Gordon Brown’s Budget pledges to deal with the logjams in the planning system, release sites for housebuilding, review the progress of PPG3 and more, are further proof of the prominence of housing on the government’s agenda.
The review of PPG3 is overdue. Three years after its introduction, the guidance has undoubtedly given new home design a boost – but at a cost. Build totals have fallen as the industry has struggled to work on complex brownfield sites and with planning committees who regard the guidance’s high-density diktat as locally unpalatable. As this issue of Homes highlights, PPG3 is a hard sell, both to planners and to customers.

Construction is often compared unfavourably to the car industry, but extend the analogy to planning constraints, and you see what housebuilders have been up against. If PPG3 were applied to car manufacturers, only space-saving, fuel-efficient Smart Cars would be rolling off the production line and Jaguars would effectively be banned. And you wouldn’t sell that to John Prescott, let alone to the general public.

Postscript

Josephine Smit