Government planning reforms under fire in Parliament

Ministerial plans to shake up the planning system and introduce an ‘algorithim’ to determine new housing targets have come under fire from more Conservative MPs.

The government is looking to reform the national planning system with several wide-ranging changes, which were debated in Parliament last night (30 September).

The debate came as housing secretary Robert Jenrick announced that new homes delivered through permitted development rights will now have to meet space standards.

The space standard begins at 37m² of floorspace for a new one bed flat with a shower room (39m² with a bathroom), ensuring proper living space for a single occupier.

The issue of converting office blocks into flats through permitted development rights proved to be a popular topic in the parliamentary debate.

‘Up to 60,000 units have been built under the previous extension to permitted development, many of which are unfit for human habitation,’ said Labour MP Mike Amesbury.

‘I am certain that neither the housing minister nor the secretary of state would like to find themselves or their families in them.’

While Clive Betts commented that these rights ‘confer rights on some individuals but take away rights from others to have their say on developments’.

‘They take away community rights to object and to have an application turned down. That is a very important and serious issue that we all ought to be addressing,’ added Mr Betts.

But it was the proposed introduction of a new algorithm to determine new housing targets which drew criticism from the Conservative benches.

Last month, backbench Conservative MP Andrew Griffith denounced the ‘mutant algorithm’ which he said was ‘cooked up in the wet market of Whitehall’.

Speaking yesterday, Theresa Villiers said the proposed formula would more than double the housing target in her constituency and ‘require the equivalent of a small new city somehow to be crammed into outer London’.

‘There is simply no way the algorithm’s numbers would be achievable without the major urbanisation of the suburbs, and in the covid era, when the importance of homes with gardens and space to breathe has become ever more apparent, do the government really want to be cramming East Berlin-style tower blocks into thousands of neighbourhoods across the country?,’ she told MPs.

While former local government minister Bob Neill said ‘we cannot go down the route of linking these measures to the wholly unacceptable growth in the housing requirement, be it through an algorithm or a formula’.

‘Bromley is already building to its current requirement and simply cannot take the wholly unrealistic numbers that are proposed,’ added the former minister.

Photo Credit – Pidmaria (Pixabay)