Sorry, no, these planning reforms are terrible
We have a very simple test about planning laws and reforms. We might even say that it’s simplistic. If whatever the new system is does not allow the building of what was considered the bare, basic, minimum a century ago then it’s a bad reform.
That bare basic minimum we described here. Council houses for the working man should be decent 3 bedders, living room and parlour, on quarter acre gardens. That’s just the minimum the 1920s decided upon for those Homes for Heroes. We’re a much richer nation now so we should have more housing. More housing as in more housing for each person or family, not just more houses. That sort of housing density is, in the modern measurement, 8 to 10 per hectare (depends upon how you count roads and pavements and so on).
So, the new announcements:
Building at “gentle densities”, of 40 or 50 homes per hectare, as the new policy supports
That’s not what we would call gentle densities. That’s cheek by jowl chicken shacks on postage stamps.
We also have the at least century long battle about flats:
It is going to be much easier to knock down existing houses and replace them with blocks of flats as long as they are no more than double the footprint of the original house and leave a garden at least half as big as before.
Expect a lot of modern and Victorian housing to go and to be replaced with three or four storey modern flats.
Flats are fine. But as we’ve also pointed out, where are you putting the associated country cottages? No, it’s not true that Europeans live in flats. Europeans live in flats plus the country place. That can be something like the German arrangement of a grand shed on a grand allotment, the Czech chalupa, the Polish dzialka, the Swedish lakeside cottage and a quarter share of Granny’s old cottage in the boonies in Latin Europe. But that European system really is “flat plus” not “flat only”. You know, like rich British people have, the place in town and one in country. But Europe has this for a quarter, a third of the population…..”housing is a technology and technologies only work when all the moving parts are present”.
That British solution to the housing technology problem always has been the suburban des res - house with front and back garden of some size. Further, any social history (say, David Kynaston’s cullings from the Mass Observation project) show that whenever asked the people say that’s what they want and the planners and the architects say they’re going to get flats. Flats without that other necessary part of the European technology, the country place.
The British planning and land use system is so bad currently that this liberation, this freeing from the constraints, still leaves it illegal to build what was considered the bare basic minimum a century ago. Which means that it’s not a liberation, not a freeing from constraints.
This is going to sound like a very restrictive and simple, even simplistic, definition of what would be a good enough - no, not perfect, but good enough - planning system. One which allowed the construction of housing similar to numbers 100 to 182, north side of the road, on Englishcombe Lane in Bath. If it’s not legal to build that bare minimum council house of the 1920s then the system’s not good enough. So, no, this new system is not good enough.
Of course, we could also just build flats and then permit ten to 15 million country cottages and then we really all would be Europeans.
Tim Worstall