The Government would ignore local communities at its peril in its bid for planning reform - Andy Brown

In theory. When it comes to practise there are rather a lot of problems to overcome. Weakening regulations doesn’t always produce the expected outcome. Just ask the people who survived the Grenfell Tower disaster. Light touch regulation of the use of building materials cost lives and resulted in huge public expense.

Often regulations are there for a good reason. There are some very good developers but there are also some who are quite happy to build homes without proper insultation or solar panels, out of materials that don’t fit in with the local style and on fields within the floodplain miles from any public transport. Without strong planning laws buildings go up without any contributions being made towards providing doctors surgeries, local schools or improved public sewer networks.

Giving developers a quicker route to gaining approval is most unlikely to result in the right homes being built in the right places. The easiest and cheapest place to build is on green fields on the outskirts of our more affluent communities. It is not entirely clear how building homes in the countryside is going to help to transform neglected urban communities. Nor is it obvious how building many more large houses will help people when the average cost of a home in many parts of Yorkshire is ten times the average local salary.

It is clear how unguided development could very easily ruin the character of some of our most valued built environments without succeeding in housing the children of local residents or the employees of local businesses.

The biggest single source of our housing problems is an under supply of good quality secure rental accommodation. That shortage has been produced by 40 years of selling off council houses on the cheap and frittering the money away instead of building replacements. No sensible person begrudges the owner of a council house the opportunity to buy their own home. Yet no sensible person can expect to see one million four hundred thousand affordable rental properties disappear from the market without severe consequences.

Allowing local councils to borrow and build needs to be centre stage in any changes in policy. As does ending no fault evictions from privately rented properties.

There is also a serious need to address structural problems in the housing market. At the moment there are more empty homes than there are homeless people. At the same time many of our most attractive locations are being blighted by the existence of a large number of second homes bought as investments. The only realistic way of tackling that problem is to tax second homes and properties that have been unoccupied for long periods of time and to use the revenue to provide accommodation for those who live and work locally.

Whilst we are at it, we could also get rid of the problem of investors sitting on large amounts of potential building land that already has planning permission or is very suitable for development. Supermarket chains and property speculators often do nothing with land for long periods of time because they can record increases in value without taking the risk of actually developing it. Once again that problem needs addressing via increased taxes. Making it easier for them to acquire more permissions won’t achieve anything.

Above all we need a focus on regenerating and improving inner city areas.

It doesn’t matter how magnificent your new town project is - if the old towns continue to crumble into dust.

During the 2019 General Election many neglected red wall areas abandoned Labour because they believed that party had abandoned them. Given the low turnout and the scale of the vote for Reform UK, for Independents and for Greens it is unlikely that this feeling has gone away.

There is a crying need to develop brownfield sites in areas that are in bad need of a facelift and where communities feel seriously neglected. That needs stronger planning rules, not weaker ones, and it needs the government to provide financial help to make projects to renovate or repurpose existing buildings viable.

Fixing the housing crisis is not going to be easy. Having central government allocate crude targets for building new homes that every locality must meet is unlikely to be the solution. Nor is neglecting the difficult job of transforming our inner cities or . We ignore local communities at our peril.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.