Sir John Hayes MP says that Government's planning and housing changes will benefit South Holland and the Deepings

In his latest column, MP Sir John Hayes explains why he thinks dropping housing targets will help our area...

Alongside purpose, a sense of place nourishes personal and communal pride.

Where we begin, live life and end it, roots our days and shapes our dreams.

Homes matter because having a place of one’s own to build a family’s future makes life’s dreams come true.

Those who speak clinically of housing targets miss the point.

It’s making homes of which people can be proud that public policy must make possible.

So, the Government’s decision to drop mandatory housing targets - whereby local communities have been obliged to endure seemingly endless unsustainable development - is wise and welcome, if overdue.

Pleased to play my part, alongside other sensible colleagues, in encouraging this sharp turn in thinking, I am delighted that, from now on, there will be no binding housing targets.

It means that no pre-destined number of properties must be built in my constituency. Henceforth, any such number will be purely advisory and must “reflect local circumstances”. This, at long last, puts local communities, and the councillors they elect, in sole charge of what’s built and where.

Never again will the imposition of top down targets be a justification for developments out of scale or character with the existing built environment or local landscape; and no longer will we be forced to suffer soulless ‘identikit’ housing estates bolted onto historic settlements.

Communities are right to focus on such ‘local circumstances’ as they have when resisting excessive developments in Crowland, Weston, Pinchbeck, Surfleet and elsewhere.

They do so knowing that the quality of houses built too often falls short of the least we should expect and too rarely matches the best. There are those who crassly discount beauty as an indulgence. Happily, the Secretary of State for Housing is not one of them.

In contrast, understanding that it is an imperative, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the 2020 ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ Commission.

The findings of that body, in which I was a participant, that “beauty must become the natural result of working within our planning system” have been given life in its successor, the Office for Place – with its pivotal role in developing Government policy.

The board of the OfP, on which I also sit, are missioned to reform the planning system to incentivise aesthetic quality and reject all that is intrusive, unsustainable and ugly.

That mission is straightforward. As the Secretary of State said, to “make it easier for all neighbourhood communities, wherever they may be, sustainably to require what they find beautiful and to refuse what they find ugly.”

The Office for Place has already fundamentally altered the lens through which future developments will be seen, securing changes to the National Planning Policy Framework which necessitate the fostering of “well-designed, beautiful and safe places”, and ensuring that any applications which do not adhere to such design guidance into account “should be refused”.

The next step the Government will take is to enshrine high quality design in strict legal requirements, so making excellence in all developments a statutory requirement. Planners will be obliged to think better and developers to build better. With no central dictats on housing numbers, and new legal requirements on design, the future looks altogether brighter as incremental, vernacular development becomes carefully considered and warmly welcomed.