Getting Dick to go Viking on the system - it’s the only way
As we suggested yesterday about the planning system:
Freedom from the system itself will only apply to those bureaucratic micturation schemes. Smaller scale - the sort of market led development that actually leads to economic growth - will still be hamstrung by this system. This system that we now all agree needs to be slaughtered because not even government can do anything while it exists.
As today’s evidence confirms:
Behind every farm gate, there’s a glut of red tape. The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has warned that farmers, and rural communities more broadly, are facing lengthy waits to secure planning permission, sometimes of five years or more. To illustrate this, the CLA sent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to 38 councils in rural areas. Of the 35 that replied, 14 had stalled planning applications from before 2020 still waiting for approval. Dorset council, for instance, took an average of 1,372 days, or three years and nine months, to issue a decision. In one case in south Norfolk, a 2007 application for a recreational fishing lake took seven years to process before apparently stalling in 2014. Victoria Vyvyan, the CLA’s president, said “our planning system is in crisis and it’s stagnating growth in the countryside.”
It’s not the grands projets that we need to free up. They’re largely enough Ministers looking for an opportunity to gurn for the cameras while cutting a red tape anyway. It’s the basic meat and two veg of the economy that needs to be allowed to happen. Each owner of each asset improving the value of it marginally - the very thing which in aggregate leads to that desired economic growth.
We have in the past suggested that the entire planning system just needs to be blown up. Proper blown up, kablooie. Or, alternatively, Dick the Butcher gets funded:
Which brings us back to Dick and his solution. We think it possible that the GoFundMe will be successful enough for a double headed axe so that he can go properly Viking on that system.
We don’t mind which, we can see entertainment value in either and both. But we are certain that one of them does need to happen. If not then Britain will continue to stagnate as no one is actually able to do anything.
Tim Worstall