Times letters: Obstacles to Labour’s housebuilding plan

Reform of these regulations has not been faced in the 20 or so years since they were introduced, possibly because of the backlash that would be created and the difficulty of securing the time and patience of ministers and legislators. But, to borrow a phrase from the regulations, there are “imperative reasons of overriding public interest” that they should be carefully revisited if the planning system is to be simplified properly.
David Brock
Chair, planning and environment law committee, Law Society (2009-11)

Sir, I was a planning officer in local government for more than 40 years and when I retired I was approached by developers to help them get permissions. I did this with honesty and common sense and never saw it as corrupt or motivated by money.

What I saw from the outside was that council planners are difficult to contact and wary of giving positive advice, apply policy rules without common sense and are too quick to block sensible ideas. This needs shaking up, but the average time from planning discussions to bricks on the ground is seven to ten years. Labour will need two terms to make their changes achievable.
Steve Dance
Bramcote, Notts

Sir, Green belts are not primarily about beauty (“Homes on green belt in new dash for growth”, Jul 8). Planners of the past recognised that green belts were vital to maintain the essential character of our country by preventing urban sprawl and keeping towns and cities from merging. Here in Bath, thanks to the green belt we can stand in the city centre and see wooded hills and fields rather than housing estates. Looking to a future in which our main problem appears likely to be a decline in birth rates and a falling population, we should reflect long and hard before shredding the green belt protection that has served us so well.
Robert Davies
Trustee, Avon & Bristol branch, Campaign to Protect Rural England

Sir, Rachel Reeves has said that the new government will ease building rules and fight nimbys. This brings to mind George Dobry QC’s planning review half a century ago, when I was his bag carrier. His proposal was to classify applications as either A, straightforward and unobjectionable, or B, complex and potentially controversial. “A capital idea,” my world-weary boss, his assistant secretary, said. “But pray tell me, who will decide whether an application is A or B, and on what basis?”
Stephen Taylor
Cardiff

Call to reclaim VAT

Sir, Caroline Rush is right that British retailers and fashion brands are losing out as foreign visitors chose to shop instead in France, Italy or Spain where they can reclaim their VAT (“Scrap tourist tax, fashion body demands”, Jul 8). Data on actual spending shows this loss to be about £1.5 billion annually.

Even worse, by ending tax-free shopping, Rishi Sunak threw away the opportunity to make Britian the only big European country in which 450 million EU residents could shop tax-free. Based on spending by Britons, who can now shop tax-free in the EU, this unique new tourist market would be worth an estimated £10 billion annually, generating £4 billion in tax revenues.

The decision to end tax-free shopping was based on incomplete and inaccurate Treasury forecasts in 2020 that were never certified by the Office for Budget Responsibility and have now been proven wrong by all the data since international travel returned in 2022.

If Rachel Reeves wants a quick win to kickstart the economy, all she needs to do is to ask her officials to review those forecasts. She will get a very pleasant surprise.
Paul Barnes
Chief executive, Association of International Retail

Museum of Britain

Sir, The debate at the British Museum (“Colonial hoard or public trove: are museums worth saving?”, weekend essay, Jul 6) focuses on the collections of artefacts brought to this country during our imperial past because we have no national museum displaying the history of the English-speaking people. There is no one place for those interested to learn about the Roman, Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudor and Stuart period (including the birth of empire), the civil war, the agricultural and industrial revolutions or labour, working conditions and the franchise, to list but a few.

Such a museum should be created and a brown or grey-field site should be found with sufficient space to do justice to our incredible 2,000 years of national history.
David Childs
Founder, National Memorial Arboretum

Election reflections

Sir, If the French had the same flawed first-past-the-post electoral system as the UK, the far-right National Rally might have had an overall majority in the French Assembly a week ago. Instead voters were able to unite in a second round behind the candidates most likely to beat the far right.

In contrast, we in the UK now have a government with a massive majority elected on 35 per cent of the vote. Sir Keir Starmer should not repeat Tony Blair’s mistake after 1997 of leaving us with a 19th-century electoral system that was fit for purpose only when there were two parties, and which has resulted in the past decade of chaos.

Tactical voting should not be necessary, and the past decade has shown again and again that many governments elected under first past the post do not provide stability.

Labour’s early leaders, including Keir Hardie, saw electoral reform as central to Labour’s mission to empower the many, not just the few. Starmer should look again at the electoral reform proposals of the Speaker’s Conference of 1917, to which Roy Jenkins really wished to return in 1998. Such proposals would not provide a bigger platform for extremists than we have now, but they would make for better, more representative, stable government.
Lord Rennard (Liberal Democrat)
House of Lords

Physical education

Sir, There is no question that unleashing Britain’s science potential must be top of Sir Keir Starmer’s agenda (“Science innovation must be at heart of government action”, Thunderer, Jul 5). But there is a gap in Ed Bussey’s otherwise excellent three-point plan: developing homegrown talent.

Businesses we work with at the Institute of Physics tell us that their biggest blocker is the lack of skills. We cannot rely on visa regimes to fill this gap, and nor should we. Instead we must start in schools. Take-up of physics A-level is shockingly low, especially among girls and other underrepresented groups, and England has an estimated shortage of 3,500 physics teachers.

Labour’s promise to recruit 6,500 teachers in key subjects is welcome, and science — particularly physics — must be a priority. Technical skills are also key, and apprenticeships can make a huge contribution to the science and tech skills gap. If the government is serious about long-term growth, it must also be serious about bringing more talented young people — and talented teachers — into science.
Tom Grinyer
CEO, Institute of Physics

…and the arts too

Sir, I agree wholeheartedly with Rufus Norris’s opinion that the arts should be an integral part of the curriculum (“Our world-leading creativity needs nurturing at source”, Thunderer, Jul 8). When I entered the working world with a professional degree, my undergraduate degree in English was seen as highly favourable. An arts education was considered an excellent grounding, teaching one how to write and think, as well as developing empathy, imagination and management ability — necessary skills in all walks of life, not frills.
Susan Hughes
East Lavant, W Sussex

Tory leadership

Sir, Richard Briand (letter, Jul 8) says that staying as interim leader after losing a general election was once accepted as part of the job, naming Michael Foot in 1983, John Major in 1997 and William Hague in 2001. Before them, though, it was more usual for the defeated leader to stay on and fight the next election — as did Winston Churchill in 1945 and 1950, Clement Attlee in 1935 and 1951, and Harold Wilson in 1970. Churchill and Wilson regained power for their parties, and Attlee led the first Labour-majority government.
Malcolm Watson
Ryde, Isle of Wight

Harsh penalties

Sir, To manage the tension of penalties (“Secret plan that turned side into nerveless penalty kings” and letter, Jul 8), I suggest that a shoot-out should take place before the start of a knockout match, rather than after a draw and extra time.

The team losing the shoot-out would still have the opportunity to win within 90 minutes. If that team were to lose or draw at the 90-minute whistle, the opposing side would win.

Responsibility for losing the match would lie with the team, and not an individual player. Perhaps we would see more attacking football. We would also have more certainty in television scheduling.
Margaret Williams
Stourpaine, Dorset

Climbing standards

Sir, As well as instructions on safety (“Life on the edge, by Victorian who first scaled Matterhorn”, Jul 8), Edward Whymper was keen that Victorians scrambling in the Alps should adhere to strict codes of dress. As a nod to the class system of those days, he wrote that climbers should “refrain from dressing as an ostler”, unless of course they happened to be one.
Neil Carver
Wallasey, Wirral

Beard sheared

Sir, Further to your correspondence on beards (letters, Jul 5, Jul 6 and Jul 8), in the days before fibreoptic telescopes unusually short or long jaws could make life very hard for anaesthetists, adding risk to the process of inserting a breathing tube. Years ago I was warned by a maxillofacial surgeon always to beware of a patient with a beard because, in his experience, it nearly always disguised a difficult jaw.
Jane Stanford
London SW13

Sir, When I returned from the South Atlantic with a beard, having been sunk on the Atlantic Conveyor, everyone thought it distinguished apart from my mother, who said it made me look fat. After I shaved it off, she said: “Oh — it wasn’t the beard.” I have not had a beard since.
Nick Foster
South Barrow, Somerset

Koala beware

Sir, Virginia Llewellyn Smith was fortunate when she cuddled a koala only to have an experience like embracing a used brillo pad (letter, Jul 8). I was liberally peed on.
Bob Maddams
Louth, Lincs