Former enemies unite to say Government planning overhaul is 'anti-democratic'

Oxford City Council and the Campaign to Protect Rural England have not previously seen eye-to-eye on planning matters.

Only earlier this year, CPRE had criticised the council’s plans to build 10,884 new homes around the city by 2036 because 724 of them were on undeveloped Green Belt land.

The council however, had said this was justified because of the housing crisis.

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But now, the two organisations have united in their criticism of Government plans which would overhaul the decision making process for where new homes, offices and other buildings are placed.

Helen Marshall, Director of CPRE Oxfordshire, said: “The changes the Government intends to impose would be fundamentally anti-democratic and harmful to our countryside as well as urban areas.

“It is essential that planning should be done at the most local level possible, especially on housing numbers, allowing local people to have control over both the quantity and quality of development and to hold their locally elected representatives to account.”

Helen Marshall of CPRE Oxfordshire

She added: “That’s the only way to develop real communities, with the right housing in the right place and ensuring a proper balance between development and protecting the countryside.”

Oxford City Council’s cabinet member for planning and housing delivery, Alex Hollingsworth, added the new planning system was not needed.

Mr Hollingsworth said: “The current planning system strikes a balance between the rights of individual landowners and the rights of past, present and future citizens. The Government’s planning white paper sets out to destroy that balance.”

He added: “The basis for the proposed ‘reforms’ is the claim that the planning system holds up development; this is demonstrably false. More than one million homes with planning permission have not been built, and more than 90 per cent of planning applications are approved.

“The failure to build new housing across the country is not a result of the planning system, but of market failure and above all the failure to invest in social housing.”

Alex Hollingsworth

Mr Hollingsworth also said Oxfordshire needs more social housing, rather than ‘attacks on the planning system and local democracy’.

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Currently, councils prepare Local Plans, documents which lay out what development is acceptable in areas under their supervision, and then decide planning applications for those parcels of land as people or companies come forward.

Councils can also negotiate with hopeful builders for contributions towards the public purse in exchange for planning permission.

But the Government’s plans, laid out in a document called ‘Planning for the Future’, would get rid of this system.

Instead, council’s would designate all land in their areas as one of three ‘zones’: growth, renewal or protection.

In growth zones, building would be allowed to go ahead without restriction, in renewal zones some building could go ahead, and protected zones would cover places like Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

File photo of houses under construction. Picture: Rui Vieira/PA Wire.

It would also get rid of the way councils wrangle money from developers for local spending, and replace it with a single, national fund.

The Government has argued this would speed up the number of homes being built.

MPs are due to debate the planning reforms today (October 8) in the House of Commons, after a request by Tory back bencher Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight.

He is not the only Conservative with reservations about the plans: Tories on local councils across England are up in arms about how the planning reforms might affect their areas.

A survey of 315 English Conservative councillors carried out at the end of summer found that 61 per cent of them are set against the reforms.