Planning Policy

: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his applause. Both PPG3 and the new PPS3 make great play of securing high-quality design, but it simply cannot be achieved when the fundamental ingredient of living space is not permitted. People need space inside their homes, and most want gardens outside to separate their house from their neighbour's, to provide a place to relax and in which their children and grandchildren to play in safety. We even have the ludicrous situation of four-storey blocks of two and three-bedroomed so-called family apartments that have no private garden space, and the land that the developer ““saves”” becomes a communal area that counts towards the public open space provision. I shall move on from those new estates to consider the effects of planning policy on the more established areas of the city. Lichfield—I speak about Lichfield, but what I have to say applies throughout England and Wales—is fortunate to have many older properties built at a time when land was not so much at a premium. Those properties have gardens—sometimes large gardens—with trees and shrubs providing green havens for wildlife. Few people would equate those gardens with the derelict and abandoned industrial sites of inner cities, but in terms of Government targets for development on ““previously developed”” land, as they put it, those sites are one and the same thing, and they are all classed as brownfield sites. In the past, the problem did not really exist, because the cost of developing such relatively small garden plots meant that they were not usually viable. However, with ever-increasing residential land values derived from the ever-increasing densities that are permissible, developers are seizing those opportunities—who can blame them?—and more and more residential gardens are becoming high-density housing developments. In the past few years, we have seen several cases in which a perfectly good house on a large plot has been bought and then demolished to make way for several closely packed houses, or new homes have been built in the back gardens of existing houses. There have been strong protests from local residents with justifiable concerns about the loss of green space and the inappropriate style of development, but the development meets PPG3 criteria—it scores its brownfield points from the Government office—and the local planning authorities see little alternative but to grant approval. They are in an impossible situation.