A ban on all new house building is spreading across the North West of England as planners cave in to local anti-housebuilding protest.
A growing number of local council planning authorities are deliberately misusing a recent change in planning guidance to reject all new housing development, regardless of whether on greenfield or brownfield sites.
The move threatens the social and economic regeneration of the entire region.
The moratorium on the granting of planning permissions for all new homes started with West Lancashire District Council being thefirst local authority to claim that revised regional planning guidance allowed them to abandon the need to work to a 20-year plan for new housing
output.
Now subject to an annual target, the authority claims it has enough housing development in the pipeline and so has no need to grant any more planning permissions until 2006.
The use of such 'residential development moratoria' is now spreading across the region. Already, local planning authorities in Merseyside, Manchester,
Staffordshire and Cheshire have followed Lancashire's lead by banning all planning permission for new homes. Many more are considering following suit.
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Cumbria stands alone in being the only county in the region that has rejected the ban but it is coming under increasing pressure to adopt it.
The ban now risks speading to local authorities across the country.
Pierre Williams, spokesman for the House Builders Federation, said: "This deliberate misuse of a policy designed to ensure the North West builds the
homes it needs for a successful future is very serious.
"Those local authorities who have adopted this ban are simply burying their heads in sand and storing up problems for the future - problems that we might not be able to solve
"How typical that during Britain's worst housing shortage since at least the Second World War, the planning system that is supposed to solve this crisis is, in fact, doing the opposite.
"House building is at its lowest since 1924 and Britain's proportion of GDP spent on housing the lowest in the developed world. The gap between supply
and demand is widening by 50,000 a year which has made house prices rocket to the point where the proportion of first time buyers is at an all-time low.
Britain has the second oldest housing stock in the EU and at current construction rates, homes built today will have to last at least 1,500 years before their turn for replacement.
"All this, and the response by an increasing number of local planning authorities is to make sure the crisis gets even worse."
The more immediate effects for the region will include:
A reduction of inward investment as the quality and age
ofthe housing stock worsens
Rural house prices will rise even further worsening the
supply of affordable homes
Local house builders may go out of business, destroying
the region's ability to catch up on housing undersupply in the future
Loss of skilled building and supplier jobs as workforce
abandons the region.
The Government Office for the North West has as yet failed to address the problem. The House Builders Federation is today meeting with Housing Minister Keith Hill to press for immediate government action.
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