We seem to have a Government here full of junior ministers (and some senior) who specialise in bright wheezes. the latest comes from one Nick Boles, scion of privilege, comfort and rural preservation, who has announced, "All we need to do is build on another 2-3% of land and we'll have solved a housing problem."
His intervention arouses both horror and approval from different sections of society. The applauding commercial interests look over their shoulders to the comforting (to their ambitions rather than their actual sales expectations) existence of large numbers of people who cannot find afford to buy a house.
There seems to be an assumption that planning is largely responsible for what gets built, in the sense of it being the author of development. That is surely not so. It acts as a constraint on commercial and individual development proposals. It tries to determine where they do or do not get built and (to some extent) what form they take and what they look like but it doesn't draw up development proposals itself. It was only introduced when the country came to have so much built development and so much of it was detrimental that it could no longer be regarded as a sponge large enough to soak up all the damage.
Of course much of what we now value in towns and country was built without any planning controls, but one can hardly deny that an awful lot that we deplore was as well. Those thinking of just turning back the clock should look at rural development in Texas, where there are no planning controls outside city territory. I have seen it. It does not enhance the landscape; it is not durable; it does not benefit the poor or people of modest means - and exactly as Andrew Motion points out it is a common good lost for ever for the benefit of the relatively priviliged (despite the fact that the building is not going to last long).
The reasons why housing is unaffordable are a complex mix of economic, commercial, social and cultural factors. The idea that the problem is simply that the 'planners' will not allow development is mistaken and the government suggestion that all we need to do is allow X million more houses to be built by commercial developers (with a diminishing requirement for a few 'affordable' houses to be included). - anywhere, anyhow - will benefit commercial developers, landowners, wealthy would-be residents of the countryside, before it does anything to help low-income people who cannot afford to build a house.
I think planning at local authority level is often muddle headed, verbose and intellectually and politically corrupt. Not totally so, but it desperately needs qualitative improvement. The idea that the solution is to throw it out the window makes me weep. Leave it to commercial interests - they will fix it - like they've fixed everything else around us. Yes, a few enterprising individuals might get to self-build their individual houses somewhere which might be valuable contributions to the built environment, but at what cost to the rest of society? We have multiple social problems.
