This week saw a flare up of the debate over land-use
planning that accompanied the proposed changes to the NPPF
last year.
It started with Nick Boles, planning minister, giving an interview to the BBC
in which he called for the amount of developed land in England to increase from 9% to 12%.
Such a marginal increase, just 3% of the land mass in England, would solve the housing
crisis, he claimed.
These figures were immediately contested, by Andrew
Lainton among others. 3% of land is an area of land around the size of Cornwall, so we are not talking
here about any small increase.
Moreover, if it has taken six millennia or more of human
development to settle on and develop 9% of England’s land mass, how can an extra
third be added on in 20 years, let alone five?
Nevertheless, the comments provoked responses on all sides,
and no doubt served their original purpose, which was to highlight a speech
that the minister made on Thursday at the Town & Country Planning
Association.
As it turned out, his speech
was rather good. There was no mention of 3%, but instead a rather lyrical plea
for beauty to be reintroduced into the way we build new homes. There were
plenty of references to the importance of landscape and natural scenery, and
the historic role of the National Trust and TCPA in protecting the most special
places in this country.
The minister called for greater attention to be paid to
quality in new developments – something that is difficult to disagree with. The
challenge, of course, is in making this a reality. The TCPA on the same day
published a report, The
Lie of the Land, which called for a more strategic approach to national and
regional planning, away from the mosaic of local plans, LEPs and LNPs that we
now have.
Certainly, there is a need here to shift the
polarities of the debate to a stronger sense of the importance of planning and
how to do it properly. A debate that pitches town vs country, rural vs urban,
to build or not to build, does not get us very far. A debate that was instead
focused on what sort of new homes we need, how they can be integrated into
landscapes, and what our vision of the future in 50 or 100 years looks like would
be much more fruitful. And it would also, as Graeme
Bell points out, speak to the founding beliefs of organisations like the
National Trust.
