A week in planning

 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.