Britain's mad planning system is becoming more and more absurd

Telegraph

8 hours ago

Across the political spectrum, we don't agree on much. But we can all agree that the UK needs more homes and must start building in earnest.
So why is Labour-run Birmingham City Council demanding that Mark Jones rip down the £180,000 two-bedroom 'granny flat' he built in his back garden for his dying father? With bin strikes, rat plagues and near bankruptcy, one might imagine that this particular local authority would have different matters on its mind.
Mr Jones said he believed the building complied with planning laws and lodged a retrospective planning application. But the council's officious officers found that the Sutton Coldfield IT engineer has fallen foul of their regulations as it was 'over-intensive', and have ordered it to be demolished by the end of the month.
The case shows in microcosm what is wrong with Britain's planning system.
Like so much that is wrong on our island, from the NHS to the post-war explosion in council housing, its origins lie with the 1945 Clement Attlee Labour government. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act established our system of planning permission, as well as the modern system of needing consents to build on land.
It also meant that all planning authorities had to come up with a comprehensive development plan. Green belts, the listing of buildings and the anathematising of building in the open countryside can all be dated back to this legislation.
In some regards, we should be grateful for Attlee's innovation. Anyone who has taken the seven-hour trip from Boston to Washington DC on the Acela Amtrak train will see why.
Apart from a stretch along the Connecticut coastline, the prospect out of the windows is of virtually unending urban sprawl. Or contrast the west coast of Ireland with the west coast of Scotland. While the Irish views are endlessly interrupted by the tackiest imaginable McMansions, complete with fake colonnades and naff statuary, the Caledonian vista is virtually uninterrupted.
Our planning system has made large-scale developers hugely powerful to a far greater extent than in most other developed countries. Building your own house is straightforward in much of the United States. But then America is a large country with plenty of space, as defenders of the British status quo might point out.
The rules in much of Europe, however, are also vastly more flexible. In France, for example, it is relatively straightforward to buy a plot of land on the fringes of a village and build a family home on it.
By contrast, in the UK, to build a new single dwelling in the isolated countryside is extraordinarily difficult. One of the very few routes is via what is now called Paragraph 84 consent. This is a rule, first introduced in 1997 in the dying days of John Major's government, allowing for new country houses to be built, but only if they are of 'truly outstanding' design and 'reflect the highest standards of architecture'.
We would all, I am sure, like to live in such houses – but to meet such benchmarks requires money, plenty of it. It is not something that rural Mr Joneses, middle-earning IT engineers and their like, will ever be able to afford.
The British system places all the cards in the hands of the vast corporate builders, with their new housing developments. Angela Rayner's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which is now being pushed through the House of Lords, will only make this problem even worse.
It will make development easier, and that is indeed a worthy goal. It will make it easier to overrule Nimby-style objections, but its mechanisms are not there to help people who want to do their own projects.
It is all about pushing through large-scale plans in the face of local opposition, be they for new homes, wind or solar farms or the latest railway wheeze dreamt up in Whitehall. It is not about allowing Sir Keir Starmer's much-touted 'working people' to realise their own building ambitions.
Our planning system might seem to have been more of a success if our post-war homes were exemplars of design. But that is far from the case. Probably the only country in Western Europe that has uglier townscapes than those found in much of Britain is Germany.
Walk through Cologne, and outside of its Cathedral and Romanesque churches you would be hard put to find an uglier city with less inspiring buildings.
Colognians have a very good excuse. When their city was rebuilt in the 1950s from the ashes the RAF had reduced it to, beauty was not foremost on their minds. We have no such excuse for some of the horrors that urban planning has imposed on our towns and cities. And our planning laws did little to protect us from these missteps.
When Nick Boles was housing minister in the Cameron government, he was evangelical about relaxing planning rules in urban and suburban areas. He wanted to allow thousands upon thousands of Mr Joneses to do pretty much as they pleased with their own land and property, and thought this would make a huge difference to our housing shortage. It would also empower local people.
Such an approach would clearly be a disaster if applied to, say, the Victorian garden square of London or the Georgian terraces of Bath. They would soon be scarred with endless glass boxes and extensions which would now be on trend, but soon look very dated.
If Labour really wants to empower working people, allowing the Mr Joneses to build on their back gardens could be just the thing. But don't hold your breath.