Adventures in the crazy world of English planning

Some stories about how England's planning system stops people doing things for no good reason

Those of you who have watched Series 2 of Clarkson’s Farm will have seen, and been shocked by, the English planning system in all its glory. Much of the debate about our planning system focuses on big projects - nuclear power stations, reservoirs, railways and, of course, large housing developments. Yet the dull reality of planning is that it is mostly about the nonsense of a committee of councillors deciding whether a farmer can turn a barn into a restaurant.

I thought therefore, in the interests of furthering your understanding of planning, I’d share some stories from my 24 years as a local councillor in Bradford. My ward, Bingley Rural, is a beautiful patch of the South Pennines surrounding five villages including where I live in Cullingworth. Everywhere outside the villages is in the West Yorkshire green belt and the ward includes protected woodland and part of a SSSI (site of special scientific interest) plus assorted bits of ancient heritage. All the villages contain at least one conservation area and, like everywhere, there is a smattering of listed buildings and structures. As a councillor, representing your residents at planning meetings is part of the job (unless you’re a member of that committee when you are not able to make representations because it might compromise your ‘independence’).

I’ve written before about how councillors (and MPs) often do a poor job on planning by preferring to behave like the Grand Old Duke of York and march residents up to the top of the planning hill only to march them back down again:

“What happens in too many cases is that local politicians (and MPs - often the worst offenders), faced with opposition to a development from residents, do precisely what the Grand Old Duke did and march randomly from one possible objection to the next. And it's wrong to march a community, banners waving, up to the top of the hill when you know you'll just march them back down, banners furled and defeated, in a week or so. Too many politicians, having got the votes nicely parcelled away, fall back on "well I tried but the planners and developers you know..."

This sort of opportunistic politics may seem like good representation but it isn’t. All it does is create a false hope in people by misrepresenting what the planning system can and cannot do. As a local councillor, however, most of my attendances at planning committee weren’t about grand developments but about little things that mattered a lot to one or two people - the sort of developments like a farmer wanting to open a shop and restaurant in his barn.

I’ll start with a proposal to build a hay store at the back of a field where a nice lady keeps retired horses. You’d have thought that this isn’t the sort of thing planners might get involved with wouldn’t you? Indeed the lady in question had a lean-to store built as a temporary measure which prompted a neighbour in one of the new build houses overlooking the field to complain. Dutifully a planning officer turned up and told the nice lady that she needed planning permission for a hay store. Oh and also that looking after retired horses isn’t agriculture so structures to support that activity aren’t allowed in the green belt.

The lady applied for retrospective planning permission (with plans for a new, properly built store to replace the existing lean-to) and I ask for the matter to be considered by committee because I knew that, given what the planning officer had already told the nice lady, if it was left to a delegated decision the officers would refuse permission. On the appointed day we go to committee and the councillors (including one especially rude one who also hadn’t read the plans) supported the officer's recommendation to refuse permission. The nice lady couldn’t have her hay store. There is a feed store on the field now because the nice lady rented the field to the neighbouring farmer to fatten some lambs and he built a feed store under permitted development rights.

‘You can’t do that in the green belt’ was a repeated experience of planning along with a persistent view from officers and councillors that everybody applying for anything in the green belt is trying to get round the rules. There’s a pig farmer in one of the villages and he wanted to build a house on the land where he kept his pigs. Apparently, one officer told me, his farm wasn’t viable and therefore this was just a cunning plan to build a house on green belt land. The officer has long left the authority and the pig farmer is still fattening and selling pigs (very nice meat it is too). On another occasion the owner of some fishing lakes wanted to build a little cafe to replace the shipping container he was using. This wasn’t allowed because of the openness of the green belt but he could convert a falling down shack into a house.

At one planning meeting I spoke up for a farmer who wanted to build a little bungalow for his mum on the edge of the existing farmyard. We got permission for this because the farmer agreed to knock down a barn (in a loose sense, it was a structure consisting of corrugated plastic and asbestos sheets over a metal frame). Even then some members agreed with the officer who said that removing the barn wasn’t sufficient to compensate for the loss of that precious ‘openness’, only the sheer ugliness of the barn won the day.

You’d have thought things would be easier once we moved away from the lunacy of green belt regulations and into the existing built up area of the villages. But you’d be wrong. One local pub wanted to remove a sycamore and build a beer garden on some land across the drive. Nope, somebody (in a house built in a pub car park only 20 years ago) complained that it would be too noisy. Off to the planning committee we go and make the case. A 2m high acoustic fence was proposed, expensive noise tests and modelling were conducted and the council’s environmental health officer was happy. But this wasn’t good enough for the planning officer and the permission was refused amidst dark tales from councillors about anti-social behaviour and the evils of people drinking outside a village pub.

Part of the ward is within the urban area of Bingley and, in a former shop, another nice lady wanted to open a nursery and childcare business. You’d have thought this was pretty straightforward given the previous use but yet again the planners decided that there’d be too many cars (despite the proposals having something the shop never had, off road access and parking). Apparently the traffic generated by a pre-school is a different sort of traffic to that generated by a convenience store because it is at two times of the day not all the time. On this occasion the nice lady appealed against the refusal (she ran several childcare businesses and said this happens every time) and permission was granted.

Meanwhile in a fit of fussbucketry Bradford Council adopted a policy of not allowing new takeaways within a certain distance of schools and places where young people ‘might gather’. This was part of grand plans to stop children in Bradford getting fat. In Cullingworth the Co-op relocated from a small store to a newly built bigger store on the old petrol station. The owner of the old store was approached by a takeaway pizza business and an application went in for that business. Now bear in mind that the village, as well as having a pre-school, primary school and secondary school, also has a chinese takeaway, a fish & chip shop, two cafes and a butcher selling hot sandwiches and pies. Plus the Co-op itself, a sweet shop and another convenience store. According to planners, adding another place where people can buy food to take away will have a devastating impact on the waistlines of Cullingworth’s children. The application was refused. 

This sort of activist approach to planning policy is commonplace. Bradford has a particular beef about advertising signs. On one occasion they refused permission for an illuminated sign on some land at the tattier edge of the city centre. Apparently, while the rubble and litter on the site weren’t damaging the setting of the conservation area, a business putting up a sign was doing just that. Conservation areas and listed buildings provide planners with a legion of reasons to try and stop people doing things by demanding planning permissions. In one listed building (technically a 1970s annex attached to a 19th century extension to what is a listed building) the owner wanted to separate the annex from the house by the simple process of boarding up the door from one to the other. To do this required a permission for the works and a listed building consent. At the same place the removal of a tree (naturally one protected by a blanket tree preservation order slapped on the site when permission was given to subdivided the house in the 1970s) required further permissions taking so long the owner joked that the unsafe tree might fall on its own faster than the council would let him chop it down!

I could carry on with examples of planning inconsistency and rank stupidity but will finish with one last story about fast cars and rare breed farm animals. This one has allegations of corruption and a planner who seemed to just make things up to justify him not wanting to grant permission. A local businessman told the council that he intended to build a new barn on his land in order to house his wife’s collection of rare breed sheep and goats. The owner had, rightly in my view, assumed that this is a legitimate agricultural purpose so there were permitted development rights. Apparently not, the location was special and protected so a planning application was required. An application was submitted at which point the fact that the applicant also owned and raced cars became an issue. The Parish Council and one planner became convinced that the applicant was building a barn for his cars, not for his wife’s livestock. One Parish councillor told me that a ward colleague and member of the planning committee had been bribed to support the application (these accusations are fairly common and, in my experience, untrue). At the planning meeting the planner presenting the recommendation to refuse described the location as ‘open countryside’ which came as a surprise since it was in a notably (and protected - see above) woodland valley. The committee, however, bought into the car story and refused the application because storing cars in a shed in the green belt isn’t allowed (unless the shed is already there when it is fine). The application was granted on appeal and the barn was built. Its contents are now of no consequence obviously.

England’s planning system is a nonsense filled with petty bureaucracy, spiteful councillors and frustrated business people. It isn’t just farmers, publicans, take away owners and shopkeepers who suffer but all of us. We talk about the big things that don’t happen because of planning (warehousing, roads, railways and houses) but the system also screws over - thousands of times every year and everywhere in the country - hundreds and hundreds of people just trying to build their businesses, to do something to help our economy grow, to provide services to us all. We are all worse off for the planning system and it isn’t just the grand local plans or the National Planning Policy Framework but the everyday minutiae of a system designed, it seems to me, to stop people doing business.