Rush to build in countryside creates the worst of all worlds

BATTLES over planning law are nothing new. First time buyers call for more affordable homes in areas where they want to live. Countryside campaigners and conservationists speak out against unwelcome developments in sensitive spots. And the planning authorities try to steer a middle course, meeting demand from buyers, placating developers who threaten to pursue costly appeals and devising bulletproof housing strategies to control development without stifling it.

But if the battles of the past over new homes and where they should be built look bloody, it is fair to say that those coming down the track are likely to be far more damaging and spark a great deal more anger. At its heart the Government’s strategy is laudable – to build back better in the wake of the coronavirus crisis and remove some of the blocks on development which mean targets for the number of new homes needed are routinely and consistently missed.

But in apparent frustration at the way councils currently perform the task of deciding on those targets, ministers plan to take it out of local hands and use instead an algorithm to make the calculation. That’s a mistake. You might have thought that having deployed an algorithim to decide on exam grades for children who could not take A-levels and GCSEs due to Covid-19 this Government would have learned its lesson. Apparently not.

As a mark of how unpopular this policy is, particularly in rural parts of southern England, Conservative MPs – from ex-Prime Minister Theresa May downwards – have not been backward in coming forward to express their disappointment with the government.

Today their fears are backed up with research from the Devon branch of the CPRE, who tell the Western Morning News that the impact on our region is likely to be extremely negative, covering parts of the landscape with homes that will suburbanise the countryside, yet fail to solve the obvious need for more affordable property in the right places.

Damian Green, former deputy to Theresa May when she was PM, summed up the issue in the Commons on Thursday. He was talking about his own constituency in Kent; but his warning holds good for pretty much every rural district which is being asked to take many more homes that it would ever have been expected to. “We are in danger of turning the Garden of England into a patio,” he said.

This is not a simple “not in my back yard kind” of protest, however. If it were, ministers could justifiably resist it by suggesting those opposed to their plans were happily established in their own country homes and didn’t want others spoiling the view, thank you very much. Although that may be true in some cases, the real worry is that all this policy will do is give a green light for costly homes in places where they are not needed yet spectacularly fail to solve the housing crisis.

The watchword for new development must surely be to build where there are jobs and facilities for the people who will buy the homes. That is not what is likely to happen with this proposal, however. The Government needs to think again.