New homes battleground

A
new homes planning free-for-all, playing fields to disappear, flood risk, famine, pestilence and a plague of locusts. Even the Women’s Institute’s concerns got an airing – a case of baking your cake and eating it.

We are talking about the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and the furore it has caused.

Localism got branded a NIMBYs Charter. Now the NPFF means England’s green acres will be encased in concrete and crested newts impaled by piling, with the buzz phrase now Housebuilders Charter. Make up your mind.

It is actually somewhere in between, which is where it should be. When the Localism bill was introduced, handing power to the parish pump, there were housebuilding industry fears that winning over local authorities in well-heeled shires, despite the sweetener of the New Homes Bonus, would become even more difficult. The NPPF reminds councils they have a duty to shape their communities proactively, balancing new housing, including delivery of both affordable and retirement homes, with economic, social and environmental needs.

It is scandalous that so many have not drawn up local plans, but wearily predictable. If housebuilders did not come knocking, would councils, with chronic housing shortages and economic stagnation, invite them in?

I sat in a Sussex parish council meeting and heard residents talk of new homebuilders “sniffing around” like enemy soldiers on reconnaissance. Council officers warned they had to identify some sites, but this did not wash with locals safe in their homes in the countryside, protecting their property values.

Planning minister Bob Neill is absolutely right. The protest against the NPPF is a “carefully choreographed smear campaign”. The National Trust boasts about 100,000 signatures on its petition against the planning reforms. Well 100,000 people can be wrong when the Trust’s director-general Fiona Reynolds tells them “millions of acres are at risk.”

The Council to Protect Rural England (CPRE) showed its true colours on Twitter in response to HBF figures: ‘Astonishing claptrap by Home Builders Federation. Any old spin for a profit.’

It is the word profit that says it all. I assume CPRE members in their day jobs would not countenance looking to make a profit.

Housebuilders are portrayed by conservationists as robber barons. They are no philanthropists and make good money, but helping to house the nation, while subsidising the provision of affordable homes and local infrastructure is nobler than many other professions I can think of.

The campaigners are incredulous that housebuilders hold large land banks, believing they headed for farmyards with fat chequebooks the day after the draft NPPF was published. It’s called securing the basic raw materials required to run your business. The convenient commercial ignorance and hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Apparently the word sustainable invites a development free-for-all because there is no strict definition. No, the lack of a strict definition means planning will remain what it has always been; a tortuous process with lawyers the winners. It is not hard to argue that putting a trowel in the ground is unsustainable, disturbing the natural habitat of the earthworm.

There will be some unsightly local battles and placards waved, but essentially nothing will change.

Rupert Bates is editorial director of www.whathouse.co.uk