Great news: a team led by Boyer Planning has won consent at appeal for 38 homes on a reserve housing site in Mole Valley District, Surrey, on behalf of Linden Wates (Dorking) Ltd. The site includes affordable homes and will help meet a local housing shortage. But it has struck me that this case underlines the current tangled state of the UK’s planning system.
For those unfamiliar with planning, let me explain….A ‘reserve allocation’ is land identified as suitable for development, but which isn’t released by a local council until they have to. Sites can remain allocated but undeveloped for a long time – the Mole Valley site had been a reserve site for nearly 30 years.
With a housing shortfall to address, Mole Valley Council eventually released the site in late 2009. But after the General Election, when the new Secretary of State Eric Pickles said he would abolish Regional Strategies, Mole Valley reversed their decision, saying they no longer felt compelled to meet their housing targets. This move was enthusiastically endorsed by local residents.
That’s where we got involved. At the three day Public Inquiry last month, we proved the area needed this site to maintain sufficient housing levels, that the council had already committed to housing targets in their Core Strategy before the Election, and that this commitment was binding.
We won the case, and Boyer’s client is delighted – but chronic uncertainty in the planning system remains. Following Cala Homes’ successful challenge to Pickles, on the grounds that Regional Strategies can only be abolished by legislation, the Localism Bill is now winding its way through Parliament committees. But even when the bill becomes law, I predict more legal challenges ahead as developers struggle to make the system work. Government ministers are expressing their frustration at negative attitudes to development, yet they fail to realise it’s their own doing: local authorities are misguidedly interpreting localism as ‘do what the locals want’, not ‘build what the local area needs’.
Thus, despite the Government saying it wants to build more homes, sites are quietly being ‘de-allocated’ and thousands of houses are not being built. I strongly believe the Government should recognise the need for greater strategic control to ensure local councils make and respect proper commitments in their Core Strategies, and not use the current confusion to create further housing shortage.
The state we’re in
Great news: a team led by Boyer Planning has won consent at appeal for 38 homes on a reserve housing site in Mole Valley District, Surrey, on behalf of Linden Wates (Dorking) Ltd. The site includes affordable homes and will help meet a local housing shortage. But it has struck me that this case underlines the current tangled state of the UK’s planning system.
For those unfamiliar with planning, let me explain….A ‘reserve allocation’ is land identified as suitable for development, but which isn’t released by a local council until they have to. Sites can remain allocated but undeveloped for a long time – the Mole Valley site had been a reserve site for nearly 30 years.
With a housing shortfall to address, Mole Valley Council eventually released the site in late 2009. But after the General Election, when the new Secretary of State Eric Pickles said he would abolish Regional Strategies, Mole Valley reversed their decision, saying they no longer felt compelled to meet their housing targets. This move was enthusiastically endorsed by local residents.
That’s where we got involved. At the three day Public Inquiry last month, we proved the area needed this site to maintain sufficient housing levels, that the council had already committed to housing targets in their Core Strategy before the Election, and that this commitment was binding.
We won the case, and Boyer’s client is delighted – but chronic uncertainty in the planning system remains. Following Cala Homes’ successful challenge to Pickles, on the grounds that Regional Strategies can only be abolished by legislation, the Localism Bill is now winding its way through Parliament committees. But even when the bill becomes law, I predict more legal challenges ahead as developers struggle to make the system work. Government ministers are expressing their frustration at negative attitudes to development, yet they fail to realise it’s their own doing: local authorities are misguidedly interpreting localism as ‘do what the locals want’, not ‘build what the local area needs’.
Thus, despite the Government saying it wants to build more homes, sites are quietly being ‘de-allocated’ and thousands of houses are not being built. I strongly believe the Government should recognise the need for greater strategic control to ensure local councils make and respect proper commitments in their Core Strategies, and not use the current confusion to create further housing shortage.