By Neil Merrick
The government has urged local authorities to relax their approach to the planning system and identify more sites in small villages where homes could be built for local families.
The government has urged local authorities to relax their approach to the planning system and identify more sites in small villages where homes could be built for local families.Landowners could be offered incentives to provide sites where planners could grant ‘exceptional’ permission for small-scale housing developments, even where the land is covered by countryside protection policies.
The government’s long-awaited response to last year’s review into issues facing rural communities, carried out by Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor, promised ‘a refreshed approach’ to planning. This would also allow rural businesses to expand more easily.
A £1m competition is being launched to encourage medium-sized towns to build sustainable neighbourhoods. This is partly to avoid creating the soulless out-of-town housing and retail estates criticised in the Taylor report.
The review, commissioned by Gordon Brown soon after he became prime minister almost two years ago, warned that homes in rural areas would remain beyond the reach of most households unless planners allowed extensions to existing towns with shops and other facilities.
Taylor described the government’s report, published on March 25, as ‘an important day for the countryside’.
Housing minister Margaret Beckett said the changes would give local communities greater flexibility. She said they were ‘the key to getting the balance right between protection and development’.
Research published last year by the National Housing Federation showed that an average of 14,494 people join council waiting lists in rural areas each month.
NHF chief executive David Orr said this week’s proposals would ‘go a long way’ towards reversing the spiral of decline. ‘Providing incentives for landowners to release more land for housing will save shops and schools from closure, and prevent many villages becoming virtual ghettos of the very rich and elderly,’ said Orr.
Beckett promised that a single new planning policy statement, replacing five existing sets of guidance, would be published soon. The government also hopes to expand community land trusts, which aim to ensure shared ownership housing is retained for local families.
Stuart Burgess, chair of the Commission for Rural Communities, said he welcomed changes to the planning system that encourage ‘a more positive approach from regional and local decision-makers to providing affordable homes and jobs in rural areas’.
Kate Gordon, senior planner at the Campaign to Protect England, said the danger in offering incentives to landowners was that it could lead to an ‘unplanned approach’, with sites for small numbers of homes in the wrong places. More emphasis should be placed on redeveloping brownfield sites rather than green land. ‘It will be vital that the government puts in place safeguards to avoid any abuse of the planning system,’ she added.
