Daily Archives: 6 Mar 2018

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6 Mar 2018

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Baker Estates, Developers/ Development, Honiton/ Gittisham, Planning System

“Planners back REDUCTION of affordable homes in Honiton”

“… Councillors voted by 13 votes to one on Tuesday afternoon to allow the application, but not until Cllr Jenny Bond asked the committee to remember the 26 affordable homes and the families who would miss out when voting on it.

She had earlier added: “We have lived and breathed this application for many years through gritted teeth but this is disappointing as there is a real need for affordable housing in Honiton and Gittisham. The current offer is 90 affordable with £500,000 offsite, which equates to four houses, so the net loss is 26 families in desperate need of an affordable house who have to wait.

“With my heart I would recommend refusal and vote against it, but my head says that we have to vote with the recommendation and not waste public money on appeal. But to lose 26 affordable houses is unforgivable.”

Cllr David Barratt said: “I will propose approval as we need to vote with our heads on this one, even though affordable housing is incredibly important.”

The committee was told by development manager for EDDC Chris Rose that the applicants have submitted the request as they believe that current planning policy would support a reduction in the provision of affordable housing down to 25 per cent, if a new planning application were to be submitted.

The planning officers’ report advised that while there is a chance that Baker Estates may not be able to successfully argue 25 per cent affordable housing provision as part of a new planning application, there is an equal chance that such a proposal would be acceptable should an application be submitted and determined on appeal by the Planning Inspectorate.

Graham Hutton, Development Director at Baker Estates had said: “We think that we are making a very fair offer. We have consulted at length with the local ward members, as well as with both Gittisham Parish Council and Honiton Town Council, to make sure that we get this right.

“What is now on the table is a proposal to provide 31 per centaffordable housing, as well as a far better mix of homes and a further £500,000 off-site contribution. This provides the best chance of securing the swift delivery of 90 affordable homes for the local area – it’s worth bearing in mind that fewer than 10 affordable homes have been built in Honiton in the past decade.

“Only by reaching agreement at the local level today is it possible to offer a package this generous, as the costs of appeal or a new application would prohibit it. An agreement today will allow us to continue delivery of the homes and this will make a huge difference to Honiton and Gittisham.”

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/planners-back-reduction-affordable-homes-1305831

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6 Mar 2018

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Developers/ Development, NPPF, Planning System

“Law Society criticises proposed government approach to planning conditions”

“The Law Society has expressed concern that the government’s proposed new approach to planning conditions was “overly prescriptive and risked generating more appeals as a result of refusal or non-determination of planning applications”.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s consultation on draft regulations intended to improve the use of planning conditions ran until 27 February.

It invited comments on draft regulations which create an exemption to the requirement in the Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 that local planning authorities obtain the written agreement of an applicant before imposing a pre-commencement condition on a grant of planning permission.

In its response Chancery Lane’s Planning & Environmental Law Committee said the generation of more appeals was an outcome that “would defeat the object of the exercise”.

The Committee went on to propose alternative approaches to meet the government’s objectives.

The Committee’s response, which can be downloaded here, was as follows:

Q1: Do you agree that the notice should require the local planning authority to give full reasons for the proposed condition and full reasons for making it a pre-commencement condition?
We agree with the requirement to give reasons for proposed conditions but are concerned that the meaning of “full reasons” is undefined (and is not defined in S100ZA of the 1990 Act) and could thus lead to litigation in the same manner as happened with “summary reasons”.
It may be preferable to apply the recently affirmed standard for reasons in the Dover case(1) – “proper, adequate and intelligible”, also per South Bucks(2) many years before.
(1) Dover District Council v CPRE Kent; CPRE Kent v China Gateway International Ltd [2017] UKSC 79
(2) South Buckinghamshire District Council v Porter (No 2) [2004] 1 WLR 1953

Q2: Do you agree with our proposed definition of “substantive response” set out in draft Regulation 2(6)?
A developer veto without reasons is also unlikely to help achieve government’s goals if it increases the number of non-determinations and thus appeals. Furthermore, the Planning Inspectorate may find it unnecessarily difficult to deal promptly with such appeals if the developer’s reasoning for bringing them is not known at the outset.
We suggest that developers should be expected to give “proper, adequate and intelligible” reasons for refusing a condition, just as planning authorities should do for proposing them.

Q3: Do you agree with our proposal not to give local planning authorities discretion to agree with applicants a longer period than 10 working days to respond to the notice?
We propose that planning authorities should have discretion to allow a longer response time where this facilitates an agreed position during the notice period. Given that a longer notice period can benefit an applicant there shouldn’t be negative consequences from the additional “delay”.
If a limitation is sought, the regulations could emulate recent changes in Environmental Impact Assessment by permitting extension by agreement up to a maximum (90 days for EIA).

Q4: Do you have any other comments on the draft regulations?
While commending their brevity and clarity, we have concerns that the regulations as proposed are overly prescriptive and could lead to unnecessary increases in appeals – thus defeating their original object. We hope that our proposed amendments offer constructive solutions and would be happy to assist the Ministry further.”

http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34464%3Alaw-society-criticises-proposed-government-approach-to-planning-conditions&catid=63&Itemid=31

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6 Mar 2018

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Accountability, Affordable and Social Housing, Developers/ Development, Inequality, Planning System

“PM wrong to blame councils for housing crisis but big builders have a case to answer”

Owl says: Couldn’t have put it better than this Tory leader of the Local Government Association!

“Theresa May seems to like giving “major” speeches. She’s delivering them everywhere right now. If she’s not careful she’ll end up with the sort of sore throat that made her speech at the Tory Party conference rather more entertaining than usual last year.

The latest one is on housing, for which the over used adjective “crisis” is for once apt. Cue a telling-off for developers and “nimby” local authorities for failing to “do their duty” to foster the British dream of home-ownership.

It’s a standard, and cheap, tactic of central government to blame others for its own failings, particularly local government.

Some 321,000 new homes were greenlighted in 2016 to 2017. Just 183,000 were actually built. There is a bank of 423,000 homes with planning permission awaiting construction. If there’s something stopping housebuilding it wouldn’t appear to be the planning system.

By the way, Lord Porter is a Conservative.

The figures supplied by his Local Government Association would certainly suggest that there is something to the claim that the big housebuilders have been sitting on land banks with the aim of profiting from rising values.

There are perverse incentives on them not to build, not just through those land values but also because of the fact that a genuine increase in the supply of homes might serve to reduce asking prices and thus the developers’ profits, not the mention the crazy bonuses they have been handing to executives.

The PM, in her speech, railed against the latter, and no wonder given their companies have made huge profits on the back of her Government’s Help to Buy scheme without doing much to increase the supply of homes.

Councils quite like the idea of being given powers to force their hands. Whether the limp measures suggested by the PM would do that is open to question, if they ever reach the statute book. Allowing councils to revoke permissions after two years if a building doesn’t get started feels like a half measure.

We, said, Lord Porter, a council leader and chair of the Local Government Association, are doing our bit and we have the figures to prove it.

Nine out of every 10 planning applications are approved and when the rare refusals are appealed to the Planning Inspectorate nearly three out of every four (73 per cent) of council decisions are upheld.

One thing that would help increase the supply of available homes would be to allow councils to borrow to build so that they could pick up the development slack. It’s a suggestion that has found favour with Communities Secretary Sajid Javid in the past, but not, so far, with his colleagues.

Another might be a windfall tax on developers’ profits, and perhaps on their executives’ bonuses, like the one Labour imposed on bankers, too. They could help to provide desperately needed funding to cash-strapped councils.

They might also prove to be rather popular. But they would be controversial, and require a PM with some gumption to force through. This one prefers to talk and talk and talk, and to moan a bit about local government while she’s doing it. She’ll be needing more cough sweets before too long. The rest of us will be after headache pills and prozac.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/housing-crisis-theresa-may-councils-builders-construction-a8240516.html