Douglas Carswell's Blog

The great planning debate - continued

After my blog on Thursday, I was interested to read Charles Moore's thoughts on planning in today's Telegraph.

Planning anything - as Hayek warned us - seems to create precisely the sort of problems we are told it will prevent. 

When it comes to planning regulations for new housing, some of our most beautiful and desirable buildings went up at a time when one did not need permission from the state to build.  Some of the most grim and ugly developments have been put up when statutory rules specified in great detail what could be built and where.

Far from preventing over development, planning rules seem to have encouraged high density housing.   

It seems to be that for years we have had planning laws that encourage developers to construct not what private citizens might be willing to pay for, but buildings that conform to the technocrats designs.

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