Cousin Itt and chocolate ice cream

I was expecting ‘it’ but not the detail of it. I certainly wasn’t expecting my reaction to it, which was sang-froid with a dollop of chocolate ice cream.

Bucks draft development plan rings alarm bells
I was alerted to ‘it’ by a WhatsApp message from a mate, who wanted to know what I thought of it – ‘it’ being the draft strategic development plan published by our local planning authority, Buckinghamshire Council. I call it ‘it’ because it reminds me of the Addams Family’s Cousin Itt – a shaggy little thing (no, not the creepy disembodied hand ‘Thing’) who utters total gibberish. The plan is indeed gibberish. But it’s not entirely Bucks Council’s fault. The Labour government has mandated that the county of Buckinghamshire – rural to a large degree – plaster 95,000 new homes over the countryside in the next 20 years. It’s an economic, pragmatic, environmental, sustainable and moral outrage, but Bucks is legally obliged to produce gibberish in line with Labour’s jibber-jabber. The fact that gibberish is spelled with a ‘g’ and jibber-jabber with ‘j’s says it all, really.

When previous ridiculous development proposals have surfaced, I’ve got on my high horse and campaigned appropriately. But this time, I contextualised and analysed the draft plan and worked through what others had to say, from Outraged of Orpington to Upset of Uppingham (neither town being in Bucks but what the heck). My considered response was to snort, sigh, roll my eyes and add more ice cream to my Waitrose order. Where was my horror? Where were my flurry of emails, letters to the editor, and social media rants?

The clue is in the phrase: “I contextualised and analysed the draft plan”. I came to understand it for what it is: a draft (daft?) plan full of proposals to develop here, there and not quite everywhere in Bucks; the plan could change a little or a lot before the final version is published. At the moment, I believe, my own village has got off comparatively lightly; and most of the proposed sites in other villages that are of interest to me are ‘reasonable’ when compared with alternatives, even if each one when considered on its own appears to be undesirable.

Why is Bucks producing a development plan?
It’s probably best to start from Bucks Council’s requirement – they have no choice – to produce a plan to build approximately 95,421.67 new homes over roughly the next 19 years, ten months and 37 days. If Bucks fails to produce a ‘sound’ plan, they will be powerless to stop the Labour lunatics and developer psychopaths from taking over the planning asylum and building almost anywhere they want. That’s how it works. It’s a daft system that favours developers and penalises blameless local communities and nature. Criticising Bucks Council for developing their local plan is as daft as the plan itself.

Why are most of the proposed sites in the Vale?
Where I do castigate Bucks is regarding their long-standing policy of protecting the green belt in the south of the county, and the Chilterns ‘AONB’ in the centre, so that we’re left mainly with development pressures in the northern agricultural Vale, which isn’t part of the greenbelt. This policy is as much to do with the Tory council favouring their Tory voter base as it is about green spaces and nature (the north is more floating-voter territory). The policy should, nowadays, be on shakier ground because quite a lot of Bucks’ greenbelt epitomises the concept of Labour’s ‘greybelt’, which is the part of the greenbelt that isn’t green at all. It’s either built on, fragmented, derelict or litter-strewn scrub that is no more than a buffer against community coalescence. Building homes on at least some greybelt is not a bad idea, but the great and the good of the Green variety, dubbed ‘Nimbys’ (Not In My Back Yard) by the development lobby, have blanketly refused to countenance the concept of a greybelt even though, in Bucks’ case’, it could save some actual green spaces ‘up north. It’s a crying shame that ‘green’ principles and ideologies are contributing towards the destruction of agriculture and nature.

In line with their policy of targeting the Vale, Bucks identified and assessed numerous sites according to a rigorous methodology. I know how it works because I once sat on a couple of relevant committees, SHLAA and HELAA, which sounds more like a Jewish comedy duo. In my not-so-humble opinion, the methodology supports most of the site-options currently on the table. While some of these sites might score modestly or even quite low, they still score higher than others and, given the whopping great target (95,000) to reach, Bucks is forced to resort to least-worst options.

Looking beyond the homes to the necessary supporting infrastructure

Bucks will need / Bucks needs better roads, education, health services, sewage treatment, bat tunnels, spider sanctuaries and snake pits. There's understandable concern that much of this will not be forthcoming. Bucks Council certainly can’t afford to fork out for much for it. They’re too cash-strapped trying to budget for the education of more kids – especially SEN – that the loathsome Phillipson is sacrificing on the altar of her rush-to-the-bottom socialist ideology of spite. Her intelligence-strapped and compassion-devoid government hasn’t said if any national cash will be forthcoming to fund infrastructure, and there’s only so much that can be raised from developers.

The infrastructure with the best chance of being ready in time is sewage treatment capacity, because the industry isn’t hamstrung by state ownership; although, it is ridiculously regulated, counter-productively underpriced, and an unfair target for the economically illiterate socialist ideology of nationalisation at any cost, fueled by lies, damned lies and precious few joined-up statistics.

Infrastructure aside, is it possible to build 95,000 homes in Bucks in 20 years? And does it matter as long as Bucks produces a plan now allocating enough land?

The answer to the second question is, yes it does matter. When the Planning Inspector examines the final draft, he has to judge whether it’s ‘viable’. If he concludes that sites for 95,000 homes have been allocated but there’s no way they’ll all be built, he’ll rule the plan to be unviable and therefore ‘unsound’, then it’s goodnight Vienna, Aylesbury, Buckingham … and Whaddon will probably be subsumed into a suburb of Milton Keynes. Nightmare!

Even if the Inspector decides the plan is sound, if the actual delivery of homes falls short of the promised rate, the plan could effectively fail down the line, leading to a developer free-for-all. To trigger this fail, a developer might point to a site that won’t be fully developed before the end of the 20 years as evidence that the rate of delivery is at risk. Wise to such a scenario, Bucks has been quite clever. They’ve explicitly anticipated that some of their proposed sites, while suitable for, say 3,000 homes, might only see 2,000 built within 20 years. They’ve flagged this and selected a few additional sites just in case. This reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) the risk of a developer triggering a fail as described above. Cool.

Do developers want to build the 95,000 homes in 20 years? 

I'll turn first to the apparent practice of land-banking. This is where developers hoard some land and, on other parcels, deliberately delay the build-rate in order to keep the supply low and thus prices high. As well as elevating the sale price, developers delay building in order to trigger unsound plans as described in the previous paragraph, thus forcing local authorities to grant planning permissions on other land they’d rather not. The 2023 Levelling up and Regeneration Act was designed to address this issue and speed up development. To date it has been pretty ineffective, because there’s more to land-banking than developers playing the planning system. There might be a shortage of one material or another, such as HS2 monopolising concrete. The workforce might be lacking in numbers and/or certain skills (there’s currently a scaffolder shortage). Finance might be difficult to secure. Ya see, there’s more to the housing market than bricks and mortar.

Do we actually need to build such large numbers of new homes?

According to the Office for National Statistics, the population of the UK in mid-2020 was just over 67m; by mid-2024 it had risen to 69.3m, an increase of 2.3m or 3.4%. According to NHBC, the number of new homes completed over the same period is estimated at 700,000. That means, ‘to stand still’ each new housing unit would have to be occupied by 3.29 people, which is way higher than the actual average occupancy rate of 2.35 (down from 2.4 in 2020). In other words, the UK hasn’t stood still: a 2.35 occupancy rate means that we should have constructed just shy of 980,000 homes; since 2020, we have therefore fallen short by 280,000 homes, and shortfalls have been recorded since way before 2020. While I hesitate to compare the UK’s housing occupancy rate to that of our European frenemies (because of economic and cultural differences) the ONS has no such qualms. They conclude that “if the UK had built houses at the rate of the average Western European country from 1955 to 2015, it would have added a further 4.3 million homes than it actually did.” And the Centre for Policy Studies points out that “Britain has just 446 homes per 1,000 people... This compares to 560 in France, 516 in Germany, and a European average of 542.” All this suggests that the UK needs to build more homes than we have in the recent past (at least). How many we need to build, is still up for debate.

Some claim that we could build fewer homes if we forcibly re-occupied millions of empty ones and repurposed business premises. This sounds too Stalinist for me, which makes me wonder why Starmer hasn’t seized on the idea. Maybe it’s because this ‘easy win’ isn’t such a panacea. Why not? Well, the ONS reports that, as at the March 2021 census, there were about 1.5million unoccupied dwellings in England; that’s just over 6% of the 25million total. However, the ONS cautions that as the census was carried out during the Covid pandemic, some people might have temporarily vacated their ‘usual’ residence to live with family or friends.

Another thing to bear in mind is that about 10% of empty homes (150,000) are in face second homes, so not empty all the time. Trying to force second homeowners into selling by introducing punitive council taxes and hostile regulations won’t make a pinhead of a difference to housing stock and affordability. More recent data (Action on Empty Homes, 2025) says that there are about 310,000 long-term empty homes (just 1/5th of the 1.5m identified by the ONS), defined as those that have been empty for more than six months, which is just shy of 1.25% of total housing stock (25m). Some of these might be ‘temporarily’ vacant owing to being renovated, between owners or tenants, or subject to probate, so they are not available to be appropriated. Three other things to note here: 1) England’s long term empty homes percentage is par for the course if not lower than similar foreign economies; 2) A functioning housing market NEEDS a certain percentage of empty homes; 3) We need to know why business premises are vacant. If it’s because the local economy is struggling, then who’s going to want to live in the area and buy these repurposed properties?

How easy is it to repurpose empty homes?

Why don't you ask people who've tried and failed to the point of going bust. For example, there’s a gorgeous (if dilapidated) row of early Victorian terraced cottages in a pretty, popular seaside town in Cumbria, close to mega-employer Sellafield. Developers have gone bust while trying to bring them back to life. The culprit? The planning system and in particular the ideological intransigence of Historic England, who’d rather see the homes remain empty than compromise on design and materials, so they remain unaffordable to renovate. The fact that most of the terrace has been looted of any historic integrity already seems to have escaped their notice. If the northeast is more your style, hop across to an ex-mining village in Durham, where empty homes are empty because no one wants to live in the area, so no one wants to renovate them because there are no jobs. In conclusion, the ‘empty homes’ mantra isn’t a solution; it’s a red herring.

What can we do about Bucks’ alarming draft local plan?

If we object to proposed sites in our respective communities, we would be engaging in an abject exercise in Nimbyism on steroids: each village protecting its own little fiefdom, neighbour pitted against neighbour and, at the end of the day, there would be different winners and different losers, but still winners and losers: there would be no overall improvement in the plan.

We might feel less Nimbyish if we play the NIABY card (Not In Anyone’s Back Yard) and try to prove that all the sites are unsuitable by challenging the underlying strategy and methodology for site selection. Should the challenge succeed, though, the local plan as a whole would fail, which means the sites being fought against, and others that were not going to be developed per the plan, would be vulnerable at the whim of the Barratts and Persimmons of this world. We would, in truth, have made matters much much worse for everyone including ourselves. Finally, we could lobby the Labour government and ask them to see sense. I know: I have a weird sense of humour.

What am going to do about it?

Me? I’m going to let the Angries from Abingdon and Piqued from Peterborough (still not in Bucks I’m afraid) get hot under the collar, while I keep my cool with chocolate ice cream. Would I feel any different and be compelled to act if looming great Barratt Blocks were earmarked for the fields across from me that would, amongst other things, slash the value of my home? In my younger days, yes I probably would. But, a lot of water – some of it polluted (not by the water companies) – has flowed under the bridge since I first dipped my toe in it. I’m reminded of Heraclitus. He purported in about 500BC that ‘you can't step into the same river twice’, meaning the water is constantly flowing: that life is in a state of constant flux. So if Barratt started digging outside my kitchen window, I’d probably rent out my house and buy another one elsewhere, thus joining the ranks of the greedy, selfish, hoarding, aspirational, family-protecting second homeowners whom the lefties love to hate. Am I bovvered?

Nah. I’m too busy reading Ancient Greek philosophy and gorging on bowls of chocolate ice cream.