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Prioritise people’s needs ‘over newts’ in housing policy, says Angela Rayner
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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UK Politics
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The people that love to talk about the importance of democracy love it when starmtroopers overrule local democracy.
Near me the planning inspectorate recently overruled a refusal for hundreds of little boxes on a zone 3a floodplain. Why are we not prioritising building on high areas given sea level rises are pretty inevitable?
We end up building on floodplains because NIMBYs block building everywhere else. These reforms will help us get more homes built where they're needed. And they don't overrule local democracy, they'll take away the outsized influence of the blockers. Democracy requires a level playing field.
They overrule the democratically elected local councillors on the planning committee on local decisions, it does exactly that.
We can all keep throwing around the word 'democracy' while the housing crisis gets worse, or the government can exercise its democratic (see?) mandate to change planning regulations in order to fix the housing crisis. For me, this change prevents councillors going rogue against the democratically (there it is again!) agreed local plans - there's no 'overruling' by the government because it's not a centrally made decision to overrule them, they simply won't be able to poleaxe their own plans.
So, it's democratic twice over: the government exercises its mandate to allow councils to exercise their mandate to build.
Well there's the other solution, the final solution to this problem which you are advocating for by default. But most people agree that that's not the direction to go so maybe we need more housing now and accept the loss of some scenery.
Say what now?
If you don't build houses and people can't afford to live in the few houses that exist, then you're condemning them to death, so just build the houses or admit you're fine with killing the undesirables instead of hiding behind pointless green washed versions of NIMBYism.
See, this reads very reasonably, but I think people were a bit put off by your original reference to a 'final solution', which has some... overtones.