Planning for new homes in rural areas
Government proposals to relax planning controls for the building of new homes in rural areas, where planning permission has traditionally been refused, have been widely reported in the media.
John Forsyth, Partner at Roger Tym & Partners, says “it is difficult to know if the headline has run away with the story, which actually makes some very sensible points. Hopefully, the current problems in the housing market are not creating an atmosphere of panic.”
There is no doubt that there is a need for more housing, and particularly for more affordable housing, in rural areas. The planning system needs to be much more effective at strategic and local levels at planning and delivering housing. The key question is how to achieve the right balance within in each town and village, to build genuinely sustainable communities.
We must achieve this balance across rural areas by considering all three strands of sustainability – economic, social and environmental. New housing has a key part to play but must be linked to jobs, schools, and other facilities for the long-term future of rural areas.
Recent work in Devon, for example, has demonstrated the potential to take a rounded, integrated view of what each settlement needs, and how to engage local communities in the debate. Such approaches help planning to be proactive, and should certainly mean a more sophisticated approach to identifying and delivering sites for affordable housing where it is needed.
The Taylor Report, published last year, made 48 sensible recommendations and said that no-one has argued for the substantive relaxation of planning controls to allow a development “free-for-all”.
We do need a full range of mechanisms, including revised planning powers and financial resources to deliver small housing sites in villages and balanced extensions to market towns. John says “I would be sceptical about the need, even today, to provide incentives to land owners to release sites, and the point surely is not to scrap planning powers but to make them more useful.”
More than six million people in Britain live in rural communities where local authorities rarely allow new properties to be built. Countryside protection groups, whilst broadly supportive of the proposed reforms, they have urged caution, warning that significant relaxation of planning curbs is unlikely to go hand in hand with sensitive development.
The changes, revealed in February 2009, included:
- the identification of new building sites in every village and hamlet where affordable housing is needed
- sweeping powers to overrule normal planning curbs in protected areas
- incentives for farmers to sell land to developers
- creating new communities on the outskirts of market towns, similar to Poundbury, the Prince of Wales's “model village”.
John Forsyth, Partner, Roger Tym & Partners.
