Environment
Beside the seaside
Oliver Stewart
One of those increasingly common struggles between environmentalists and developers has been going on in the small seaside resort where I live. And the developers have won a resounding victory.
The Secretary Of State for the Environment has held an inquiry and has given the developers permission to blot out the resort's remaining open spaces with ninety-eight new houses.
It is a good example of the kind of thing that is going on at dozens of places around our coasts and it is evidence of governmental indifference to the quality of life such places can offer. Residents and local authorities join together in striving to prevent the running up of these shanty towns. They believe that they destroy local amenities, cause drainage difficulties and turn the resorts into bad imitations of inferior city suburbs. No one, they think, obtains any profit from them except the developers. But in their efforts to maintain local standards they receive no support from those very ministers who are most prone to mouthing platitudes about protecting the environment.
The files of local newspapers reflect the.bitterness which official attitudes and actions have generated. People do not like having their surroundings spoilt for the sake of developers' profits and for no other reason. For note that the seaside shanty towns do nothing at all to ease the housing shortage. They are occupied for six weeks of the year and left derelict for the remainder. They absorb labour and materials which ought to be devoted to the building of genuine homes to live in, not holiday bivouacs to shelter in during the summer.
There are outcries when office blocks are left empty; but nobody seems to bother when thousands of seaside bungalows are left empty. It must also be accepted that the proliferation of chalets and bungalows probably makes it more difficult for local boarding and guest houses and hotels to survive.
It is slightly ironical that, at the seaside place mentioned, a large hotel, situated close to where the new houses are to be built, now stands empty and that it failed while under the sponsorship of the concern which has now obtained planning permission for the new settlement.
The English seaside holiday resort may be, as some say, so horrible that it does not deserve protection. But the seaside shanty town is even more horrible. Moreover it can never be converted. The land has been cleared; the trees have been felled. Nothing can be done to mitigate its awfulness. And all the time it draws to itself the labour and materials which are so urgently needed for the construction of genuine homes.
So it remains an astonishing and an inexplicable fact that the Secretary of State for the Environment — in the person of his winspectors — has been so busily turning down appeals for planning permission in regions where there is a desperate shortage of houses while, at the same time, lavishing planning permission for shanty town development in those seaside resorts where the requirement is confined to strictly temporary shelter and that only for holiday purposes.
This marked lack of balance in the actions of the Department of the Environment is the consequence of the absence of any national planning permission policy. What goes on now under the name of ' planning' permission is a mixture of ignorance of local conditions and failure to draw up any co-ordinated scheme for suiting development to the region in which it is allowed to take place.
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