Star comment: We have no say on our future
Up and down the land the nation is in the grip of a sort of house-building hysteria which threatens to destroy the very landscape which makes Shropshire such a unique and beautiful county.
But then we can rely on our vigilant councillors to ensure that developments only go ahead in appropriate places in a measured and considered way, can we not?
Not at all. It is the era of council hand-wringing.
See also: Anger at 15,000 Shropshire homes backlog
Planning committees may as well be informal social clubs when it comes to housing applications. Controversial applications come up and the councillors profess to being able to doing nothing to prevent them.
If they vote against them, they contend, the developers will simply go to an appeal which they will inevitably win, resulting in the council having to fork out costs pointlessly.
The reason is that councils are meant to establish a "land bank" for future housing needs, and if they have not, which is the case for both Shropshire Council and Telford & Wrekin Council, then the developers have the trump cards.
Instead of submitting major housing applications to our local planning councillors, developers might as well short circuit that pointless process and go direct to the Secretary of State for routine rubber-stamping.
Meanwhile, more than 15,000 homes across the county have been given the go-ahead and yet work has not begun. This has led to the suspicion that developers are cashing in on the current good times in which, it seems, anything goes, so that they have a vast stock of housing permissions in the bag.
Then they can start work, or not, more or less at their leisure – they have five years. The upshot is that in places where new housing could usefully be built, it is not being built, and in other places where new housing is controversial, the plans are being pushed through and are a timebomb just waiting to blight the lives of Salopians.
Just how much new housing does Shropshire need? Could not some of the demand be met by bringing into use unused, or underused properties? To use an expression which has currency among politicians these days, nobody seems to have an overall grip. Centralised policy is triumphing.
You can complain, but nobody will take any notice. Shropshire's future is being built now and Salopians are being robbed of an effective say.
