Tory Planning Policy “A NIMBY’s Charter”

Homebuilding & Renovating, the UK’s leading self-build magazine and website, responds to last week’s launch of the Conservative Party’s Green Paper on planning policy, “Open Source Planning”

 Jason Orme, Editor of Homebuilding & Renovating magazine and experienced self-builder, says: 

“While it’s easy in principle to welcome the view that local people should have control over their local development strategies, the reality of giving neighbours and in particular parish councils a bigger say in deciding whether a development goes ahead is a recipe for disaster.

“Any developer or self-builder – indeed anyone with experience of the planning system – knows that the default setting for any locally elected bodies to the chance of a development in their area is ‘no’. The Conservatives’ promise of cash in return for support – by siphoning off part of the Section 106 agreement settlement to those directly affected – will reduce this part of the planning process to one governed by ‘bribes for building’.

“The Conservatives also make some rather strange assumptions about self-build. The paper claims to want to give more power to self-builders to ‘increase the creation of successful communities’. It seems to believe that most self-builders build as part of a group and would be happy to only be able to sell their finished home for no more than one third of its finished value. 

“Another headline grabber is the proposed abolition of ‘garden-grabbing’ – almost certainly a sop to the tabloid hatred of developers building flats on large side and back gardens. The reality is that the removal of the classification of garden land as brownfield land will have the unheralded impact of removing a key source of self-build plots.”