To be sad about houses being built on Greenfield sites

[Orangemochafrappacino]

Its rife in my village at the moment. There are a few brownfield sites but these seem to be being ignored and farmland is being snapped up for development instead.

The rulebook for this seems to be slowly being torn up by this current government and I'm now hearing stories of developers being able to purchase land on a forceful basis and even proceed building giant housing estates without proper planning permission.

Has anyone else noticed this in their local area? I understand houses need to be built but it seems completely nuts, we are going to have no farmland or trees left at this rate.

open.spotify.com/episode/3K2e6lwf9JwqDLaPAVXNcl

Byline Times have just released this podcast - all about the calculation of the number of houses. A very interesting listen about how the calculation in population growth is entirely wrong and how we could easily end up with ghost towns ...

@DottyHarmer

A local councillor mooted a plan to stop people demolishing bungalows and building houses in their place. He was poo-pooed, but thinking about it it did make sense, as once bungalows are out of the housing stock, they are never replaced. And it’s like dominoes, once one person rebuilds their bungalow as a house, the whole road goes as no one wants to be overshadowed on either side by a much larger property.

Yes...a lack of appropriate housing means older people stay in the houses they brought up families in....often 3 or 4 beds....I am not saying they have to !move but if they want to stay in the area there is nowhere to go often

The problem is that developers apply for planning permission and get turned down, then they reapply... over and over and over with no limit. So the local community has to fight them over and over and over. Until they finally get permission - and then it’s game over, there’s nothing locals can do to get it overturned. This is how many green field sites get planning permission and it’s shocking. There should be a limit on the number of times they can apply - eg if they get turned down it would be good if they weren’t allowed to reapply for say ten years.

My mum would like to downsize but still wants off street parking & a garden, there are no bungalows near her or even small houses.

@SilverOak I didn’t know this is this the case U.K. wide or just England? I agree they shouldn’t be allowed to keep applying over and over

This is an issue that may well lose the next election for the Conservatives.

The pressures to develop are immense. I think if the government was really serious about "levelling up", they would focus their efforts on encouraging businesses and services to relocate away from London and the SE.

Completely agree. The increase in remote working should facilitate this as companies have adapted their business model to covid. My brother lives in an industrial town in Yorkshire that would benefit from some new housing stock. It's important to safeguard their countryside too but there is a higher availability of brownfield sites, some of which are currently derelict and unattractive.

The delegation of housing targets across all areas seems a flawed model. Surely someone in government could look at the bigger picture and the need to plan nationally? It could be one way of truly "levelling up"

[quote AlaskaThunderfuckHiiiiiiiii]@SilverOak I didn’t know this is this the case U.K. wide or just England? I agree they shouldn’t be allowed to keep applying over and over[/quote]
So do I but I'm sure it is to with cronyism and friends in the council possibly?

@ChardonnaysPetDragon

This is an issue that may well lose the next election for the Conservatives.

I blame both the conservatives and labour for the current housing crisis (and it really is that with so few homes available) both for not building and for allowing immigration without building homes.

I am certainly not being told by some middle class pro immigration mumsnetters with three or more children who at the slightest hint of marital trouble says LTB increasing housing demand. that the decent sized homes with gardens in areas where people want to live shouldn't be built which doesn't affect them by sole virtue of them being born 20 years earlier.
Personally I would force the sale of all second homes too.

SilverOak I didn’t know this is this the case U.K. wide or just England?
Not sure but definitely in England. My local community fought a development of 150 houses for 30 years. We won ELEVEN TIMES. Our MP supported us. The council supported us and so did neighbouring councils. But the developer just kept reapplying over and over.

When their final 2016 application was refused by the council they appealed to the planning inspectorate, who overruled the council’s decision and granted permission. So now we have a housing estate on what used to be a field.

ELEVEN times they were told No and they were able to reapply. ONE time they were told Yes and that was it, we had no further recourse and the yes couldn’t be overturned. It’s unfair.

That's disgusting and all the time and money it costs to fight these applications

@SilverOak

SilverOak I didn’t know this is this the case U.K. wide or just England? Not sure but definitely in England. My local community fought a development of 150 houses for 30 years. We won ELEVEN TIMES. Our MP supported us. The council supported us and so did neighbouring councils. But the developer just kept reapplying over and over.

When their final 2016 application was refused by the council they appealed to the planning inspectorate, who overruled the council’s decision and granted permission. So now we have a housing estate on what used to be a field.

ELEVEN times they were told No and they were able to reapply. ONE time they were told Yes and that was it, we had no further recourse and the yes couldn’t be overturned. It’s unfair.

That is shocking and unfair.

Yes same where we live. There will be nowhere for people to walk their dogs soon. Some of these new houses don't even have gardens! Not even a courtyard

That's disgusting and all the time and money it costs to fight these applications
We are just residents. We didn’t have recourse to expensive solicitors and professionals like the developer did. We wrote all of the objections ourselves. Over and over for 30 years. In our spare time while we were all working. And permission was refused eleven times.

The developer offered us bribes to stop fighting. They offered to buy our houses so we could move away and stop fighting. In the end they said “We will never stop. We will reapply and reapply and reapply FOREVER until we get what we want. This is futile - STOP FIGHTING US”. But in the end it was the planning inspectorate who screwed us over. After thousands of objections, after our own residents, our own councils, our own MP said NO for 30 years, a planning inspector who lives hundreds of miles away waltzed in and overruled the council and gave permission. We were devastated.

I don’t think this should be permitted. Reapplying over and over forever until they get their own way. No should mean no.

A lot of the issues being discussed here were covered in the white paper Planning For The Future and there will be a planning bill in the autumn. One proposal in the white paper was that the Government would set housing targets for England, rather than it being done at local level, but like most of the proposals that got a hostile reception and it’s rumoured that the Government is going to drop it.

One proposal in the white paper was that the Government would set housing targets for England, rather than it being done at local level
There is a reason for this. It’s because many local councils have failed to set housing targets at all, which leaves them wide open for predatory developers. Basically the developer applies to build houses on a nice green field site and says to the council “You can’t prove you are meeting your target for building houses because you have no target. Therefore you must permit me to build these houses”. And the council basically can’t refuse.

The village we live in has slowly been made into a town with 4,000 new houses set to be built over the next few years.

We don’t even have a Tesco metro or a co-op. The house developers took our considerations and will be building an area to practice cricket. We asked for a gym/pool/pleasure facilities and we got a measly area to play cricket. Currently it takes around ten minutes to get from one side of the village - a road that’s about a mile long. All the houses along the high street (with a small school in the middle) don’t have drive ways so it’s manic trying to drive along there. God knows how we’re going to cope with another 4000 houses.

It’s looking like we will be having a development of 4000 new houses near to us soon, on top of another large development nearby. Ancient woodland, fields etc all gone but apparently it’s fine as they are going to have a small green community area for the new houses to use.

The town is a deprived one and services are
already under huge strain, the hospital was downgraded not too long ago, you can’t get a dentist etc. These things should be a priority for the people already living here before more housing is built.

I’m not against housing being built but the sheer number of them and the areas that will be gone forever is upsetting.

The problem is that brownfield sites are often council or government owned and have basically got huge issues with them that are why they aren't being built on. There's a big one near me, but of course a developer isn't going to want to build on it because its next to an incredibly smelly landfill. No one would buy the houses, so developing that site is pointless.

If government could be convinced to share the costs of making some of the brownfield sites fit to build on, developers would be more likely to build on them.

At the end of the day developers are profit driven. If we want housing built without concern over profit level, the government/council need to build them, the way they used to.

Oh and our local council (full of older very wealthy people) have put all their energy into resisting developers building anything, heaven forbid more people should be allowed to live near the councillors huge back gardens. Instead they should have been proposing better quality developments to meet local housing need, they haven't done this, so they have no defence against the developers.

I’m not against housing being built but the sheer number of them and the areas that will be gone forever is upsetting.

Then we need to reduce demand let's start with making the UK a hostile place to emigrate to and the TTC section of this site are also part of the problem. Currently this site seems to want more people but no more houses which is quite frankly stupid and inhuman.

SilverOak - Yes, many local authorities are open to the presumption in favour of sustainable development because they have no local plan.

There was a discussion earlier about repeat applications. Within some conditions, local planning authorities can - but aren’t obliged to - decline applications which are similar to an application which has been refused within the previous two years. The planning practice guidance on making an application (available online) even says that the purpose of these powers is to inhibit repeat applications that the local planning authority believes are intended to wear down opposition.

What's your solution then @ILoveAllRainbowsx ? Keep concreting over the entire countryside until theres nothing left? You'll probably get your wish tbh. I just think it's sad and I'm sure if profit was taken out of the equation and there was the political will we could come up with other solutions.

And for what it's worth my current house is in a bog standard cul de sac, I have no nice views or space to want to protect in my immediate area. My concern isnt coming from a selfish point of view its coming from an environmental point of view.

Isnt the UK birth rate on the decline anyway?