. But it is important to understand that the planning system can also enable people to determine how they wish their village to develop. Future papers will look at how to create neighbourhood plans and participate in the creation of ‘local plans’ (a term used for a plan which covers one or more district councils).


The planning system
The planning system in England is a strange mix of political, administrative and judicial processes. Decisions on granting planning permission are made by local planning authority (LPA), which in rural areas is usually a district council or unitary authority. However, most decisions are granted without a debate by the full council or even by a planning committee, but are instead delegated to a planning officer or local ward councillor. In Malvern Hills District, 94% of applications were determined at officer level.

Where councillors are involved in making a decision, they have to be aware of the advice of their professionally-qualified planning officers, who will make a recommendation largely on whether the application conforms to the requirements of key planning documents. These form a hierarchy, from the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), to the local plan, to the neighbourhood plan (if there is one).

The NPPF is produced by the Secretary of State for Levelling-up, Housing and Communities, and is revised every two or so years. It specifies the objectives of the planning system and how it should operate. The NPPF states that “The purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development”. This interpreted to mean that “all plans should promote a sustainable pattern of development that seeks to: meet the development needs of their area; align growth and infrastructure; improve the environment; mitigate climate change...”. These objectives are often self-contradictory - a common feature of government policy documents.

Local plans (also called ‘development plans’) are produced by one or more local planning authorities, usually after a lengthy process of consultation. As a result, local plans are completed infrequently and may be out of date. A key part of local plans are its ‘policies’. These are like mini-laws, and each one is numbered and justified by evidence. Local plans must conform with the NPPF, in particular the requirement to meet the ‘objectively-assessed housing need’ (OAHN) which is calculated by the Government for each local planning authority. A large part of any local plan, therefore, is the identification of preferred sites for development. The formula for calculating local OAHNs has fluctuated radically in the past few years, and is the subject of national controversy. Local planning authorities must not only conform to their OAHN, but also ensure they have identified sufficient building sites to meet five year’s worth of OAHN. If local planning authorities fail to identify a ‘five-year land-supply’, developers can argue that they should no longer be restricted to sites specified in the local plan and can build outside settlement boundaries in open countryside.

Neighbourhood plans exist mainly in rural areas and small towns, and are usually developed by parish and town councils. They are required to conform with the strategic objectives of the local plan, but may also identify preferred sites for development as well as preferred styles and types of housing. Unlike the other two levels of planning, neighbourhood plans are adopted after a referendum in the designated neighbourhood area.

Councillors will usually take heed of the advice of their planning officers because applicants have a right of appeal if the application is refused. Appeals are determined by a planning inspector, which is a quasi-judicial post. The planning inspector may hold public hearings, in which applicants may be represented by specialist planning lawyers. If the refusal is overturned by the planning inspector, the applicant may be awarded costs which will be met by the local planning authority. Note that there is no right of appeal by a local community against the granting of planning permission (although in a very few cases, there may be a request for judicial review).

It is important to understand that planning system, for all its complexity, is limited to ‘spatial planning’, or the allocation of land. All the other agencies of government such as education, transport, the environment and so on will have their own planning systems, often produced by a different set of authorities.


Planning applications
Planning applications always involve several documents, all of which can be viewed and downloaded from the local planning authority website. Each application is allocated a number, and you can use this to search got the application you are interested in. Applications can be outline or full, and will include multiple documents, including:
▸    An application form. This will include the name of the developer, their agent, and a summary of things like the proposed number of dwellings and parking spaces.
▸    One or more maps, showing the location and layout of the proposed development.
▸    Elevations of the proposed buildings.
▸    Design statement. This is often the most useful document, and gives the justification for the scheme and how it corresponds to the local and neighbourhood plans. The latter details are sometimes found in a separate planning statement.
▸    Landscape and visual impact assessment (LVIA). This assesses the impact of the proposed development on the local landscape.
▸    Transport statement. This describes current traffic in the vicinity of the proposed development and estimates the resulting increase. There is also an account of public transport and walking and cycle routes.
▸    Drainage report. This describes how sewage and flood water will be managed.
▸    Environmental impact reports. There may be separate reports assessing the impact of the proposed development on the biodiversity of the site and on particular types of wildlife (especially protected species like bats and newts).

All of these reports are included because they are required by the local plan and national regulations. However, they are all funded by the developer. As a result, they are rarely critical of the proposed development and may even play down its disadvantages. They therefore differ from the reports from public authorities, which are shorter, more factual, and can be critical of the proposed development. These reports usually include:
▸    Heritage reports, which assess the impact of the proposed development on historic buildings, conservation areas etc.
▸    Reports from local authority drainage engineers.
▸    Reports from the Highway Authority (usually the County Council or unitary authority in a rural area).
▸    Landscape and wildlife reports.
▸    Footpath reports, assessing the impact on rights-of-way.
▸    An urban design report.

The website will also include an opportunity to submit your own comments on the application, which you can do either by typing onscreen, or by attaching a file. There is usually a very short deadline for submitting an objection, but the actual decision will be made by the council some months later. This means that an objection submitted a month or two after the deadline will still be considered.

Developers sometimes submit a response to the various planning objections, and this will be downloaded to the website for the planning application. It is therefore important to keep viewing the website and, if necessary, to reply to the developer.


Preparing an objection
A common response to an unpopular planning application is a petition. This has little impact and, by itself, is a waste of effort. However, there are more effective ways of mobilising opposition. These include forming an action group to publicise the disadvantages of the proposed scheme, and encouraging people to submit objections on the LPA website. These should be in people’s own words and include information about the disadvantages they would personally suffer, rather than be a standardised response. An important part of making a comment is ‘certification’. Public authorities pay far more attention to communications from formal bodies than from individual members of the public. Formal bodies have letter-heads, a list of officers, and contact details. Action groups should ensure they are certified in this way. The most important such body is the parish or town council, and this should make a detailed response which summarises the reasons for local opposition. Other certified bodies that can be enlisted in a campaign are the county branch of the CPRE the Countryside Charity, and (depending on the type of impact of the proposed development) the Ramblers Association, the RSPB and local wildlife trusts.

The content of responses must be based on ‘material considerations’. The most important of these are the NPPF, the local plan, the neighbourhood plan, and other formal guidance notes as well as previous decisions by planning inspectors. References to local and neighbourhood plans should cite the specific policies that the proposed development breaches. References to the NPPF should be to the most recent version and cite the particular paragraph in the document.

Other material considerations taken into account by the LPA, including:
▸    Loss of privacy or light caused by overshadowing.
▸    Whether the development will worsen local parking problems.
▸    The amount of local traffic generated and its impact on highway safety.
▸    The effect on listed buildings and conservation areas. This includes proposed development near (‘in the curtilage’) of these features.
▸    The capacity of the local physical and social infrastructure to cope with the proposed development. This includes the impact on local schools and primary healthcare.
▸    The layout and density of the proposed buildings (including design, appearance and materials).
▸    Whether there is sufficient access for disabled people.
▸    The impact on wildlife and biodiversity.
▸    Landscaping and the loss or effect on trees. Building near a large tree can affect its roots and eventually kill it.

Some things are not material considerations in considering planning applications, and should be avoided in writing an objection. These are:
▸    Negative effect on the value of properties.
▸    Dislike of the developer/applicant.
▸    Matters controlled under building regulations or other legislation, such as structural stability, fire precautions, matters covered by licences etc.
▸    Private issues between neighbours e.g. land/boundary disputes, damage to property,
▸    Problems arising during the construction period from noise, dust, and construction vehicles.
▸    Applicant’s personal circumstances (unless exceptionally and clearly relevant, e.g. provision of facilities for someone with a physical disability).
▸    Opposition to business competition.

It is a waste of time objecting to an aspect of the development that conforms to the local or neighbourhood plan. For instance, if the neighbourhood plan specifies a settlement boundary for a village, it is pointless to object to an application to build dwellings on a site within that boundary on the grounds that no houses should be built at all. However, it may be possible to object for other reasons, such as too high a density, or inappropriate design.

One issue that is particularly contentious is that a development would result in the loss of a view. Developers argue that ‘There is no right to a view’, but replacing a view of open fields with a view of a large back fence is a loss of residential amenity. The loss of views for many people counts as a negative visual impact and may be in breach of protected views in the neighbourhood plan and policies in the local plan to protect the countryside.

Statements of objections should be supported by evidence. Action groups can collect their own data on issues like biodiversity and traffic flows. It is important to check all the reports comprising the application for accuracy. As noted above, these are paid for by the applicant and almost always support the proposed development. But they are usually completed by people unfamiliar with the locality and may contain partial or incorrect information. Some examples:
▸    Transport reports which include multiple statistics estimating traffic flows (usually based on a database called ‘TRACS’), but which fail to state the total annual increase in motor vehicle traffic from the development. This is important data because its impact on the sustainability of the proposed development.
▸    LVIAs which rate the local landscape as ‘moderate’, based on what at first seems systematic methodology, but which is in reality little more than a personal judgement. LVIA reports may fail to include photographs, or, include photois which show the landscape in the most unflattering light. Hardly any include visualisations of what the development would be like if completed.

It is important to Include pictures as part of the evidence. Human beings are visually-dominant, and respond far more to pictures than to pages of text or statistics. An example is the photograph below, taken on the road to the local school, which was included as evidence against an assertion that the locality had a moderate level of traffic when the schools were opening and closing.

 

Finally, the objection should be laid out as a well-written and professional-looking report (preferably as a pdf), and attached as a file when submitting it to the local planning authority website. 

The wrong houses in the wrong places

As a parish councillor, I spend much of my time reading and preparing responses to planning applications. My quiet village in the Worcestershire countryside is now under assault from landowners who wish to profit from the massive increases in the values of their fields when planning permission to build houses has been approved. It was estimated in 2015 that agricultural land, on average, increases in value from £21,000/ hectare to £1.95 million/hectare once planning permission has been granted.

So we currently have applications for over a hundred houses, which would have the effect of increasing commuter traffic down our narrow lanes, taking good agricultural land out of food production, and straining public services such as drainage and sewage, water supply, education and primary healthcare. Each of these applications comprises many plans and reports, all of which are published online by the district council. The various reports are produced by specialist private agencies and deal with the implications of the proposed development for such matters as transport, drainage, health and ‘visual impact’. They are paid for by the developer and, not surprisingly, always seem to come out in favour of the development.

I have learnt over time to be suspicious of the quality of these reports. I have found that they are frequently inconsistent, contain basic factual errors, and even suppress unwelcome information. However, they sometimes include things that are interesting and provide enlightenment. One such is a recent drainage report which concluded that most of my village has been built on an aquifer. This explains the frequent floods at times of heavy rain, the incessant dampness in our houses, and why, for instance, the pit in the local garage always fills up with water at such times. This should not of course have been too much of a surprise. The village is surrounded by hills on three sides and the land even rises on the fourth side where the main road heads to Worcester.

Although most of the village was built on an aquifer, there are dry places. All the old buildings, from our 12th Century parish church until about the 19th Century were constructed on higher and drier ground. The contrast with lower-lying ground is striking. Due South of the parish church is a field which has a lake and is now a wildlife reserve. This would have been convenient as an extension to the overcrowded graveyard around the church. But the water-table in that field is so high that, when conducting funeral services by the graveside, the vicar would have needed to use the section of the prayerbook for burials at sea.

Unfortunately, villages in the past often lacked enough dryfield and houses in villages and towns were built on soggier ground. This problem was faced in the Middle Ages, when people constructed towns in excellent locations for trade where the only land was also an excellent location for flooding. This is shown in the photograph from 2007 of the lovely market town of Tewkesbury, where the Rivers Avon and Severn meet and where the only dry ground is occupied by the abbey. 

Since then, in Tewkesbury and elsewhere, modern houses have been built on ground even more prone to flooding. Indeed, 10,000 houses each year are built on flood plains in England and in the coalition government in 2011 relaxed planning rules to make this easier.

Why did this happen? The main reason is that governments in England have decided that housebuilding should be outsourced to private corporations and, to a lesser degree, to housing associations. They must therefore be encouraged to build houses by removing any impediments which might reduce their profitability. This has meant weakening planning laws and building regulations, even those which protect the buyers from flooding and fire. It has also meant allowing housebuilding on flood plains (where land is cheap) and on good agricultural land (because this is cheaper to build on than brownfield sites).

This policy has not been particularly successful in meeting the demand for new houses. Most experts identify a need for 250,000 new dwellings/year, while in the last decade the number completed is about 130,500/year. The large building corporations instead accumulate land which has planning permission so that 40% of such sites are at any one time undeveloped. The building corporations do this because the shortage of homes keeps prices high. Why incur the cost of building twice as many houses when this would radically depress prices and profit margins?

The outsourcing of housebuilding in England may have failed to meet the need for new houses, but it has been very successful in other ways. Housebuilding is one of the most profitable sectors of the British economy, with profit margins on each house completion double that made in the USA. The largest UK housebuilder (Persimmon) pays its senior management team a bonus of £100 million/year. In response, the property sector generously rewards the Conservative Party. A recent article in the Financial Times reported that the property sector provided £18 million pounds for the party in the last two years, equivalent to a quarter of its total donations. See: https://www.ft.com/content/c5737fbb-2893-4a5a-be5e-965785f1a37b.

So insufficient houses are built and houses are built in the wrong places, but the system works well for landowners, the building corporations, the Conservative Party and the many private agencies that produce the multiple misleading reports that accompany each planning application.  

 

The ubiquity of misinformation

Two years ago our parish council was seeking funds to help build a skate park on the village playing field. We learnt that a firm was offering £35,000 to purchase a small corner of the  field to build a transmission mast for mobile telephones. This seemed a good offer, particularly since mobile phone reception was poor for some of the main networks. The Parish Council agreed this was a suitable offer and would help fund our new skate park. The start of each meeting of the Parish Council is always preceded by ‘democratic time’ - half an hour in which any parishioner can raise an issue for the attention of the Council. At the next meeting, one resident stated her opposition to a phone mast because she said she was ‘electrosensitive’ and that the signals from the mast only a mile from her house would produce headaches or even brain damage. Her objections were silenced when a councillor pointed out that the village already had two mobile phone masts in operation (of which she was unaware), and that these seem to have had no adverse effect on her.

The mast has now been built, and is about the same height as the local telephone poles. Mobile phone reception has improved and there have been no fresh reports of ‘electrosensitivity’ in the village. This is a consequence of the fact that this phenomenon probably does not exist. There is of course evidence that people blame microwave radiation for a wide range of symptoms, including even suicide. But several well-conducted scientific experiments have found that, like our local resident, people who complain of ‘electrosensitivity’ are unable to detect when a signal is or is not being transmitted. One study from 2005 is typical and is summarised by the NHS website here: https://www.nhs.uk/news/neurology/mobile-phone-mast-sensitivity-is-it-all-in-the-mind/. This used an experimental group of 44 volunteers who claimed to be ‘electrosensitive’ and a control group of 114 people. The experimental group reported symptoms when they were placed near to a mobile phone mast and told that it was ‘switched on’. When the tests were repeated with the sample not knowing whether the masts were switched on or off, there was no relationship between their symptoms and whether or not mobile phone signals were actually transmitted.

Of course, microwave radiation from mobile phone masts could have long-term effects on people even though their reports of short-term symptoms like headaches are unreliable. Fortunately, there have been several thorough research studies which have attempted to measure the health outcomes of exposure to mobile phone masts. Even better than individual studies are ‘systematic reviews’, which collect every relevant research study, rate their quality according to strict criteria, and come to an overall conclusion based only on the high-quality studies. The World Health Organisation has reported the results of a systematic review of this kind on the health effects of phone masts (https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/88/12/09-071852/en/). This looked at 134 studies, of which 117 were rejected as not being relevant or not meeting quality standards. A review of the remaining studies found no evidence of any health effects from mobile phone masts. It also confirmed that people claiming to suffer from ‘electrosensivity’ were unable to identify whether or not they were actually exposed to any such signals.

This is good enough for me, speaking as a retired medical researcher. But it raises the question why many people continue to believe that mobile phone masts damage their health. This is really two questions: why do people attribute the very real problems they may experience in their life (such as headaches or depression) to mobile phone masts, and what social circumstances sustain this belief?

It is common for people to seek explanations for adversity, including problems with their health. In the past, they often identified unseen magical forces such as witchcraft and the desire of local gods (or devils) to inflict punishment. Jews or other stigmatised minorities served as locally-identifiable devils. So in 1670, the Empress Margarita Teresa in Vienna blamed her miscarriages on the magical workings of the local Jews, who were promptly expelled from the City. Technology has provided a sequence of unseen forces, from electricity to television sets, and now mobile phones. Each at various times has been blamed for causing cancer or more minor ailments. Few people now worry about electric sockets or television sets interfering with their brains, but mobile phone masts are comparatively new and still being built, at least in country villages. So they have become the latest focus for anxiety.

It is a paradox that beliefs of this kind are sustained in the modern world by means of the very technology that they blame. The Internet, transmitted through wireless routers and mobile phone masts, has become the world’s largest human repository of fantasies and lies. Search for articles on ‘electrosensitivity’, and you will find websites devoted to the concept, often including impressive-looking studies proving their claims. How can a person without expertise in a specialist field distinguish one of these websites from scientifically-valid studies? The answer is that we struggle. What we can do is defer to an expert but be careful in our choices of expert. In particular, we should pay most attention to those who have relevant qualifications and training and who do not have a financial interest in one particular course of action. It is almost certain that a neurologist who has undergone a decade’s training in the science of the brain and its disorders knows more about the causes of headaches than some unknown person running a website on ‘electrosensitivity’. Likewise, more trust should be placed on the opinions of the world’s top climate scientists than an unqualified politician who has been funded by the oil and coal industry (even if he is President of the USA).

Shopping in a shed

One thing town planners in England never seem to do is plan towns. Instead, their main task is to make recommendations to local councils to either approve, modify or reject proposals from private developers. But developers do not plan towns either. In most cases, developers wish to build estates of large ‘luxury executive’ homes on greenfield sites (preferably in the green belt) because this is where the profits are greatest. Their proposals (and therefore the proposals of town planners as well) are for suburbs: detached houses arranged in curving roads lined with fast-growing trees (usually silver birch). The exceptions are the so-called ‘affordable homes’ required by planning regulations, which are usually arranged in small terraces. Each private development of this kind is named after what it has destroyed: ‘Cherry Orchard’, ‘Hop Fields’ and the like.

There have of course been some new towns built in the UK from the 1950s onwards. But these too resemble large suburbs with no centre that can be recognised as such. Instead, what passes for a town centre is usually a suburban shopping mall. These are essentially large sheds, packed with the kind of chain stores that make every town centre look the same. Indeed, an idea for a new television series would be to blindfold someone and drop them in a suburban shopping mall and see how long it takes them to discover which town they are in purely on the basis of what they can see in front of them. Most of these sheds are utterly without character, although a few are spectactularly ugly: there has rarely been any building so vile as that built as the shopping centre in Cumbernauld ‘new town’.

We can compare shopping in a shed with a traditional high street in a town like Ludlow, Marlborough or Ledbury. These have a row of shops and restaurants, most of which are still owned by local people rather than chains. They therefore are more likely to sell the unexpected. Local butchers prepare and hang meat instead of serving it on plastic trays covered in cellophane. There are second-hand bookshops and shops selling art-works. The shops themselves are interesting and usually attractive buildings, sometimes reached through small lanes off the main high street. There is usually a market hall, in which local traders and farmers can sell their produce. It is possible to get a good cup of tea or coffee in a café not called ‘Costa’, ‘Nero’ or ‘Starbucks’. The traditional high street is also the centre of local life: it is near the parish church and there is a town hall, usually a rather grand building to express the pride townspeople in the past had in their community.

How could you build a new town that would be as pleasant? The first step would be to recognise that few English towns began as villages: most were designated as towns by the Crown or a local landowner, with aim of raising income from a market or for defending the frontier. The latter were walled and were usually planned on a grid of streets. An alternative was a town based on an important trade route, which became the high street. This would usually be widened about half-way along, to provide space for a market. In some cases, market traders would move to a covered market and an island of new buildings would appear in the space they had previously occupied in the high street. Along the high street, land would be sold or leased as ‘burgage plots’, often about ten metres wide, stretching back as much as 60 metres from the high street. Each plot would have been fronted by a building that would have been both a workshop for making and selling goods, and a residence. The rear of each plot would initially have been used to grow food or keep animals, but it was common for buildings to gradually extend backwards. There would often be access lanes between plots, and over time these developed into narrow shopping streets. This is not just a feature of a medieval town: Melbourne has delightful ‘laneways’ that make it one of the most attractive of the many towns and cities that were planned in the 19th Century.

In a future post, I will look at how we can follow the best practice of the past to create a new town that looks like a town.

Planning sustainable communities

When I first started my career as an amateur neighbourhood planner, I was confused about the use of the word ‘sustainability’ in our local plan. I live in village of about a thousand people in South Worcestershire. The local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’) covers half the county and has a lot to say about sustainability. But it mysteriously attaches this term to its proposals to concentrate all new rural housing in what it terms ‘Category 1 villages’. These are larger villages which, like my own, have a shop and post office, a pub, and a village school. Category 1 villages come at the top of a hierarchy of rural settlements of decreasing size, with definitions of each successive category (2 to 4) included in the local plan.

Discussions of sustainable development usually begin by quoting the  UN report Our Common Future, which defines it as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since the population is growing, a key part of meeting future needs must include  feeding these extra mouths. How then could it be ‘sustainable’ to build large housing estates next to villages on fields which until then had been producing good crops of brassicas, potatoes and other vegetables? I discovered that developments of this kind were deemed ‘sustainable’ by the local plan because this supposedly reduced transport use compared with building on agricultural land in smaller villages. This idea of ‘transport sustainability’ seems to have originated from the 1990s, and appears in many local plans together with the related idea that there is a hierarchy of rural settlements.

I have never found any evidence to justify this idea of ‘transport sustainability’. It is instead probable that transport use is much the same in large and small villages: in both, almost all people commute to work by car, buy their groceries from urban supermarkets or on-line, and drive their children to school. But ‘transport sustainability’ is useful for developers because it provides a rationalisation for building high-priced housing estates of ‘luxury executive homes’ in larger villages within commuting range of cities. Needless to say, this policy is disliked by people who see their pleasant village turning into a suburban sprawl. But the policy is unpopular in many smaller villages too. This was confirmed for me when I went to a conference on neighbourhood planning. I found that half the attenders were from large villages that wished to prevent large housing estates being built, while the other half were from small villages that wanted more houses but were obstructed in this aim by their local plan. The people from small villages were concerned that without a small amount of new housing, they would be left with a declining and elderly population with minimum access to services. But all attenders at the conference agreed that what their communities needed was housing that met the specific needs of their community, particularly social rented or affordable houses to enable younger members of families to stay near their parents, and small manageable houses so that elderly people could move to smaller and more manageable houses within their own community.

Elderly and infirm people in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to another challenge: the decline of local services in villages, both large and small. The Rural Coalition has estimated that about a thousand village pubs and shops close each year in England. Even where shops remain, reductions in the remuneration of sub-postmasters is causing a decline in village postal services. Meanwhile, the Royal College of General Practitioners has predicted that many small (and therefore rural) GP practices will close because of changes in the NHS remuneration formula. In my own Category 1 village, a pub has recently closed, while the larger village up the road now lacks a shop and a post office. In other words, Category 1 villages are increasingly resembling category 2,3 and 4 villages.

This decline in services will have its greatest impact on the 10% of the rural population who lack their own transport - a group dominated by the very elderly. In the next 20 years, the ONS estimates that the number of people over the age of 80 in my part of Worcestershire will double. A high proportion of these will live alone and need support. It is unlikely that social care funding will rise to take account of this change. The burden of care will therefore, as now, fall on families and increasingly on local communities. This means that a major objective of neighbourhood planning must be to maintain social and family networks. New housebuilding in villages should therefore be of two kinds: smaller manageable houses so that very elderly people can downsize and remain within the communities where they have their friends and where they are known; and social rented housing so that the majority of young families who can not afford to buy a house can stay in their community close to their parents.

Another objective should be to maintain and expand voluntary support. Of course, many services operated by volunteers exist already in rural areas. In my area, several villages co-operate in running a day centre for the elderly, which draws attenders from 25 villages, brought to the centre by a large team of volunteer drivers. Many villages also have clubs and coffee-mornings which provide social links for very elderly people. But there are great variations between villages in the availability of volunteers and the organisational skills to develop their own local services. The people who contribute most to local organisations are generally those who identify strongly with their community and have a sense of mutual obligation to each other. This in turn seems to arise from the sense that they live in a special and unique place. This sense of place is undermined when villages are expanded with identikit housing estates, which make everywhere look alike. Where this happens, the mutual support characteristic of English villages gradually declines to the level found in our more impersonal suburbs.

So a major aim of planning in future should be create and maintain sustainable communities rather than ‘sustainable transport’. This would involve looking at each village not as a depository for luxury executive homes built to meet centrally-determined housing targets, but as a place in its own right, with its own need for particular kinds of housing. In many villages, this would probably include housing to enable families to live in proximity to provide support to each other, and housing to let elderly people move to more manageable dwellings within their own community.  

The horrors of planning 3: local plans

It took some time after I became a parish councillor to realise that planning departments of district councils do not actually do much planning as most of us would understand this term.

In everyday use, the word ‘planning’ means the activities of setting out an objective to be achieved at some defined point in the future, identifying the steps needed to achieve it, and specifying the resources required for each step. Effective planning does a lot more: it investigates the possible threats to the implementation of the plan and the preferred response to them, it estimates the scheduling of the various steps so that resource costs can be minimised, and it considers how the people involved in implementing the plan should be informed and trained. A lot can change after a plan is made, and so delays in implementation may result in action being based on obsolete data. So good management involves rapid planning followed by a timely implementation. There should also be review stages, so that the planning team can check progress and adapt the plan if this is required.

How much does the work of planning departments correspond to this definition? Planning departments have two main activities: they produce a ‘local plan’ for their area, which specifies where and what type of development should take place; and they recommend what should be done about applications to build, modify or demolish buildings. The two activities are related - permission to build is not usually recommended in areas not so specified in the local plan, while the local plan also defines some places as being ‘conservation areas’, in which there are tight restrictions on what can be built and what changes can be made to existing buildings.

The local plan-to-be in my part of England is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP)’ and covers the area of three local councils: Malvern Hills and Wychavon District and the City of Worcester. I call it a ‘plan-to-be’ because it is still being formally examined by a planning inspector appointed by the Government, after which, if he finds the plan ‘sound’, it will have the full legal force of a local plan. But until then, there is actually no local plan in force for the entire area, which means that, according to Government policy, almost anything can be built almost anywhere.

This situation has come about because of the inordinate time taken to complete the SWDP.  Work seems to have begun in 2010, followed by publication of a draft in 2011, followed by lots of consultation, followed by a new draft, followed by the planning inspector indicating that insufficient sites for new housing had been included, followed by another revision, followed in 2015 by the current round of ‘examination’ by the planning inspector. This length of time does not seem to be unusual for local plans. However, all this shows that the process of planning has become more important than the actual plan itself.

Why these delays? The problem lies in the way in which planning law now operates. Gaining planning permission to build houses on farmland results in a massive increase in the value of the land. The designation of areas for development in a local plan and the consequent granting of planning permission therefore has the effect of donating large sums of cash to selected individuals. This creates a sense of injustice among those refused planning permission, anger in communities which see their neighbourhoods despoiled, and a temptation for corruption among councillors and planners. As a result, planning has become a prolonged quasi-judicial process, with extensive periods of consultation, appeals, and examinations.

What of the contents of the SWDP? Well it certainly looks like a plan - there are high-sounding statements of objectives, maps, lists of ‘policies’ (ie quasi-laws which define what development can be permitted), and various estimates of population growth. But it fails the definition of ‘planning’ as set out above for several reasons. In particular, it is concerned only with ‘spatial planning’ - the allocation of land for specific purposes. This means that although the SWDP analyses the growing number of older people in South Worcestershire, it has nothing to say about the implications of this trend on local health and social services, the potential impact on the need for public transport, or how local communities can best cope with a larger elderly and infirm population. This is a product of ‘departmentalism’, or the way in which governments partition inter-dependent activities between different departments and agencies. Each of these then avoids trouble by keeping within its own area of responsibility. So healthcare is planned by the various local agencies of the NHS, social care and transport by the County Council, and spatial planning by the district councils. Each then generates their own separate sets of plans and strategies for their particular topic.

There are other problems with this spatial planning approach. By focussing on the allocation of land for specific purposes, local plans include nothing about the appearance of the whole place. So the policies in the SWDP relating to leisure and recreation are concerned with the use of community centres, village halls and playing fields because these all take place on defined bits of land. But the most popular recreational activity were I live (and probably in most of England) is walking in the countryside. This can hardly take place where extensive housing estates are built over fields and where woodlands become thin strips dividing various estates of suburban dwellings.

A further problem is that planning in England has become almost entirely reactive. Planners react to population change (including high rates of immigration), to speculative applications from developers, and, more generally, to the desire of most English people to own a house with a garden in a low-density suburb while also preserving the countryside. This can be seen in the way in which the planning authorities approve individual applications to build. Here is an example from my own village. Our primary school is large by village standards, with 140 pupils. It occupies a site near the parish church (the school was founded by the Church of England) which has gradually been built over as the school has expanded. There is now no room for further expansion on the current site. Expansion will be necessary in the near future because 75 new houses are being built in the village, while some smaller schools in neighbouring parishes will probably be closed and their children transferred to our village school. Fortunately, there is a decent-sized field next to the school that would be suitable for expansion. Good planning would therefore involve purchasing the land for the school or, at the very least, preventing it being used for anything that would impede expansion. However, the land is in private hands, and there is much more money to be made selling land for housing than selling land for school expansion. So the owner duly applied for planning permission for 14 new houses, which the District Council (against the advice of the parish council) has approved.

I do not believe these problems with local planning in England have come about because of any personal shortcomings among our district councillors or our local planners, who I have always found to be capable and willing to help members of the public. But, as I learnt when I was a social worker, the most capable and earnest people can have all their best efforts rendered ineffective when they have to cope within an unworkable system.

See also: The horrors of planning 1
                The horrors of planning 2

The horrors of planning No. 2: 'Housing Need'

You do not have to be exposed to the English planning system for long to realise that it exists primarily to designate acceptable sites for new housing. In my own area of South Worcestershire, the three district councils have prepared a draft local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ or ‘SWDP’), the bulk of which comprises long lists of potential housing sites in individual towns and villages, together with various justifications for their inclusion.

The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable. 

But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.

This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.

However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.

All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.

What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of  course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.

One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.

To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.

See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'

The horrors of planning No. 1: sustainable development

Before I became a parish councillor, I knew little about the world of town and country planning. In the last few years, I have struggled to make good this deficit - essential since the work of planners can protect what we value or, at worst, can result in ghastly edifices which assault the eye, the demolition of pleasant streets or the obliteration of precious countryside. I found that planning, like all professions, has its own language and assumptions. These are rarely questioned by practitioners and little understood by the rest of us. One such term is ‘sustainable development’. In the non-planning world, this has a reasonably clear meaning, inspired by the United Nations report of 1987 Our Common Future (often called the ‘Brundtland Report’). This defined ‘sustainable development’ to mean “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Sustainable development is the stated objective of the key planning document in England: the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This begins by quoting the definition in the Brundtland Report, while the forward by the then Minister of Planning states that “The purpose of planning is to help achieve sustainable development”. In addition, paragraph 14 states that:

“At the heart of the National Planning Policy Framework is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be seen as a golden thread running through both plan-making and decision-taking.”

The rest of the NPPF instructs local planning authorities (and planning inspectors in cases of appeals against refusal of planning permission) in how to implement ‘sustainable development’. However, in a remarkable verbal conjuring trick, it narrows the concept to the point of disappearance. So paragraph 14 continues by advising that:

“local planning authorities should positively seek opportunities to meet the development needs of their area; Local Plans should meet objectively assessed needs, with sufficient flexibility to adapt to rapid change, unless: any adverse impacts of doing so would significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits, when assessed against the policies in this Framework taken as a whole; or specific policies in this Framework indicate development should be restricted.”

So development (not even ‘sustainable development’ by this stage) will be approved unless there is significant and demonstrable reasons for not proceeding. By paragraph 47, any constraints on housing development are removed:

 “To boost significantly the supply of housing, local planning authorities should: use their evidence base to ensure that their Local Plan meets the full, objectively assessed needs for market and affordable housing in the housing market area, as far as is consistent with the policies set out in this Framework, including identifying key sites which are critical to the delivery of the housing strategy over the plan period; identify and update annually a supply of specific deliverable sites sufficient to provide five years worth of housing against their housing requirements with an additional buffer of 5%...”

A footnote defines the mysterious term ‘deliverable sites’ as ones that are:
    ”available now, offer a suitable location for development now, and be achievable with a realistic prospect that housing will be delivered on the site within five years and in particular that development of the site is viable”.

This commitment to what for practical purposes is unlimited development is bad news for rural villages that would prefer to remain villages. Paragraph 55 clarifies what ‘sustainable development’ means in this case:

 “To promote sustainable development in rural areas, housing should be located where it will enhance or maintain the vitality of rural communities. For example, where there are groups of smaller settlements, development in one village may support services in a village nearby. Local planning authorities should avoid new isolated homes in the countryside unless there are special circumstances such as: the essential need for a rural worker to live permanently at or near their place of work in the countryside; or where such development would represent the optimal viable use of a heritage asset or would be appropriate enabling development to secure the future of heritage assets; or where the development would re-use redundant or disused buildings and lead to an enhancement to the immediate setting; or the exceptional quality or innovative nature of the design of the dwelling.”

So a development is defined by the NPPF as ‘sustainable’ in a rural area if it is on the edge of a village, which will apparently ‘enhance the ‘vitality of rural communities’. I have heard councillors and planning officers using this very definition to propose that a large new housing estate is indeed ‘sustainable’ because it is on the edge of a reasonably-sized village.

I live in a rural parish with about 1400 residents. We are fortunate in having a primary school and high school, a shop and post office, a garage, some trading estates, a large sports centre and even a local radio station. So far, ‘sustainable development’ has meant building 51 houses on good farming land, with permission for another 14 on an old orchard. This process is being repeated in villages all over England, and the result will be to substantially reduce the farmland needed to feed current and future generations. The NPPF is therefore a thoroughly dishonest document, which adopts the fashionable terminology of ‘sustainability’ to justify what in reality is uncontrolled and destructive development.

Planning in Wonderland

Last week I went to a seminar on neighbourhood planning organised by our local Conservative MP, Harriet Baldwin. Like her previous seminar on rural broadband, it aimed to promote the achievements of the Government, but also revealed a great deal about how decisions are really made in our country.

The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.

After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.

The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.

Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.

See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor

How green was my village

England is the most crowded country on the mainland of Europe, with an average of 395 people/square kilometre. Yet there are still places in England where you can look around and see only hills, woods and fields, and where you can travel down narrow country lanes to small villages clustered round an ancient church. I live in one such village in West Worcestershire, where the flood plain of the River Severn meets the long ridge of wooded hills which reach North from the Malverns. Our village is not picture-perfect: there is no village green or duckpond, the village pub is closed, and we have a small industrial estate, a primary school and a high school. But the village is in a verdant setting of hills, woods and fields that is dear to all who live here.

So much of rural England survives because laws were passed in the 1940s to prevent destructive development. National parks, green belts, conservation areas and local planning authorities all date from this period. Development has of course taken place, but country villages have usually been preserved rather than replaced by speculative housing. All this is changing, and developers can now essentially build what they like where they like. In my village, the district council has approved an estate of 51 new houses on good quality land that has been farmed for over a thousand years. This was strongly opposed in the village, which would have preferred smaller infill developments to meet local housing need. I spoke on behalf of the Parish Council in the public session of the district council meeting to oppose the development. But it was nevertheless approved, largely because the district council has no alternative.

There is no alternative because the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in 2012 specifies ‘a presumption in favour of sustainable development’, and requires each district council to identify sites for housing in its local plan sufficient to meet the ‘housing need’ of its population for the next five years. But all the local plans that existed before the NPPF have now been superseded and none of their successors have yet been approved by the Secretary of State. District councils which have refused to give planning permission for unsuitable developments have found that planning inspectors have almost always overturned their decision, and that the building has gone ahead. In such cases, the district council is penalised financially by having to meet the costs of the applicant and by losing access to the funds usually paid by applicants to meet the additional expenditure (roads, schools, village halls etc) incurred by the local authority as a result of the new development. In such a climate, district councils can do little but try and negotiate the best deal they can with the developer and then approve the application.

We therefore have a parody of local democracy followed by a parody of a judicial process, which all works to enrich the corporations that build houses and supermarkets. An essential role for governments is to rationalise all this with hooray words like ‘sustainable’. The development in my village was deemed ‘sustainable’ because it will be built in a village with a reasonable range of local services. Never mind the loss of farming land to build 51 oil-fired houses, or the increase in the number of people who will need to commute by car to Worcester and more distant cities. ‘Sustainable’ has thus joined words like ‘modernisation’, ‘liberation’, and ‘choice’ which serve to cloak the darker designs of our politicians and their masters.

See also: Confessions of a parish councillor
Going local

Confessions of a parish councillor

It is now well over a year since I became a parish councillor for my small village in Worcestershire. Like most of my colleagues, I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Most such vacancies arise, I suspect, because new parish councillors find that this unpaid post demands impossibly large amounts of their time. But another factor may be the complexity of the issues facing parish councils, despite their almost total lack of powers. Planning is the most complex of all, not just because planning laws and regulations are difficult to grasp for non-experts, but because the operation of the planning system utterly contradicts the common sense of local people.

The centre-piece of the planning system is the so-called ‘local plan’, prepared by the planning departments of the district council. I use the term ‘so-called’ because local plans are anything but local. In my part of the country, three district councils have prepared a joint ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ (SWDP). This covers an area of 1274 square kilometres and a population of over 286,000. Local plans must conform with the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework and a plethora of other regulations. But most important of all, they are required by law to meet nationally-determined targets for building new houses. These in turn are estimated by the Office of National Statistics from predicted population trends and rates of ‘household formation’.

So the SWDP begins with statements of aspirations which meet current government policies such as energy saving, better waste disposal, and the mysteriously-vague term ‘sustainability’. This is followed by lists of sites judged suitable for ‘development’. These include sites for employment and retail, but most are for new housing estates to be built by one of the big housebuilding companies. In most cases, they will have already purchased and promoted these sites for development. Finally, the SWDP identifies the implications of proposed developments for employment, roads and other local services.

Parish councils do not have the power to vary these ‘local plans’, but they can comment on them as part of a formal process of consultation. The plan is then forwarded to a planning inspector who holds a quasi-judicial hearing to rule on whether the plan is ‘sound’ (ie internally-consistent and in accord with national policies). Developments on individual sites, even if positively-identified in the local plan, still require planning permission from the district council. Once again, parish councils can comment on these before a decision is made. If the district council refuses planning permission, the applicant can appeal to a planning inspector, who will conduct a hearing and then make the final decision.

This system, at first sight, looks rational and fair. But the discussions at parish councils and with its citizens illustrate a real conflict of culture and belief. Parish councillors are usually people who are longstanding residents of their community and know every road, hedge and ditch and (between them) almost every resident in the parish. Parish councillors’ sense of identity is therefore strongly connected to their parish. They are aware of what makes their community distinctive and different from others. In a country parish, they will therefore try to maintain its familiar local features and its rural character while also striving to improve the services available to its residents.

District planning officers have an outlook that is almost the exact opposite of that of parish councillors. Planning officers are professional local government officers who are responsible for ensuring that the local plans they help formulate are in accord with national policies. Many planning officers are transient: they know that promotion will often depend on moving elsewhere - perhaps to the other end of the country. In a rural district, they are responsible for many dispersed communities, and can not hope to have the kind of expert local knowledge possessed by a parish councillor or a local resident. Lacking a long-term commitment to a particular community, they probably regard parish councillors’ passionate defence of their village against development as a self-interested protection of property values. At worst, we are seen as backward peasants standing in the way of ‘progress’.

By contrast, the building corporations speak the planners’ language. Their planning applications meet the complex requirements of national and local planning policy, and are backed up by various specialist reports on drainage, environmental impact, transport impact and so on. These specialist reports are commissioned by the developers from various consultancy agencies who (I suspect) generally support applications by those who pay their fees.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local plans end up proposing lots of new housing, and that individual planning applications to build new estates and supermarkets are usually passed by district councils and (should there be an appeal) by the planning inspectors. The planning system, in other words, is part of an great unstoppable engine of government which works to make all parts of the country look the same, to empty our high streets, and to destroy what is special and unique about each town and country in England.