So much for democracy - National Housing Federation wants councillors removed from planning decisions

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I'm not a fan of David Orr, boss of the National Housing Federation. Not only is this old Labour hack wedding to the old model where government hands over cash to his members to subsidise house-building but he says stupid things like this:

‘My proposition is that we should enhance the local authority councillor’s role in thinking strategically about place-shaping and plan-making, but remove them completely from the day-to-day operational delivery of those plans – then leave it to officers to be accountable to the councillors'

The problem is that the business applauds this example of allowing professionals to push aside the population. It also illustrates that developers - and their lackeys - do not want to talk to communities about their concerns, their worries and their needs. Instead they want to ram their preferred solution down the throats of those communities.

People elect councillors precisely so they can make decisions - the choices - about things like housing. And maybe this means that sometimes those councillors make decisions the 'professionals' don't like. Decisions like this one:

More than 250 campaigners, many waving placards, attended the Shipley Planning Panel meeting at Bingley Arts Centre yesterday.

The audience cheered and stamped their feet as councillors voted six to one against proposals by developers Redrow and Bellway to build on the site at Sty Lane, Micklethwaite.

This was a decision - recommended by those professionals - that was upheld at appeal, confirmed by the secretary of state and upheld again in the high court. With David Orr's scheme it wouldn't have been made.

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...and Bradford Council want you to think there's a housing crisis

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For some while now the Labour folk running Bradford (into the ground) have been telling us that there's a 'housing crisis' requiring us to build loads and loads of houses all over the place to cope with our growing population.

However, it seems that this growing population is, in fact, leaving:

Internal migration statistics, released by the Office of National Statistics yesterday, show around 4,000 more people left the district than arrived in the year ending June 2012. 

We'll be finding out that the birth rate statistics the Council are using are wrong next.

Mind you in the same newspaper they're running:

Bradford’s Housing Timebomb, which calls for more affordable homes to be built on brownfield land to help the 21,000 local people stuck on social housing waiting lists. 

The 21,000 figure is, of course, a complete fiction - this is the number of people registered on the Bradford 'choice-based letting' system which isn't a waiting list. Anyone can register and no questions about housing need are asked. However, this doesn't stop self-interested lobbies like the National Housing Federation.

In Bradford there are perhaps 6,000 people actually in some kind of housing need in any given year and around 2,000 social rents coming onto the market in the same period. If a net figure of 4,000 people are leaving (mostly leaving behind an empty home), it seems to me that the housing development need in Bradford is pretty close to zero.

And this rather explains why there's over 5,000 houses planned that aren';t being built. Put simply, there's no-one to buy them.

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