Formby Civic Society is a registered Charity (No. 516789)

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The coalition government blames the planning policies of the previous government for the shortage of housing in England. It says they are too detailed (over 1000 pages of policy documents), not sufficiently in favour of development and too costly to administer.

The government proposes to replace existing planning policies by revised policies presented in a much shorter document, namely the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the initial draft of which is a mere 52 pages long. The declared purpose of the new policy is to facilitate development.

Leading national bodies concerned with protecting the built environment and the countryside, e.g. The National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and Civic Voice, to mention but a few, do not share the government’s analysis.

Civic Voice is conducting a Campaign for Fair Planning in an attempt to persuade the government to think more carefully about its planning policies. It is asking people to write to their MPs to urge them to exert their influence in making the NPPF a balanced and therefore a fair instrument of planning policy; the Campaign for Fair Planning website makes it easy to do this.

The major housebuilders hold over 280,000 unimplemented planning permissions for new homes and most commentators attribute this to the depressed state of the housing market.

Further, it is pointed out that, for many years, 80% of planning applications have been granted within the tight target times set by government.

The consultation on the draft NPPF has just closed.

To read the Society's representation to the government on the document, please click here.