For the last year Alistair Lexden has been working closely with Create Streets (CS), an increasingly influential social enterprise and research institute dedicated to improving the built environment. Its central objective is to promote the creation of more and better urban homes in terraced streets of houses and apartments rather than in complex multi-storey buildings. These are the homes that people want to live in, as is made overwhelmingly clear in CS surveys of public opinion.
One crucial aim of CS work is to give people in urban areas a direct and powerful voice in the planning process. A first step towards achieving it is embodied in the Direct Planning (Pilot) Bill, which Alistair Lexden put forward at the start of the new Parliament on May 27. This important Private Member’s Bill (details attached) was given its First Reading in the Lords on June 3. It represents the beginning of a determined campaign, inspired by the cross-party one nation tradition in British politics, to make the planning system more responsive to the wishes of the people. In the words of CS, “we need to change the question from ‘ how to build more homes?’ to ‘ how do we make new homes more popular?’”.
The Bill will not become law in the current session of Parliament. By putting the measure into the longer term legislative process, Alistair Lexden in conjunction with CS has begun the vital first stage of reform by stimulating discussion of the need for change.