… “But we’re back to smoke-and-mirrors because it is simply not a fact that, once more new houses are built, they mean more new jobs.
Add this to the constant watering-down of agreements concocted in things called “pre-applications” (known as pre-apps for short) and what we see are housing developments, originally given planning permission IF they included a healthy percentage of affordable homes, being built with just one or two per 100.
I do not know many people in the Westcountry who would welcome a politician saying: “We are going to build all these new houses – and just building them is going to create so many new jobs we will have to bring workers in from Eastern Europe to help – then they can live in some of the few affordable homes that have gone up and look for new jobs once the last slate has been put on the last bijou, unaffordable, home.”
But it is exactly the kind of crazy scenario we are looking at when we smash through the smoke-and-mirrors surrounding magic catchphrases like “cut-red-tape” and “seeding economic opportunity”.
Careful development aimed at the region’s many brown-field sites is what is needed first and foremost – not the killing of the beautiful rural goose that lays our golden tourism egg. That seems to be the result of the New Planning Policy Framework which many see as a government induced land-grab or developer’s charter.”
East Devon Watch 