24th June 2011, 12:04 PM
BAJR Wrote:Rather than be paranoid, I do hope this is not an attempt by the Concervative High Command to test the waters with an expendable minor councillor. Helps prepare the way for a more concerted effort.
I have to say that I'm slightly worried that this may be the case as well. Not as part of some coherent ?plot?, but certainly as an event that other councillors/Gov't members may be keeping an eye on to see what they can get away with. As many people have said, and is set out excellently in the Finds and Features blog, this is unlikely to get very far because of PPS5 etc. However, I was reading a blog on Lib Dem Voice yesterday (please note I?m not a Lib Dem!) that did make me wonder how much longer PPS5 would be a hindrance to people like Alan Melton:
Quote:A little-noticed policy of the Coalition is that of throwing out the entire planning system and replacing it with about fifty pages of pro-development planning policies. This is called the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and is intended to be the entire amount of national planning policy governing development.I don?t really know anything about the NPPF, but is it as bad as it sounds here? As if so, couldn?t Fenland DC be the thin end of the wedge?
Simplicity and brevity sound great, though, so why worry? Well, Planning Minister Greg Clark gave the task of re-drafting the voluminous PPSs to the innocuously-named ?Practitioners Advisory Group?. The four people on this august body are a Director at Taylor Wimpey, a Conservative Councillor on the LGA Board, a representative of ?Major Developers? to DCLG, and the Acting Head of Sustainable Development at the RSPB. What did a group 75% made up of Tories and Developers come up with? Unsurprisingly, a draft planning system that directs planning decisions towards automatically saying ?yes? to any application that brings economic growth, and which puts people and the environment firmly in second and third places in the process.