Member

My experience is that some housebuilders delay the start of building in the three-year period by constantly stop-starting the process. They do this by putting in applications for minor changes of the original permission. It might be a change of house type or of materials used, but they constantly put in a drip-drip feed of minor applications to forestall the beginning of the three-year period. In a recent large application in my town for 300 new homes, I think we have now had five such drip-drip minor applications, and that has put back the start point of housebuilding by well over two years. That is one way that permissions are gamed, if you like. The other one, as we know from the Competition and Markets Authority, is that some major housebuilders contrived to work together to ensure that there was no market in housebuilding in a particular area, and paid a paltry fine for doing so.