Who Would be a Planner?

How often do you hear someone tell the media: “I know we need to be building more new homes, but this isn’t the right place for them”?   

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge facing our planners and our politicians.  Everyone knows that there is a shortage of houses, caused by smaller household sizes and a rising population; and everyone would like housing to be more affordable, especially in rural areas, to enable young people to remain living and working in the communities from which they come. 

And yet many people lose sight of that when a proposal is made to build some new homes within a community. 

Now, I would be the first to recognise that the way that some developers act can exacerbate this feeling.  There is sometimes a perception that some operators fail to balance their perfectly justified right to run a profitable business with their responsibilities to the communities in which they are building. 

But equally, many of us – especially those of us who live and work in the local community - feel passionately that providing new homes in a responsible manner is good for those local communities, creates employment, and funds investment in economic and social wellbeing. 

Into this mix steps the planning authorities – democratic bodies which make the final decision.  A house builder can put forward a case, but it cannot grant itself planning permission; that is the job of the local authority, and rightly so. 

A survey published this week revealed that the majority of the population have little or no knowledge of the planning process, and in particular of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).   

This might sound like an obscure piece of bureaucratic gobbledygook, but in fact is the document, agreed by democratically-elected politicians, which governs the decisions that are made about where all this much-needed new housing should be built.  I would recommend anyone who is interested in how Government proposes to meet our housing need to Google NPPF and find out more.

The research showed that uncertainty among the general population about planning ‘grey areas’ is fuelling the housing crisis, delaying or obstructing housing from being built on appropriate sites. 

The survey also found that the vast majority of the population overestimate how much of the UK is urban – something which fuels comments about ‘concreting over the entire countryside’.  In actual fact, just 7 per cent of the country is urban, and that includes the huge conurbations of London, Manchester, the West Midlands and Leeds/Sheffield.   

In Norfolk the proportion is much lower.  Surely we can find some space in our county to ensure that everyone has a decent home to live in.  That is what the planners are tasked with doing, and we should give them our support.