Activism and the road through Planning & Local Democracy
‘All I need is the air that I breathe’ - (With apologies and full credit and copyright to Albert Hammond)
For the last 29 years, I have been engaged in legal activism both in legal practice and through my role as a consumer and human rights advocate. That advocacy has brought me into contact with many public officials across the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia. It has also brought me into close contact with journalists, many of whom were keen to report the detriments suffered by individuals and how authorities intended to resolve these deficits, or not as the case may be. This was certainly the case with local democracy reporters who would simply contact me to ask questions about councillors codes of conduct, freedom of information requests through to the more serious allegations arising from their investigations. In truth, I had little experience of how local democracy functioned, but the legal theories behind their requests were essentially the same and I was always happy to guide those journalists.
In the UK, we’ve seen a great deal in the headlines since 2024, about the apparent strictures around planning, and how they were responsible for applying a downward pressure upon delivering developments within communities. The catalyst for recent commentaries centres around two issues: the apparent demographic demand for housing and an equal high demand for social housing.
When the Starmer government came to power in 2024, grand ambitions were announced for a national home-building programme. Within that declaration of intent, they also announced that they were introducing mandatory housing targets for local councils, increased impetus on existing and new development plans, maintaining the brownfield land approach but introducing a common-sense approach to the greenbelt and causing councils to review greenbelt boundaries, prioritising low-quality grey-belt land, introducing ‘golden rules’ for greenbelt land by requiring developers to provide infrastructure for local communities and social housing.
This was further strengthened by the same government taking on the ‘blockers’ from preventing housing developments, in order to save bats and newts. Starmer announced those changes in early 2025 by stating:
“Nuclear plants, trainlines and windfarms will be built quicker thanks to changes to the rules to stop blockers getting in the way of the government’s Plan for Change….The new common-sense approach doesn’t allow newts or bats to be more important than the homes hardworking people need, or the roads and hospitals this country needs”.
To read more from this article, please visit my Substack page:
Comments