By the time the notice goes up, it's decided
How the planning system actually works, and the stage where speaking up counts most.
Most of us first notice the planning system when a notice appears on a lamppost. By then a lot of it was settled years before. Roughly, it goes like this.
- The government gives each council a house building target.
- Every few years the council writes a local plan that picks the sites. It asks the public twice, once on the options and once on the finished draft. The options stage is when things can still move.
- Then come the applications. If a site is in the adopted plan, whether it gets built on was decided back then. If the plan is out of date, developers can win on fields that were never in it.
Most of the time, though, there's nothing open to comment on. A council asks about its plan for a few weeks, then often not again for a year or more.
The rest of the year still counts. Above the district councils, county leaders and the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough talk to government about growth across whole areas, all year round. It's one of the few places you can push for planned new places instead of estates dotted round every village.
The government is also bringing in a new regional planning system. It lets homes be planned across a much wider area: for example, a whole county's new homes could go into one planned place, instead of being spread across every village. Sign the petition and we'll email you when it opens for comments, with a plain guide to responding.
Sign the petition and we'll email you when your district's next plan opens, with a plain guide to responding. You don't need to watch for it.
Where you live
We can stop this
We want building concentrated in fewer, larger places with schools, health, water and transport built in — not another estate on the edge of every village.
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