Daily Archives: 25 Oct 2021

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Planning applications validated by EDDC for week beginning 11 October

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Budget 2021: £2bn for new homes on derelict or unused land

Almost £2bn will be invested by the government into building new homes on derelict or unused land in England, the chancellor is expected to announce in Wednesday’s Budget.

BBC News www.bbc.co.uk

The government said 160,000 greener homes could be built on brownfield land the size of 2,000 football pitches.

It also pledged to invest £9m towards 100 urban “pocket parks” across the UK.

However, concerns have been raised that not enough affordable homes are being built.

Nigel Wilson, chief executive of Legal and General, told the BBC’s Today programme the £1.8bn investment was the “right direction of travel”, but was “not enough scale right now”.

He warned people living in smaller cities and towns were being “left behind” due to not enough homes being constructed.

“You shouldn’t have to be rich to be green,” he said. “It’s very difficult for poorer people to get on the green (housing) ladder.

“There’s a lot of active listening going on (by the government), but we don’t just want CGI housing – we want real housing built across the UK.”

The government said the funding was part of its efforts to meet the UK’s net zero target by 2050.

It hopes the plans will help regenerate parts of England and support 50,000 new jobs.

The proposals also include creating so-called “pocket parks” – measuring the size of a tennis court – to create more green spaces.

More than 2.5 million people across the UK currently live further than a 10 minute walk from their closest green space.

Tim Farron, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for housing, said people buying new homes would be “forced to fork out thousands to upgrade their homes in the future to cut their bills and reduce emissions”.

“In his Budget, the chancellor should bring forward new standards for greener homes to ensure all new homes are cheap to heat and produce minimal emissions,” he said.

The Labour Party and Green Party have not responded to requests for comment.

As well as funding for new housing developments, the chancellor is expected to confirm £65m to develop new software to help with the digitisation of the town planning system.

The first phase will see the system rolled out to up to 175 local authorities in England.

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Revealed: Boris Johnson’s Rambling Speech At Women’s Event – ‘I Love The Police’

Does he have the “will or inclination” to stand up for women or does he just want to keep in with ‘the boys’?

The prime minister waffled about women lorry drivers having to urinate in bushes and female representation.

Sophia Sleigh www.huffingtonpost.co.uk 

Boris Johnson has been criticised over a speech in which he heaped praise on police and talked about female lorry drivers urinating in bushes. 

The prime minister described how much he “loved” the police while speaking to women at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester earlier this month.

The comments were made two days after Johnson had been on TV urging the public to trust the police in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder by serving officer Wayne Couzens.

However, some female Tories were less than impressed, with one telling HuffPost UK: “It was tone deaf really. Instead of lavishing praise on the police, perhaps he should have been talking about what they can do to rebuild trust with women.” 

The speech – made just a few days after Couzens’ sentencing – was described as “terrible” and “out of touch” by one Tory woman.

Johnson made the comments at a fringe event by Women2Win – a campaign to get more Conservative women elected.

He said: “Look at our policing I think the men and women in our police force are fantastic. I love them. I love the police and there’s several of them here protecting me, so I better be careful what I say. They are wonderful guys.”

In an apparent reference to Everard’s killing, he went on to say we all wanted to have a world in which women “can walk the streets safely” and their complaints are taken seriously.

Also in the speech, the PM pushed for more female representation in every profession, adding: “Look at the issue that’s obsessing the media at the moment – slightly too much obsessing the media.

“Why is it do you think my friends, it’s so difficult to persuade people to become lorry drivers and join the road haulage industry well why should they join when you when you’re told you have to urinate in the bushes?

“I’m speaking frankly about this, why should you when you have to sleep in your cabin, that’s not frankly what women want. It’s ridiculous.”

Labour MP Janet Daby has been calling for misogyny in police forces to be addressed and raising examples in the commons. 

She told HuffPost UK: “He is not helping the police by brushing off the issue and by keeping in with ‘the boys’.

“Critiquing the police is not about making them ineffectual or reducing their authority in society. It is about improving their standards and challenging them to be better and to provide a dignified and well-respected national service.”

She said sexism was “deep-rooted” in the police force and no different to the challenges other male dominated organisations have faced.

Daby said she was not convinced Johnson has the “will or inclination” to stand up for women.

A No10 spokesperson said: “This was a truly sickening crime – and as the PM said at the time, we know that officers will have shared in the shock and devastation felt by the whole country.

“We’ve been clear that the police must raise the bar and investigate crimes against women and girls thoroughly so that victims feel more confident coming forward to report them and more perpetrators are brought to justice.

“Our Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy – launched this summer – will also help drive long-term change to prevent more of these crimes from happening in the first place and ensure victims get the support they need.”

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Tory MPs back plan to give people a vote on new housing in their areas

Conservative MPs are calling on the housing secretary, Michael Gove, to hand greater decision-making powers over new housing to local people in an attempt to boost acceptance of new developments.

Robert Booth www.theguardian.com 

Steve Baker and Greg Smith, Tory MPs in house-price hotspots in Buckinghamshire, are backing a plan to strip councils of decision-making powers over some new developments and incentivise residents instead to approve new schemes.

The proposal to extend localism comes as Gove and his advisers rethink government planning reforms, which ran into angry opposition in the Tory shires because they reduced local participation in planning and gave developers a freer hand.

Baker and Smith are backing an idea floated by the Social Market Foundation thinktank to allow residents of streets or villages to vote on whether to accept additional development in their close vicinity. The theory is that they are more likely to support allowing more extensions or new homes on underused sites if they stand to benefit themselves from the planning consents.

“It is clear that we cannot continue with our current planning system,” said Baker. “Costs and disbenefits are imposed on individuals without adequate inclusion in the process or adequate compensation being provided. We need to give the public the opportunity to say ‘no’ to planning proposals, but the incentives to say ‘yes’ because they see the gains for their community.”

The government has said 300,000 new homes need to be built each year to meet demand. In the last 12 months for which data is available – up to the end of June 2021 – 183,450 were built in England.

The report, written by John Myers, who runs the YIMBY Alliance (yes in my back yard) campaign, suggests villagers “should have more power to allow high-quality, attractive development next to the village when they see benefits for the community”.

“In towns or cities, residents of a stretch of street should have the right to conduct a street vote to set out the rules for new extensions or more ambitious development,” Myers writes. “A mews vote could similarly allow residents of houses surrounding a stretch of waste ground to give permissions to add new mews cottages.”

Greg Smith, the MP for Buckingham, said: “Planning in the UK is broken. Driving through our villages, signs proclaiming ‘no to xxx houses’ or ‘no new development here’ are commonplace – and politicians ignore that at our peril. This new paper proposes a fundamentally good principle of genuine localism and people power.”

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Find the money! Now you see it, now you don’t

Rishi Sunak admits £7bn transport pledge has only £1.5bn of new money

www.independent.co.uk 

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has admitted that his £7bn pre-Budget pledge for new transport projects contains only £1.5bn of new money.

Extra spending will go on train and tram upgrades in England’s cities, Mr Sunak said as he seeks to fend off protests that pledges to the north and Midlands are being broken.

Pressed on how much of the money was new, the chancellor conceded £4.2bn had previously been announced. “What we’ve done is top that up by £1.5bn,” he told Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday.

He added: “It’s a great example of levelling up in practice, and it’s ultimately just going to create growth in all of those places.”

Mr Sunak would not be drawn on whether metro mayors would also be told that HS2 will be built in full to Leeds, and whether a stop for Northern Powerhouse Rail would be confirmed for Bradford. “It wouldn’t be right for me to speculate,” he said.

Fears have been growing that the HS2 scheme’s eastern leg is to be significantly trimmed or even scrapped as part of the upcoming integrated rail plan.

The Independent has learned that a new station in Leeds and a new line connecting the city are likely to be given the go-ahead – but trains will be forced to slow down and run on existing tracks between Yorkshire and the Midlands in a scaling-back of the HS2 leg.

Labour’s West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin expressed her dismay at the lack of commitments over HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail from the chancellor – warning him not to “water down” pledges.

“What is important for us is that stop in Bradford. We can’t have a watered-down version of our transport network,” she told Sky News. “We have been underfunded for decades.”

She added: “Now is the opportunity for government to be bold, to be ambitious and to come with us with our vision for West Yorkshire to have that London-style transport system that will really make us that powerhouse we can be.”

Mr Sunak pointed out that Conservative mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street and Labour’s Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham had welcomed the announcements he had made.

“What the money announced yesterday was about is about what we call intracity transportation, and that’s about how do we get people who live in and around a city to be able to get into the middle of it and out again easily,” the chancellor said on Sunday.

Mr Burnham praised the government and said there was now more “alignment” between regional leaders and Whitehall, as his city region appeared to be the big winner from Treasury announcements.

It was confirmed Greater Manchester would be handed £1bn in capital funding for the infrastructure elements of the transport plan at the budget on Wednesday.

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“Levelling up” the Tory way

‘Prosperous’ cabinet ministers’ seats in line for millions of development cash.

www.independent.co.uk 

Seats held by seven cabinet ministers are in line to receive tens of millions of pounds of development cash despite previously being judged as not needing the funds, triggering fresh accusations of bias in “levelling up”.

The constituencies of Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Stephen Barclay, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, are on a list of “priority places” ahead of a new £1.5bn annual fund.

Yet all three – plus those of Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis, trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, chief whip Mark Spencer and Robert Jenrick, the former communities minister – had been classed as “most developed” and unlikely to receive grants.

The revelation, from research for The Independent, has provoked a fresh outcry over a post-Brexit shake-up of development spending, after delays that have already swiped around £1.5bn from needy areas this year.

Independent experts warned ministers are ignoring where “need is greatest” and making a mockery of Boris Johnson’s celebrated pledge to level up the country.

Labour accused the government of “funnelling money to richer cabinet ministers’ constituencies”, after similar controversies over different funding pots.

The long-promised UK Shared Prosperity Fund – to replace the loss of the £1.8bn-a-year EU structural funds – is already mired in controversy, after being delayed until next year.

The government promised to match the pre-Brexit grants – to build local economies by attracting businesses and jobs – but even a stopgap £220m fund, for 2021-22, has yet to hand out any money.

A total of 100 “priority places” were announced, across England, Scotland and Wales, for that stopgap UK Community Renewal Fund to help them “prepare” for grants from the £1.5bn Shared Prosperity Fund to follow next year, although other areas will also be eligible.

That list sparked anger by excluding some poorer areas – Liverpool, Sheffield, Knowsley, Carlisle, Plymouth and Preston – that received the EU funds.

Now research by the House of Commons library has revealed that seven cabinet ministers’ seats were in low-priority “most developed” areas under the old scheme – but are now first in line for many millions of pounds each.

They are in the local authorities of Richmondshire, in North Yorkshire (Mr Sunak’s constituency), King’s Lynn & West Norfolk (Ms Truss’s), Fenland, in northeast Cambridgeshire (Mr Barclay’s), Newark and Sherwood, in Nottinghamshire (Mr Spencer’s and Mr Jenrick’s), Northumberland (Ms Trevelyan’s) and Great Yarmouth (Mr Lewis’s).

Of the 49 council areas in England that were considered “most developed” but are now “priority places”, no fewer than 35 have Conservative MPs, or a majority of Conservative MPs.

The New Economics Foundation think tank hit out at the way the fund has been set up, accusing ministers of wasting “a golden opportunity” to target areas still suffering from the loss of old industries.

“These delays and its allocation process – which seems to pay little heed to where the need is greatest – are a missed opportunity to give people greater control over their local economies,” said Frances Northrop, NEF associate fellow.

Professor Steve Fothergill, of the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University, also condemned a “badly flawed” process that would aid “distinctly prosperous areas” at the expense of poorer ones.

He criticised the use of local authority district data – when local economies stretched much wider – and population density as a criteria, “a discriminator in favour of rural areas” which tend to be Tory.

“The civil servants have screwed this up with a formula that’s generated some bizarre and silly results,” Prof Fothergill said, while rejecting the idea of a “political fix”.

He added: “EU structural funds have been the largest source of funding for economic development for 30 years. The government can’t be serious about its levelling up agenda if this list is used for allocation of the Shared Prosperity Fund.”

And Steve Reed, the shadow communities secretary, said: “Funnelling money to richer cabinet ministers’ constituencies, at the expense of poorer ones, will do nothing to fix the regional inequalities the Conservatives have created and worsened over the last decade.”

The Shared Prosperity Fund is due to start next April, but bids have not yet been sought – and there are doubts over whether all funding will be replaced, with only an annual “average” of £1.5bn to be spent.

With ministers and officials in Whitehall making the decisions on allocations, there are also fears of a power-grab that will undermine the union.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities defended the way areas were chosen and confirmed it would enable them “to take full advantage of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund when it launches next year”.

“The selection process for the UK Community Renewal Fund is transparent, robust and fair to help identify areas most in need of funding,” a spokesperson said.