Thread by @Andrewwood17

You may be reading about proposed new #PlanningBill
It may if it survives have a big impact here (& we do not know full contents yet)
There will be a lot of political opposition (mainly from Conservatives!) but the planning system in England is crap - it does not deliver
1/

enough new homes, quality homes, affordable homes nor beautiful places - some of those failures are for other reasons not just the planning system
I am not sure I agree with government proposals but I won’t defend status quo
Tower Hamlets has to deliver around 1.82% of all
2/

new homes & I suspect opposition from suburban MP’s may push targets higher (this assumes people/market want more new homes here)
Part of the change will be zoning, a map will say this a Growth area where we want development but this area is Protected from development
3/

Want to have a guess where in TH which is which?
The Council as I understand it will set the zones although should consult
But if we can go to a low level of detail we maybe able to Protect some areas e.g. old pubs etc (I assume parks etc will be automatically protected)
4/

Another part of the change will be something called a local Design Code, the national version of which was consulted on recently
The government say they want each local authority to write their own design code in next 3 years!
5/
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

So I now attend two training sessions a week (16 in total) to understand what this means, at a personal cost of £1,000, UDL who run course are not for profit (I did ask TH Council for £help as part of a personal training budget but they did not respond)
urbandesignlondon.com/events/code-sc…
6/

So hopefully by the middle of July I will know enough to help write a Design Code for the area, either helping residents form a partnership with the Council and/or for a new Neighbourhood Plan
More on this later but see pics in next 2 tweets for what about
7/

But controversial part of changes may well be that no need for planning committees of Councillors!
Argument is that this reduces democracy
Having attended many development meetings I am not sure Cllrs adds much value nor works
But it would move public engagement from the
8/

end of the process (planning committee decision) to the beginning (the plan writing stage)
It is hard to get public & Cllrs to engage with policy even though key, but they will need to in the future
It will make England more like other countries
But given complexity how will
9/

this all work? as a lot of issues unresolved (what happened to renewal areas in my 3rd tweet?)
But if we want more new high quality affordable homes for everybody in the right places with supporting infrastructure then big changes required
Pics from my mums home town in
10/

Germany which I added because other countries do this better as regards quality of homes as well
But a lot of the governments policy agenda use the word ‘beauty’ which we will need to define in a Tower Hamlets context!
11/