housing
Matthew Pennycook stood up this week and announced that mayors across England will get the power to overrule local councils on planning applications above 150 homes, above 15,000 square metres of commercial space, or above 30 metres tall — roughly ten storeys. These are not garden-extension numbers. They are small-town
housing
A quarter to a third of everything central government spends in Britain never passes within touching distance of a ballot paper. That is not my number; it is Bristol University Press's, from a study of arm's-length bodies, and it means quangos now handle a bigger share
localism
Greg Clark stood up in the Commons on 17 January 2011 and called it the biggest transfer of power to local communities in a generation. The Localism Bill, he said, would sweep away the regional quangos and hand planning back to the people who lived with the consequences of it.
housing
Somewhere in one of the thirteen mayoral combined authorities that will shortly acquire this power, a planning committee is about to spend an evening doing what planning committees do: reading objections about drainage, parking and the loss of a hedge, weighing them against a housing target nobody in the room
housing
Somewhere in the paperwork for the 13 mayors of England there is now a line that did not exist a fortnight ago: the power to overrule a local council and wave through a development of more than 150 homes, or 15,000 square metres of shops and offices, or anything
housing
Ronesha's younger son needs a fridge for his medication. For seven weeks last year, in a bed and breakfast in England, he didn't have one. The stay itself was already unlawful — the law caps a family's time in a B&B at six
housing
England needs roughly 300,000 new homes a year to keep pace with demand, has managed it exactly once since 1969, and last year the total came in around 170,000 — a shortfall the trade press reports and the political class shrugs at. Every time a local scheme collapses, the
housing
Andy Burnham stood outside Downing Street on Monday and told the country he would "bring back hope," which is the kind of sentence you say when you don't yet have a housing number to say instead. He is Britain's sixth prime minister in a
housing
A planning inspector called Susan Heyes spent eleven days in March examining Trafford's local housing plan, and at the end of it she added four hundred homes to a green field near Hale that the council had voted, twice, not to build on. Nobody in Trafford elected Susan