Why the government makes our streets a little uglier

You would be forgiven, while walking down the street, for not stopping at every lamppost to read the hastily printed notices fastened to our street furniture. When you walk into a pub, restaurant, nail salon or shop, you would also be forgiven for completely ignoring the hastily printed letter from the council regarding planning application number 26/03570/FULL, for example. When erected on street furniture, the ink usually runs, and the notices collect dust, soot, cigarette stubs and chewing gum. Rather ugly indeed.

What are these eminently ignorable wastes of fine British fir? They are planning notices. When the idea was first introduced in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, before the internet was widely used and when newspaper readership was much higher, there was a push to increase public engagement with planning applications. It was the beginning of the end for a broadly pro-development civilisation, but I digress.

Today, the rules state clearly that notice of any planning application should be displayed prominently and publicly on the land to which the application relates, or, if that is not possible, as close to it as physically possible. The notice must remain displayed for at least 21 days after the application has been submitted, using very bright colours, or at least as bright as an A4 sheet of paper fresh from the office printer will allow. Local authorities are also statutorily obliged to check regularly whether the notice is still present, undefaced and legible. That’s correct, reader: your council tax is paying for people to check whether a piece of paper is properly affixed to a lamppost.

In the age of the internet, such a manual approach to planning is one of the many reasons why we find ourselves in a housing crisis. Local authorities impose menial but frustrating costs on replacing your windows, if you live in a listed building, or whacking a conservatory in your own garden, even if it is not generally visible. Even when British people attempt to improve the public realm, the state mandates that they add further garbage to it.

Now, you may be asking: why is the author so upset about a piece of paper? It is not as troublesome as the national debt, the crushing tax burden, the slow rotting of our culture or the failing public services upon which seemingly more and more people are becoming reliant. A fair point. But what would we lose if these notices were removed? What if the government did not mandate the littering of our streets with these Petri dishes for discarded gum, general rot and meaningless plastic waste?

The more conservative members of the public might argue that these notices matter for democratic engagement in the planning process. Unfortunately, that does not chime with me. Why should it matter to the public if I, or more accurately my landlord, wanted to replace my sash windows or stick a mansard on the roof? I would argue that, in a nation that values the property rights of property owners, such alterations should be exempt from these requirements.

Even if the public were deeply exercised about larger renovations and new buildings, we would not require pieces of paper to tell them that there was a building site in front of them. Should they be sufficiently agitated to complain about the creation of additional value, growth, businesses, employment and homes, they can use the universally available digital planning portals that track submitted applications.

There is no need for physical planning notices. They do not help anyone, and they make our public realm messier and uglier. Get rid of them and liberate our public spaces from overzealous bureaucracy.