Want to see planning laws bulldozed? Be careful what you wish for - Andy Brown

It isn’t easy to build your way out of a housing crisis that has been 40 years in the making. It takes time to identify potential new sites and it needs care about what is built and where. Trying to find a site for a new town is even harder. There aren’t many large areas of suitable building land in Britain that are available to develop close to the sites of genuine housing need. Problems with potential sites aren’t always obvious to people without local knowledge.

What the developers might want to build on new sites doesn’t always correspond to what people need. The main groups that are in serious need of improved housing supply are the elderly who need specialist accommodation, young people who need a first home and those who depend on reasonably priced rented accommodation. What developers usually find most profitable to build are three or four bedroom houses for purchase on the edge of town.

Planning rules aren’t always just a bit of a nuisance standing in the way of much needed development. Often they are very sensible policies about which are the right places to build that have been established after years of careful examination by public hearings.

Planning committees exist because the public has a long-established right to elect representatives who will voice their views about how best to improve their community. Reducing their powers and increasing the ability of developers to push through proposals against opposition isn’t always a wise thing to do. Sometimes that local opposition is very well-founded and the developers are wrong. There are, however, some ways of increasing housing supply that can produce results rather more quickly and reliably without the need to remove the ability of the public to have its say over what gets built.

The first is to use the enormous stock of existing housing permissions. Sites for more than a million new houses have been passed for development in the last ten years without anything being built. The developer has chosen to sit on the land until they can find a more profitable time to act.

It would only require some robust action to bring many more of those sites into use. A law needs to be passed which says that if the houses aren’t completed within a reasonable period such as five years then the permission falls and the land value plunges. Couple that with higher council tax on undeveloped land and it would unlock thousands of new homes. The only reason that isn’t being done is heavy lobbying from some of the worst developers. Let the good ones take on the sites that already have permissions.

The second major potential source of good quality homes is more challenging but much more important. We are currently struggling to build large numbers of new homes at the same time as we are allowing large numbers of old buildings to crumble into a state of neglect in neighbourhoods that are failing to attract new residents. Across many of our once proud towns and cities there are areas where there is huge potential to improve the quality of housing that already exists and to uplift a run down locality. We also have high streets with closed down shops that could be repurposed as homes.

Before we start building shiny new towns on open countryside where crops are currently grown it might not be a bad idea to start work on restoring pride in our old towns. In Keighley, for example, the giant Dalton Mill building sits immediately next to a train station with excellent connections to the Leeds job market. It is big enough to be repurposed to provide well over a thousand new homes. Instead of being snapped up for development it has sat unused for decades whilst gradually declining to the point where it is mainly used as sets for dark TV series like Peaky Blinders. The site has experienced two serious fires in recent years, yet it is still capable of becoming a wonderful regeneration project.

No developer is going to find a site like that commercial without help from the government. The uplift that could be provided for a much-neglected part of our county by developing it would be enormous.

Go to London and you will see wonderful examples of repurposed and reused buildings. Travel across the north and you will find endless examples of potential development sites sitting unused because there isn’t a financial incentive to develop them.

What is needed across much of Yorkshire is not a network of new towns constructed with little control over planning. What is needed is the restoration of pride in the old ones.

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