Improving the planning system

IWANT TO START by saying thanks to those who have reached out to me since I announced I was standing down in May. This included a nice letter from the former ‘Vicar’ of this Parish Geoffrey Willett, somebody who I admire greatly.

As I am standing down, I thought I would use some of my final articles to give some thoughts and opinions on the local challenges we face and how these might be addressed.

I will start with the subject of planning – something that I have written about more than anything else in my 28 years and which will continue I believe to be a hot topic moving forward.

The development of Markfield and Stanton as communities has been an ongoing process over many centuries. Mostly slow organic growth over many years reflecting the needs of the local community, until the 70’s when this growth accelerated, especially the housing growth associated with the various Fitchett developments. It has never been a surprise that people would want to live here, especially once the M1 was built, giving fast access to the UK’s road network. It’s always been a good place to live, close enough to key population centres but also right on the edge of the Charnwood Forest, and as a result it will always be attractive to developers.

For the majority of my time on the Borough Council the pressure from developers was largely managed by a combination of national and regional planning policy and effective local government at both a Borough and County level. Housing targets while always contentious were never as toxic as they are today. The reason for that toxicity was that the current Government increased by a significant number the requirement for new houses in local authority areas, ‘build! build! build!’ was the mantra. It also increased the burdens on Councils to deliver this housing whether in the right places or not. At the same time funding pressures in local government meant that resources to manage the planning process dwindled and planning and highway functionality was impaired.

So toxic had the increased housing targets become, that the present Government has now changed tack and is pushing for the abolition of them. I cannot help but think this has more to do with the rank unpopularity of the present Government, but it is at least helpful and if implemented will allow for a period of much needed reflection. We do though face a housing problem in England, that can be seen in the increased prices for land and homes, which means home ownership is more out of reach for people today than it has been for decades. This is sadly combined with the fact that social housing provision is inadequate and that council housing (once a genuine housing option for local people) is slowly disappearing, denying local people a genuine choice.

Developers’ resources

Sadly today, housing policy has largely been outsourced to major housing developers who have the resources to drive policy in the direction they choose to maximise their own profits. This was made clear to me when I attended and spoke at the recent planning appeal hearing against the prospective developers of the land north of Ashby Road. I was struck by the huge resources the developer was throwing at this appeal to the Governments inspector. It was an abundance of resource that in reality, Hinckley and Bosworth could never match in defending its correct decision to refuse the developer planning permission.

So I believe most people can agree that things need to change, the present solutions do not work as they undermine local communities and encourage speculative developers such as we are seeing on Markfield Road in Field Head. So for what it’s worth, this is what I think should happen.

Discount for locals

Firstly I do think we need a more robust understanding of housing needs and not just the need to own a property but also an ability to socially rent at an affordable price. This need should be identified down to local communities in a fair and transparent way. We need to ensure local people who grow up in a local community have an ability to remain in that community with decent housing. One way of doing this is to ensure that when new housing is built in a community, those living and with roots in that community should be given the best incentives like a 15% discount to be able to purchase or rent these new houses.

I do think that local communities should be tasked with identifying where it wants any development to take place to meet its own local demand but also some general population growth. Should a local community like Markfield or Stanton identify and set that out correctly, that should be it. No other development should proceed for as long as that process remains valid. And it must be longer than 2 years or even 5 years as proposed. So in essence I believe in local neighbourhood plans with even stronger and longer lasting protections than we have today. And neighbourhood plans that can cross authority boundaries if in doing so it clearly relates to the community in question.

Greater confidence

If every community in England was tasked with doing this, we would go some way to addressing the problems we face and we would involve many more local people in doing so. We would also give much greater confidence to local communities that the planning system was working with them and not against them. Such plans would also be able to influence the type of housing required and support the development of new Council houses for local people.

Another major concern today that I fully share, is that new housing simply does not deliver enough mitigations to compensate communities. It can mean a struggle to get children into local schools, bigger class sizes or a longer waits to see a GP, this cannot be right. It also appears far too easy for developers to wriggle out of promises they make. This needs tightening up with proper penalties for failing to deliver for communities and ensuring new housing is not a burden. I think local communities would be more accepting of new development if the gains were more transparent and up front from the beginning.

Alongside those local community plans, we need proper regional infrastructure planning so that roads and public transport match up to the developments, so that things actually work and people can get to where they need to be. It cannot be right that cash strapped local authorities are effectively bidding for money from developers to fund road improvements that barely improve matters and do not substantially plan ahead. We shouldn’t always be accepting second best.

New settlements

My final suggestion would be that we cannot simply expect to keep squeezing more housing onto established settlements and changing the very nature of them. If we are to seriously address the need for more housing on the scales suggested, we urgently need to build more new settlements which can be purpose built with infrastructure to match. That is what happened the last time the UK was faced with a major housing crisis following the Second World War. New settlements will not drain existing resources and can be designed to work with the local landscape and features.

Planning will always remain controversial. What we need to do is find a way of ensuring broad community support for development that ensures future generations have quality places to live. The system as it stands will not deliver that, it is just building up resentment, unaffordable properties, and an absence of choice for local people. I think that some if not all the suggestions above will help address these problems which is why being cynical for a moment they probably will not happen. Still the refresh of the Markfield Neighbourhood plan is soon to get underway and a call for volunteers to help in this, is being made. Its an opportunity in a small way to help shape the future for the community.