Slow to act councils leave door open to developer free-for-all

Peter Byrne/PA

To put it bluntly, unless your local council pulls its finger out pretty quickly and publishes a list of land available for development, any developer can move in and build what he likes where he likes in your area.

And that's not simply scaremongering, that's an admission from the government!

Under new reforms, every council should publish this list as part of their new planning guidelines but to date, only half have done so. Last year, a Tory MP, John Howell, who advises the planning minister Greg Clarke, told a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference that it was fine if councils didn't want to produce planning guidelines for their areas but as long as they failed to do so they were leaving the door open for developers to come in and do what they liked.