Housing has been much in the news over the last year or so.
We are strongly objecting to a planning application of 5,000 homes at Lodge Hill in Kent. It’s not that we object to homes per se – as I pointed out in this blog here, people need a home too, and we’re building far fewer than we need. However, getting the location right is critical, and destroying a designated site which is a stronghold for nightingales is a lesson in how not to plan sensitively for the needs of people and nature. There’s still time to ask the Secretary of State to ‘call-in’ the application to make the decision himself, and save the nightingales (here’s the link to an action you can take).
Meanwhile, over the last year I’ve been taking part (in a personal capacity) in the Lyons Housing Review, commissioned by the Labour Party to work out how to deliver 200,000 homes a year by the end of the next Parliament. In his speech today at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband pledged a new generation of towns, garden cities and suburbs for 500,000 new homes.
Although the final report hasn’t been published yet, some of the key recommendations of the Lyons Review were trailed at the Labour Party conference.
The key proposal is for New Homes Corporations, established by local authorities to work as local delivery agencies to deliver large scale housing development, working with the private sector and housing associations.
There wasn’t much mention of environmental matters in the media coverage, apart from a welcome reference to green spaces as critical infrastructure which New Homes Corporations will help to deliver.
We’ll have to wait until the final report to find out what it recommends on getting the location of new homes right (for which the planning system is key) and making sure they are built to the right quality.
Whoever is in power next year, the RSPB wants to work with housebuilders and local communities to build places that are great for both people and nature.