It's out! The new National Planning Policy Framework

[BAJR]

http://www.communities.gov.uk/statements...om/2115446

National Planning Policy Framework

Mr Speaker I would like to make a statement about planning policy.

I am delighted today to be publishing the National Planning Policy Framework and our response to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee Report of the 21 December 2011.
Our reforms to planning policy have 3 fundamental objectives:

• To put unprecedented power in the hands of communities to shape the places in which they live;
  
• To better support growth to give the next generation the chance that our generation has had to have a decent home, and to allow the jobs to be created on which our prosperity depends; and
  
• To ensure that the places we cherish - our countryside, towns and cities - are bequeathed to the next generation in a better condition than they are now.
  

To achieve these objectives reform is sorely needed.


A decade of Regional Spatial Strategies, top-down targets and national planning policy guidance that has swelled beyond reason to over 1000 pages across 44 documents, has led to communities seeing planning as something done to them, rather than by them.


And as the planning system has become more complex, it has ground ever slower. In 2004 Parliament required every council to have a plan - eight years on, only around a half have been able to adopt one.


During the last decade - starting long before the financial crisis - we built fewer homes than in any peacetime decade for 100 years.




Read on::
http://www.communities.gov.uk/statements...om/2115446