I’ll fast-track beautiful homes, says minister
NEW homes that conform to local residents’ ideas of beauty would be fasttracked through the planning system under radical proposals drawn up by a Government-commissioned review.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Robert Jenrick, the Housing Secretary, discloses that he is considering a new “fast track for beauty”, which would allow homeowners or developers to gain planning permission more quickly if they are seeking to build a type of structure that a community has already said would be acceptable in their area.
The proposal is contained in a major report by the Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, following a year-long inquiry into the planning system and how to increase the use of new homes with “high-quality” designs.
This newspaper understands the review will recommend using images of buildings and roads to prescribe the types of buildings that are acceptable in each area – rather than relying solely on written rules.
The commission has separately called for local authorities and planning inspectors to publicise unsightly or poorly-designed applications that they turn down, in order to encourage
better-looking schemes. It is also expected to call for the Government and local authorities to plant two million trees to line streets around the country.
In the run-up to the report’s publication on Thursday, Mr Jenrick said he wanted “treelined streets as the norm again” and “zero-carbon homes being built as standard within five years”. The commission was originally chaired by Sir Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, who died earlier this month aged 75.
Nicholas Boys Smith, founder of the Create Streets think tank, who succeeded Sir Roger as chairman last April, said: “Most new developments are mediocre or poor. We are scarring our country. The consistent sense of frustration at most of what we’re building was painful. In the report we will call for nothing less than a new development and planning framework. However, we set out, we hope, very practical and achievable steps to get there.”
The commission’s proposal of a “fast track for beauty” comes after an interim report stated the panel wanted to
“explore in more detail” whether it might be possible to “permit small developments specifically designed to advance beauty, and which comply with design guidance, to make speedy progress through the planning system.”
Today Mr Jenrick states: “Beauty should become the natural result of working within our planning system, not the exception.” Mr Jenrick, who was appointed to the role by Boris Johnson last year, says there has been a “misconception” among housebuilders “that quality needs to be the enemy of supply.
“Evidence shows that those developments of the highest quality and the most attractive designs are approved more quickly, sell faster and are the most enduringly popular.”