Planning, Housing and Politics
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How can the planning system adapt so we can build new homes without alienating voters? Barrister and author Hashi Mohamed investigates, focussing on the system in England. The government has pledged to build 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s to ease the country’s housing crisis and increase home ownership. But wide-ranging planning reforms to make it easier to achieve were shelved following the Conservatives’ shock defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election last year. So is it possible to create a politically acceptable planning system in this country? Deadlock between local communities and big developers is commonplace, with planning policies taking years to realise through a local government system that lacks vital resources and expertise. And what has to change for enough new homes to be built? Hashi Mohamed asks how the planning system, and the way we live and build, needs to adapt. Producer: Caroline Bayley Production Coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Jacqui Johnson Sound: Graham Puddifoot Editor: Hugh Levinson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
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| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:41.0 | Hello and thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis, the podcast that looks at the ideas behind |
| 0:47.0 | the news. |
| 0:48.0 | Over the next half hour, planning Barrister and author, Hashi Mohammed, is going to explore the housing crisis. |
| 0:55.4 | He asks how new homes can be built without alienating voters, and whether planning and house |
| 1:01.2 | building have become too political. |
| 1:06.0 | I'm here on a major construction site just a mile outside of the |
| 1:15.0 | town of Malmsbury in Wiltshire. It's sunny, surrounded by excavating machinery, the Abbey in the distance. |
| 1:19.0 | Here will be 200 houses in the not so distant future. |
| 1:23.0 | We're standing on the actual construction site, |
| 1:27.0 | which is the embodiment of neighborhood planning. |
| 1:29.0 | This site was looked at because of its accessibility to the local school, to local |
| 1:36.1 | workplaces and we're actually standing on a new road that's going to be built which is going to help take the traffic out of the town. |
| 1:46.9 | Kim Power is an independent local town councillor and soon to be Malmsbury's next mayor. |
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