‘They knocked down our old house in three hours,’ says a friend who has embarked on what he says is a conventional rebuild, nothing Grand Designs about it, on the south coast. ‘But it’s taking forever to get planning permission for the new one. They want reports on everything, from bats to highway impacts: you’d think we’re trying to build a whole huge housing estate.’
And if you do happen to be in the business of building whole huge housing estates, you’ll be eager to know whether Rachel Reeves’s reforms and ‘mandatory targets’ – aimed at delivering 1.5 million new homes in this parliament – will put rockets under the planning system or run straight into a brick wall of nimbyism, exacerbated by lack of capacity and adverse market forces.
What am I talking about? Shortly after Reeves’s speech on Monday, I spoke to a northern housebuilder who used to be a planner himself. Under Labour in the 2000s, he recalled, local authorities were well staffed, there was EU money to be had and planning decisions were often settled on an exchange of emails. If that all sounds a bit cosy, apparently it kept the pipeline flowing. Then came Tory ‘cuts, cuts, cuts’ combined with ‘incredible amounts of new paperwork’ addressing issues such as ‘nutrient neutrality’ and ‘biodiversity net gains’. Approvals slowed to a glacial pace and many planning officers took early retirement, leaving a gap that Labour’s pledge to recruit and train 300 new ones could take years to fill.
Meanwhile social media enables nimbyists to form larger and louder groups: every greenfield development will be fiercely opposed, there aren’t enough brownfield and greyfield sites, and councils will back away from controversial approvals even for sites that are already inked on local plans.
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