Planning minister moved in re-shuffle

Monday night's news that Audlem is to get cracking immediately on its fast-track neighbourhood plan may well be helped by news from yesterday's Government reshuffle.

Nick Boles was Planning minister until yesterday but is now Skills and Enterprise minister.

He has been featured on AudlemOnline a number of times including in an article last April 'With a minister like this....' which, we have to admit, was far from flattering.

He believed that Green-belt land in England should be freed up for new housing developments. In a report he commissioned in 2012 it was said that releasing 2% of English land for development would allow for the building of an extra 8m homes.

Nick Boles was appointed to the politically sensitive post of planning minister in 2012 as the government announced plans to relax planning regulations to underwrite new housebuilding to the tune of £10bn.

He soon faced accusations of hypocrisy after details of his own 'Green Belt' upbringing emerged.

After Mr Boles launched a scathing attack on countryside campaigners accusing them of being 'hysterical scaremongering latter-day Luddites', it was revealed that the minister, whose father was a former director general of the National Trust, grew up in a string of idyllic countryside locations.

Mr Boles had been given responsibility for overhauling planning laws to boost the economy – a move which campaigners feared was a massive threat to the Green Belt. Opponents went as far as to say he had 'a mission to pave the entire country in concrete from Newcastle to Newquay'.

His name came up frequently at the Inquiry into Gladman's appeal against refusal by Cheshire East to grant planning permission for 120 dwellings at Little Heath, Audlem.

It will be interesting to see if his move from Planning will herald a change of direction. There were fears amongst some in his party that he might be losing many rural votes because of the rash of planning applications across rural England. Many living in the Shires appeared to feel that with Mr Boles in charge the dice was loaded in the speculative developers' and builders' favour.

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