"Too many trees, not enough parking..."
Why councils declaring a 'climate emergency' is meaningless, because it's not backed up by actual action - except more cars, bigger cars, more parking....
For the protection of the very guilty, for once I won’t be naming names in what follows. But I really should, because until we stop messing about with platitudes and actually DO something, the planet is going to burn.
Exhibit 1: The humble council planning officer.
(If only they were humble).
There’s a whole debate going on at the moment about the planning system. The Government wants to reform it, because it’s so utterly dysfunctional/ not at all democratic/ far too democratic/ too slow/ too unpredictable - delete as per your own prejudice.
Let’s start at the end of that list - with the ridiculous amount of power held by planning officers, who can kill a worthy scheme at birth if they want. And they frequently do (which is why the planners are 100% wrong when they talk about ‘95% of applications get approved’ etc - that’s not the point. It’s all the ones they’ve stopped on the way that matters).
On one application we submitted, the planning officer first made contact with us on the last day of the 13th week since it was submitted (ie, the last day the application should have been decided on), to say that we should either withdraw it, or we would have to sign an extension letter. Why? Because she was bone idle, and incompetent. But we were stuck with her, so that’s that.
But I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, here’s a cautionary tale about a pre-application consultation from deepest Derbyshire.
The site was owned by the county council - an old primary school, long since demolished. They had put it up for sale, and the guy dealing with it is one of the nicest people you will ever meet, very professional, and very interested in eco development.
So we drew up a scheme - 41 super energy efficient, factory built and craned into position homes, plus a new community club, new footpaths to open up the playing fields and play area behind the site, many new trees etc etc…..
We talked to the local councillor - loved it.
We talked to the folks running the existing but very old and battered club - they loved it.
We talked to the senior county councillor for regeneration and ‘clean growth’ - also loved it (and who was looking for a demonstrator site for eco housing using technology. Told him he already had one - this one they were trying to sell to the highest bidder, and maybe someone should join up the dots? But they didn’t, and that’s a whole other facepalming story…)
We spoke - informally - to the chair of planning committee, who…. yep, loved it.
Suitably emboldened, we prepared our pre-app bid. As part of this process, we looked at the planning authority’s priorities, as of course all good developers do - not just around housing, but also around energy efficiency, net zero carbon, all that good stuff.
Like a lot of councils, this particular LPA had loudly proclaimed it’s a ‘CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!’.
But unlike many others, this one had actually put a lot of effort into turning the easy bit into the hard bit - via a long strategy document, stuffed solid full of practical actions, costs, target dates, project owners - the works, including how they will use the planning system to create better, low carbon developments.
Brilliant! We thought. We are onto a winner here. What we want to do - in housing terms, in transport terms, in improving the environment etc - is right up their street. They’re gonna love it!
And here it is:
41 home, ‘net zero’ carbon development + new Working Men’s Club
Aimed at first time buyers
Creating new communal green space and new pedestrian links
New club built to similar eco standards – opens up adjacent pitches to greater community use
One dedicated parking space per home + plenty of visitor parking
Cool huh?
Any guesses as to what reaction we got?
Maybe just show the quotes from the planning officer’s response….
And
“The scheme also appears incredibly dense with swathes of frontage parking.”
BUT ALSO…
“Each dwelling should be provided with a minimum of 2 off street parking spaces (2+ bedrooms)”
By ‘incredibly dense’ they presumably mean ‘less than 40 homes per hectare, which is what you would expect in an area like this, so actually not dense enough, which is waste of land’.
But don’t forget the most important thing of all - the five minutes a week the HUGE bin lorry comes round for, around which all things must orbit:
“Refuse collection should be considered.
“The vehicle needs to be able to enter and exit adoptable roads within the site. The Council have 3 different bins in total.
“The club – is there demand for such a facility? if so it should be provided with sufficient parking spaces.”
Nice mention for the new club there too - the one absolute, cannot be negotiated out requirement of the landowner. Only question the planner officer has is ‘ think of the cars, if you need to bother with it at all’.
Comments on Net zero? Low energy bills? More biodiversity? New trees? New public spaces? Affordable first homes? Err…..
Nada. Silence. Absolutely no interest whatsoever. Just ‘too many houses, too much green space, not enough cars’.
Which is, frankly, absolutely pathetic.
If we had done what was being demanded of us, and modified the scheme, the site would have become instantly unviable - because on a tricky brownfield site, with a big reduction in house numbers, there’s no profit and way too much risk.
But at least you would have been able to park your two cars (in a place where at least 20% of the population don’t own a car at all, but whatever).
Oh by the way, and speaking of transport - did I mention that the site is so well-served by public transport, that we would have had to move the bus stop up the road a bit to build the entrance off the main road?
None of this, sadly, is a rarity. Here you have planning officers effectively acting as judge and jury….. although I went over the officer’s head and had a lovely chat with the head of planning, who basically said our scheme was fine. We agreed and few changes and got on famously….. which is sort of the point. It shouldn’t be down to one person’s (lack of) judgement. There should be rules - the least possible number of sensible, easy to understand ones - and they should be applied consistently. But they’re not.
Parking is the elephant in the room here. At the same time as all this ‘CLIMATE EMERGENCY’ rubbish, we have council highways people actually INCREASING not only the minimum number of spaces required per house, but also making those spaces ever bigger.
Here in Nottinghamshire, the county council had a perfectly sensible system - for a two or three bedroom house, you needed one parking space and half a visitor space - 2.4m wide, and 4.8m long.
Now it’s two spaces per house, no exceptions - at 3m by 6m.
(Ever seen a massive car parked in a 2.4m by 4.8m space? Yep - it fits just fine.)
A typical new build terrace or semi-detached house is 5m wide. Two parking spaces is 6m wide. So you can’t put them out the front, which is land efficient. If you put them down the sides, then you can’t get the density up to make a profit (especially on smaller, more likely to be brownfield/ run down in need of regeneration sites).
Or in other words, our very successful Newark development would be illegal under the new rules, all because of ‘not enough car parking’.
That’s nine, entry level homes, all sold to first time buyers, that wouldn’t get built.
What matters more - housing for people? Or housing for cars?
Land use is a choice. We aren’t really making any more of it, so we need to make better choices. Cars are not a human right, and not even a human need for many. But a dry, safe roof over your head most definitely is.