Outdated planning approaches are hurting our villages - Yorkshire Post Letters

Andrew Vine’s article is exactly right. It is very difficult for local people who need houses to get onto the housing ladder, and the use of houses for holiday lets and second homes is the cause of this. However, he has not gone far enough. In some areas of North Yorkshire, the problem has been made much worse by local authority planning policies.

Please don’t think I am anti-panning. I worked for many years as a planning advocate for district councils and have always admired the British planning system. However, like all good things, the planning system can be misused with perverse and catastrophic consequences.

Take the example of Ryedale. Most of Ryedale is not green belt or national park or an area of outstanding natural beauty. However, much has been made of the fact that most of the former district could be described as within their “setting”. This was the excuse for applying policies very similar to green belt policies to the rest of the former district.

In the nineties a less restrictive approach was taken, and development limits were drawn round most villages and towns to allow for expansion. Later a less benign view was taken and these reasonable limits were shrunk. In the villages, these development limits have not been expanded since 1996 – 27 years ago.

In 2013, for bogus environmental reasons, a new plan was adopted which required 90 per cent of all new development to be allocated in the five towns. The village development limits were not expanded and development within them was inhibited by the requirement of a local needs occupancy condition.

What has happened since the adoption of the Ryedale Plan was predictable. There is now more congestion than ever in the towns; the villages which Ryedale had been trying to preserve in aspic are frozen in time and losing out on the benefits of new development, resulting in upsurge of house prices so as to be unaffordable to local people as accommodation is slowly lost to second homes and holiday lets, the loss of village pubs and shops, dying churches and chapel closures, and the closure of local schools (eg. Hovingham school), as the decrease in school children makes village schools unviable etc. In short, the situation is a ghastly mess.

One cannot blame local people for opposing new houses which could be bought for holiday lets or second homes. However, if one were to expand existing development limits or ease the restrictions on building in the countryside in another way and lift the local needs occupancy policy and replace it with a primary residence policy, this could go some way to alleviating the problem.

Primary Residence conditions require owners to use their house as their main residence and therefore prevents use as holiday lets or second homes. It’s not a perfect solution, as such conditions could only apply to new houses and, but it would ensure that buyers or tenants of new houses would live in them and use local services.

As it happens, the new unitary county are unwilling to make any changes until they have a new county plan. This could take decades, and in the meantime, village development limits will remain unchanged, pressure on the towns will get worse, and the failed local needs occupancy condition will remain.

In my view, this is a thoroughly perverse misuse and misapplication of planning law and practice.