Wild Justice’s response to the National Planning Policy Framework consultation

One of the first acts of the new Labour government has been to signal that it wants more houses built in England and it is looking to make that process easier. Wild Justice has no problem with that in principle but the devil is in the detail and making it easier to pour concrete means changing planning policy and that might have much larger implications that just for the housing sector.

Planning policy isn’t our area of expertise so we worked with a range of experts to submit a response to the consultation. Our response is below and the consultation can be viewed here.

The consultation is long and complex and we didn’t respond to every question. It deals with a much wider range of issues than simply housing need including location of renewable energy developments (so see, for example, our response to question 74). We did stand up for the concept of beauty in the planning system (see question 59).

We’d be surprised if many want to read our response, but in the interests of transparency we publish our response here now. Many other environmental organisations, and a large number of vested interests, will have put in responses too – we wonder what they said.