Stop the talking, start delivering!
STOP THE TALKING, START DELIVERING!
Revisited. Revised. Maybe even regurgitated. It appears to be the case that the Government has a strategy for reviewing housing reviews and strategies.
Article prepared for the Nottingham Evening Post’s Commercial Property section by Freeth Cartwright’s Mark Flatman
There’s the Housing and Regeneration Bill, the Homes and Communities Agency, the Cave Review of Social Housing Regulation, the Hills Report into Social Housing, a Five-year Plan (National), Homes for the Future Green Paper and reviews looking into local authority strategic housing roles and various regional housing strategies.
In November, the East Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy (Examination in Public) Panel report also came out, with the suggested number of houses going up in various parts of the region. It broadly endorsed the growth being proposed and increased it further in some cases.
The Callcutt Review is one of the latest national reports, with John Callcutt, former head of English Partnerships, publishing a review initiated by former Secretary of State Ruth Kelly to look at how the UK house-building industry can “deliver more affordable and sustainable homes in the quickest and most effective way”.
Another review and yet another gauntlet that has been thrown down asking developers to deliver and deliver quickly. However, the report appears to gloss over the weaknesses of the current planning regime and focuses too much on the role played by house-builders. In my view, it clearly misses the crux of the problem.
The fundamental problem is the planning process. The “new” system introduced by the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Order Act is proving to be little more that the king’s new clothes - window dressing if you like but, unfortunately, using opaque glass!
The system, for all its pretences, is now more unwieldy, burdensome and slower, despite the superficial cosmetics of the Planning Delivery Grant system, which provides extra funding and incentives to local planning authorities to speed up the planning system and deliver sustainable communities.
The word from the coalface is that the system is clearly creaking at the seams and it will get worse before there is any prospect of improvement largely because of the anticipated deluge of housing planning appeals that are likely to emerge. Driven by frustration, house-builders will not be prepared to await the outcome in many years time of the leviathan that has become the Local Development Framework process. What are some of the solutions? It has to be the case that the planning appeal process is speeded up and the whole planning system needs to be properly resourced in order to effect any substantial, and workable, change. What is needed is strong, co-ordinated action by central and local government. Reviews are all well and good but let’s stop the talking and start delivering.
Mark Flatman is Director of the Planning Unit at Freeth Cartwright.
ends - 12 December 2007