Launched with a pledge to “go further than ever before” to meet housing targets, the Government is consulting on the biggest shake-up of planning rules since 2012. A few welcome words on transport, like building more homes around railway stations, are overshadowed by focusing decision-making on a single (housing) target. Planning is supposed to be about creating better places. However, communities are set to lose their ability to influence that, instead having ever more of the same characterless, car dependent homes imposed.

The consultation asks how the new wording can “support wider objectives”, like “creating good places to live and work”. Yet we’ve known for years what the problems are. In 2019, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission found that “Every sector of the industry has told us, and our wider research has firmly agreed, that overly car-dominated places tend to be less attractive or popular.” It concluded “we have to seriously tackle car dominance when designing places”. In 2021, the UK’s Transport Decarbonisation Plan agreed, saying that “[d]evelopments often do little or nothing meaningful to enable cycling and walking, or to be properly and efficiently accessible by public transport. Sometimes they make cycling and walking provision worse. We can and must do better.” Reports by brilliant NGOs like the New Economics Foundation and Transport for New Homes have hammered home the same message again and again since then.

It’s bad enough that new wording is only ”intended to restate existing transport policy”. What the consultation does not tell you is that it remains weaker than what was in place between 1994 and 2012. That previous policy rightly identified traffic growth as damaging our towns, countryside and planet. The new promise of “vision-led” planning sounds alright, until you notice National Highways claims its huge road-building plan is vision-led too! Existing wording to “give priority first to pedestrian and cycle movements” sounds nice, until you look at recently built housing estates and realise those words have proved as ineffective in the real world as SLOW markings on thousands of roads.

Please respond to the consultation by 10th March. Just put your name, address and email in the ‘Take Action’ panel, then click the ‘Start Writing’ button to send a response. You can edit the suggested text as you see fit. When you’re ready, hit ‘Send Letter’. The whole process should take less than a minute.

Many thanks,

Chris, Ed, Roger & Nisha

Transport Action Network