Flawed planning law makes us all losers

Many will be dismayed that the small field in the Vale is to be developed after all, having hailed a victory for common sense when plans were first rejected.

It could not be allowed to rest there. There was too much money at stake after the new Island Development Plan super-inflated the value of the land.

Nor should anyone imagine the developers are jumping for joy. It has been an unacceptably long, painful and expensive process and the result is up to six houses short of what they had hoped for.

They are joined in their disappointment by the deputies who decided that the application should be rejected, only to see their votes overturned by a professional tribunal*.

There are those in the Planning Service who would say that this is the nature of the development process. It can get messy.

That argument will cut little mustard with Vale residents who gathered petitions, lobbied their deputies, took time off work to register their displeasure and found the system stacked against them at every turn.

In the end it was all for nothing, because the Island Development Plan is deeply flawed.

When the president of the Development & Planning Authority agrees that the loss of another green field is a shame, yet finds she is powerless to do anything about it then it is clear something is very wrong.

‘But the policy says it can and the policy has to win’ is a dispiriting assessment of a planning system where common sense, people power and democracy have been strangled by the red tape of an overly rigid and poorly constructed planning law.

But what serious efforts are being made to amend the IDP? It passed its last DPA review with flying colours.

Many deputies entered the new Assembly promising to do something about such planning disasters.

With each day of delay more green fields are lost and more development is earmarked for the same crammed areas.

Action today? Yes, please.

*This paragraph has been amended to reflect that the tribunal members are elected by the States every six years