Opinion: Rush to build houses harms countryside and farmers
© Jim Varney How many more new houses do we need? Everywhere you go, the urban sprawl gets bigger, infilling gaps between town and ring road on green belt, destroying farmland and habitat.
Housebuilding, to various qualities, is about the only thing we are good at in this country.
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Unfortunately, from small shoeboxes to mansions, the pattern is always the same though – a shiny new development surrounded by crumbling infrastructure.
Roads too narrow and potholed, inadequate sewer systems, no off-street parking, no extra doctor’s surgeries or schools.
Developers always choosing green belt instead of brownfield because it’s easier and cheaper. Why not tidy up the high street, which is dead because of online shopping.
It makes no difference if the parish council, the county council, internal drainage boards and all other knowledgeable interest groups object. You may even be unlucky and have your land compulsory purchased for the “greater good”.
Developers can get lawyered up, have deeper pockets than all other parties, and can appeal to the Secretary of State and win.
For serious agri-business, there is nothing more annoying than others around you cashing in land for “bungalow seeds”, bringing the urban fringe ever closer, with everything that entails. It makes farming more difficult for those left doing it and devalues agricultural land.
We need a serious review of procedure. The housing secretary, Steve Reed (Mr “Build Baby Build”), won’t do this though
Don’t let developers and urban planners tell you their attenuation ponds and wetland areas are big enough.
Simple logic suggests that when they’re at capacity, water in equals water out, and each attenuation scheme is only taken on its individual merit, even though multiple schemes could discharge into the same watercourse, overloading it.
Who is going to maintain these schemes in the future? Nobody, because it doesn’t fall into anyone’s remit.
Who’s going to pay the price going forward? Any landowner downstream.
If you want to exercise your riparian rights to stop a solar park chopping through a carrier main that’s taking your drainage water to a pumping station, you’ll probably be ignored, but when a developer wants to tap into your main drain with 70 houses-worth of water and, on occasion, sewage, it becomes your problem to maintain and clean out all the urban detritus.
Oh, but don’t worry – biodiversity net gain (BNG) will sort it all out.
The first option available to the developer is to deliver 10% BNG for the next 30 years, on-site, which is probably impossible because of housing density.
The second is to buy off-site units on the open market, which are lucrative to landowners but not to sitting tenants. The third is to buy statutory credits from the government which will, at its discretion, use the revenue to invest in habitat creation.
Does that mean if options one and two are exhausted, the government would have the power to compulsory purchase private land to satisfy BNG, in a green-washing exercise to continue housebuilding.
We need a serious review of procedure. The housing secretary, Steve Reed (Mr “Build Baby Build”), won’t do this though.
What’s actually stopping him reaching his housing target is the fact that Labour has tanked the economy and nobody can afford a mortgage.