“No shops, no schools”: homes in England built without basic amenities. “Thousands of properties going up without access to playgrounds, community infrastructure & doctors.” Some developers not fulfilling legal requirements with little consequence, others didn’t actually have to. A planning mess.
"The current system of developer contributions is failing to capture the money needed to unlock affordable homes and pay for essential infrastructure and social facilities." www.tcpa.org.uk/press-releas... by @thetcpa.bsky.social 07 July 2025.
A deliberately contrived mess driven by the Treasury which 25y ago convinced itself that building fantasy nos. of houses would solve all UK economic problems. It's been systematically destroying planning & feather-bedding builders by encouraging car-dependent sprawl with little or no facilities.
A new build near me also had to provide a school, shops, and GP surgery. Until that portion of land set aside for these amenities suddenly wasn't allowed to be built on. We have several large fields nearby all in the same predicament. Also none of them have footpaths. Sea of tarmac.
Same in Scotland…
The guardian's foray onto planning is rarely a success. Half arsed analysis and unjustified conclusions. The system works much better than this. Things to note..developer contributions are pretty much the only funding to infrastructure available, developers hae zero influence over public transport.
It *is* a mess, but part of the problem is we constantly talk about the need to build housing, rather than the need to build neighbourhoods. Homes on their own are just a solution to one problem and a contributor to another, more complex one. We need a better development process... www.yoco.uk
The age old tug of war between private developers maximising profits and local authorities eager for more housing to meet their local plan obligations.
The UK makes denser living undesirable through leaseholds and insufficient public spaces. It also makes sprawl difficult because all land is valuable and has been owned for the past ~1000 years, so there is no cheap unutilized land to sprawl onto.
Sounds like the standard American suburb
Welcome to USA suburbia and automobile addiction
Except that new UK homes are the smallest in Europe, not to even compare them to the US, so even the main benefit of a big house and a big yard aren't here. And UK cities aren't quite as car-feiendly so having a car isn't as useful. It's a bad middle ground.
Agree, we have the worst housing and pay more money for it too. TV show host Kevin McCloud (Grand Designs) said the UK should be embarrassed at the low quality of our homes. Working class don't matter in the UK.
This is common in Australia's outer suburban areas. Car dependency is baked into subdivisions, with no provision for basic services like healthcare, food, clothing etc. All a car trip away, with no alternative infrastructure in place (cycleways, buses etc). It has to change.
Doug Ford in Ontario🇨🇦removed developers requirement to install infrastructure, passing that cost onto taxpayers by increasing their property taxes Ford then privatized services like garbage/recycling collection to charge homeowners more for inferior quality/efficiency Ford is owned by the mob