The inability of Wiltshire Council to maintain a five year land supply has blighted towns and villages in the county with inappropriate development. This is because the government punishes councils in that situation by letting developers have greenfield planning permissions on sites which wouldn’t normally be considered for development and haven’t been allocated by the plan process.

However the government’s changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) mean that the requirement is reduced to four years, which WC should be able to achieve. This is because the council’s Plan Review is at an advanced stage so it should be possible to revert to a plan-led system.

The changes should also mean that Neighbourhood Plans would have a life-span of five years. The previous decree that NPs went out of date after two years in places like Wiltshire made them hardly worth the trouble of creating.

Government planning policy tends to be somewhat oscillatory, so there’s no guarantee the new rules will be there for very long, but in the short term this is good news for those towns and villages which had been threatened with unsustainable housing estates.

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