HOUSING policy has been a calamitous, drawn-out mess – a classic example of how blame-game politics can fail people.
The 2010 coalition government ripped up Labour’s cumbersome ‘Regional Spatial Strategies’, just as years of bureaucracy was to be signed off with a Local Plan for housebuilding in Coventry.
Conservative ministers promised councils could make their own decisions on local housing need. Then a U-turn came when government inspectors didn’t like the newly Labour council’s proposal for fewer homes, 12,000, and full green belt protection.
Seven years on, a Local Plan for a similar 25,000 homes – including similar green belt land – could be adopted next week.
It remains a disastrous fudge, with mysterious predictions of unrivaled population boom for Coventry, and no effective ‘brownfield first’ protections to prioritise the types of dwellings desperately required.
