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'Wild West' Planning Will Hit Sustainability
(September 14, 2020)The government, led by the Prime Minister Boris Johnson struggling with the Covid crisis, are ramming through so many emergency measures many of which should be dealt with quite rightly by MPs.
However, we locals have to wake up to some that are not going to help in any way, and in days long after this is hopefully over, will be very detrimental to us.
We have a planning system, undermined by changes in favour of developers just a few years ago, which saw a field by the River Wylye (Spurt Mead) in our town specially protected from development getting the thumbs-up for housing.
Now central government wants to take almost all decision making away from local communities and councils who ensure that development is sustainable, and hand them over to mandarins at Westminster and housing developers.
Our costly county councillors will probably only be left with making tree preservation orders and changes of use into accommodation.
This comes at a time when developers already sit on a huge landbank of already permitted areas for them to use and totally undermines democracy and well thought out decision making but that is nothing new at the moment.
All this panic de-regulation could do is either add to the landbank or see this part of Wiltshire famed for its landscape become the 'wild west' in a land grabbing housebuilding rush.
Time for us to all write to our MP to ask him where he stands on this and to get the government to think again.