Simon Crowther CEng

From tomorrow planning applications for up to 9 homes will be decided by officers in England, not the elected councillors. Larger schemes reach a committee only if a senior officer and a nominated councillor both agree. Automatic referral when residents object is gone. Read that again... to get a decision in front of the people you elected, you now need the agreement of the officer whose judgement you are questioning. The check on the officer runs through the officer. But what happens when officers get it wrong? And they do. Not from malice but from caseload, turnover and planning departments hollowed out for fifteen years. The councillor is the only person in the system who has to answer to a resident. The committee is the only room where a decision is made in public, by someone who faces an election. @mhclg calls that “delay”. @CarlCashman of the @LGAcomms is right, elected councillors are the backbone of the English planning system, and the impact of this change needs reviewing early. I’d even go one further. You don’t remove a check first and measure the damage afterwards. The review belonged before tomorrow, not after it. Councils that voted against it were instead told the courts would overrule them. The ministry calls these “smaller and more technical applications”. 9 homes next door is not technical to you. And it is exactly the segment where the post-planning disaster is worst: small sites, small SPVs, thin balance sheets, builders who liquidate the day the last unit completes. We are speeding up permissions for the part of the market with the least accountability once the keys are handed over. @SallyJameson says this is “not in any way intended” as an attack on local democracy. Intent isn’t the test. The effect is. This isn’t a party point. Labour MP @CHinchliffMP told the Commons on Wednesday the answer is not to silence councillors but to secure consent with a higher standard of development. He’s right about the standard but nobody in government is working on it. A great planning permission on paper is meaningless when the building turns out to be a defective trap. This reform speeds up the paper and does nothing for the building. It removes the one person in the process with a name, a ward and an election, and calls that efficiency. Delegation without accountability isn’t speed. It’s the same mistake with no one to answer for it.

Everyone is rightly furious at successive governments, the SLC, and HMRC over the Plan 2 student loan trap. But there’s a massive question missing from this entire debate: where the hell was the UK student union leadership while an entire generation was being locked into this? Look closely at what Plan 2 actually is. Teenagers were handed a financial product that no commercial lender on earth would legally be allowed to sell - compounding RPI+3% interest rates that start accruing before you even graduate, paired with terms that the government retroactively worsened by freezing repayment thresholds. And what did the @nusuk and student union leadership do after 2010? After the initial tuition fee protests (where NUS leadership infamously spent as much energy condemning their own protestors as fighting the policy) they completely capitulated on the financial mechanics. Throughout the 2010s, as the fine print of Plan 2 quietly turned into a generational wealth-stripping machine and effective marginal tax rates for graduates hit 50%+, UK student unions retreated inward, as @SCcrowther has been campaigning on. They traded hard-nosed, bread-and-butter economic campaigning for internal bureaucracy and performative campus politics. There was no sustained national campaign on interest rates, no mass mobilisation when repayment thresholds were retroactively frozen, and zero organised consumer-rights pushback on how these loans were being sold to 17-year-olds. Contrast that with Ireland at the exact same moment. In the wake of the 2008 crash, Irish governments repeatedly floated the reintroduction of full tuition fees and income-contingent loan schemes. The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) treated it like an existential war. Between 2008 and 2011, USI didn’t get distracted, they put 25,000 to 40,000 students on the streets of Dublin in disciplined, relentless pre-budget marches. They went door-to-door in marginal constituencies, cornered local TDs (Irish MPs) on the record, occupied government departments, and refused to let the cost of education drop off the front pages. In particular I remember the work of @LauraHarmon01 and @JoeOC99 at the time! Look at the divergence today: • Ireland: Full fees and loan schemes were defeated. The student contribution was capped at €3,000 and in recent budgets, the Irish government has actually been cutting it because student pressure never let up. • The UK: Graduates who played by the rules are watching their balances balloon despite years of payments, fighting an incompetent bureaucracy over overpayments, or remortgaging their homes just to escape a 6%+ state debt trap. Surely a union’s fundamental job is to protect the material, economic interests of its members? When Irish students needed a shield, USI (renamed AMLÉ @amle_ie) in fairness to them fought like a real trade union and won. When UK students were being handed a subprime generational tax disguised as a loan, its student union leadership went missing in action.

The planning system isn’t the only thing broken in English housing, it’s what happens after planning is granted. The debate is completely consumed by the upstream tap of planning permissions, street votes, permitted development and hitting (and then missing…) abstract completion targets. This piece from @yimbyalliance laments that "only" 438,000 homes have been built since July 2024, yet remains completely blind to the downstream disaster: England’s catastrophic build quality crisis, where over 93% of new-build buyers report defects after moving in and more than a quarter find 16+ faults. A great planning permission on paper is meaningless when the physical as-built building turns out to be an uninsurable, defective trap. We are three years on from @michaelgove admitting that buyers have more consumer protections purchasing a washing machine than a new-build home. The developer lobby’s perpetual "poor mouth" narrative about viability doesn't wash. Major housebuilders recently coughed up a record £100m CMA settlement after a probe into price-sharing and face a £4.5bn legal claim for inflating prices. Development finance stacks up and margins have been protected. What is rotten is corporate accountability. The unspoken crisis isn't just whether an infill plot or upward extension gets approved. It is: • The endemic use of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) designed specifically to dodge long-term structural liability. • Strategic liquidations and phoenixing that leave freeholders and leaseholders with zero legal recourse. • Unchecked material and design substitutions slipped through under the guise of "value engineering." • A compromised inspection and warranty ecosystem where contractors walk away and buyers absorb the ruin. Look at the Canning Town mess just last week where 200+ residents in a decade-old development were evacuated overnight. Look at @dannybster’s block in Camden, where the developer’s own survey mooted demolition while residents spent seven years and over £500,000 in legal fees fighting for repairs. Leasehold reform wouldn't have saved them. Looser planning rules wouldn't have saved them. Arguing that deregulated infill and small-builder extensions "cost the Treasury nothing", as @KaneEmerson suggests, ignores who actually foots the bill when building control and warranties fail. It costs buyers everything when defective construction goes unchecked and ordinary families are left holding the tab for structural remediation. Politicians hide behind planning deregulation and volume targets because they refuse to confront developers, contractors and warranty providers on liability. Pumping up delivery numbers without statutory consumer protection and enforceable liability isn't a sustainable housing policy. It just accelerates the rate at which buyers are sold defective nightmares.

In any other market what do you think will happen when the product offered to consumers is manufactured with underlying defects and quality issues? Oh, and you have zero consumer rights when it all goes wrong. The "value" people are asked to pay isn't there. The result is a market correction. The fairytale property economics cannot continue.

MP @JamesAsser says it's "absolutely infuriating" that 200+ of his constituents have been forced out of three Canning Town towers overnight. He should be. But his party has known about this crisis for years. Royal Gateway is about 10 years old and already run by residents under Right to Manage. Leasehold tenure reform wouldn't have saved anyone. This is England's unspoken housing crisis: too much new-build stock isn't built to the standard it was sold and mortgaged on. When it fails, the bill lands on buyers who've put everything into a deposit and can't fund repairs or years of litigation. So most absorb it, and stay quiet. In 2023, @Keir_Starmer pressed Michael Gove over @dannybster's new-build in his own Camden constituency, a block its own developer's survey said might need demolishing. His constituents, he said, "cannot be left paying the cost of a broken system." He never came to see it. Then Labour took power, and his office offered Dan help only within existing law. Dan's new Labour MP, @Sagal_AW, hasn't visited yet either. Green leader @ZackPolanski has. Seven years and more than £500,000 in legal costs later, Dan's flat is uninsurable and unmortgageable, with still no viable plan to fix it. Meanwhile the government's Your First Home scheme is nudging more buyers into new builds. So, @JamesAsser: you asked who's at fault. Part of the answer is your own government. Labour has had more than two years to give new-build buyers real protection and still hasn't. Will you push it to make developers, contractors, inspectors and warranty providers pay, or just stay infuriated? Infuriating isn't a policy.

Alternative headline: Business struggles to sell low-demand product forced to rethink market strategy. In what other sector would there be any sympathy? Consumers rightfully fear inadvertently buying, for lack of a better phrase “new-build shite”, spending years and hundreds of thousands of pounds litigating and remediating.

The "quality" of new build developments in London and across the country is a huge problem affecting our generation seeking to buy their first homes. Defect-ridden flats appear to be everywhere. The housing crisis needs an honest debate on what we build, not how many we build.