Yesterday morning I was a substitute for another councillor on the Development Committee. This is the first time that I have been asked to do this since the Conservative led coalition government took power in May, and in one respect a real difference has been felt already.
This is in the area of ‘garden grabbing’. The last government decided in their wisdom to redesignate gardens as ‘brown field land’ for redevelopment purposes. This meant that it was open to developers to make a quick buck from building anywhere that enjoyed the benefit of a large garden. ‘Garden grabbing’, combined with completely inappropriate national density regulations, resulted in some pretty terrible planning decisions in both rural and urban areas. (Examples of some of these can be seen a stone's throw from our home in Newmans Green.)
In Babergh we avoided the worst excesses of the policy, but some suburban areas of London and other cities have been drastically changed for the worst as lovely old homes were demolished and replaced with soulless blocks of flats which in the event did not prove very popular with the public.
What a difference in atmosphere today! The committee was asked to approve the demolition of a house in East Bergholt on a really large plot of land. The proposal was to replace this with three detatched houses, which admittedly were a little closer together than other houses in the road, but which would have probably elicited little criticism before May. I found myself in the strange position of actually defending the proposals against accusations of ‘overdevelopment of the site’.
In the event the vote was a tie, and the Chairman cast his vote in favour of allowing the development to go ahead. Times have certainly changed, and not in this particular instance for the worst!
Statistics from the Daily Mail in 2008.
