Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
THE government has already seen fit to issue grave warnings about the dangers of injuring ourselves while engaging in DIY. The next stop, it seems, is to stamp out home improvements altogether. There is widespread public support for preventing home-owners from demolishing historic buildings or defacing them with inappropriate alterations, but the extent of the latest edict on conservation goes rather deeper. It is an all-out assault on the Polyfilling classes When government inspectors set out with their clipboards after the war to conduct an inventory of the nation's architectural heritage, they were instructed to act with discretion: buildings were to be listed when, and only when, they were of importance. Where they encountered, for example, a Tudor farmhouse to which an asbestos shack had been added in the 1930s, they were to list the original building but not the shack.
It was a compromise, in other words, between the public interest and the right of the individual to use his property however he wished. Not so the new rules just announced by the planning minister, Nick Raynsford. If your home lies within one of the 8,000 'conservation areas' which have sprouted around the country over the last 20 years, you will now be liable for prosecution if you take down a stretch of chainlink fence or the rotting porch on your 1960s bungalow. Architectural quality or historic interest doesn't come into it; permission will be required 'for the demolition of any boundary wall, gate, fence and other means of enclosure, and a chimney or porch on a dwelling-house'.
Home-owners in conservation areas also face losing their 'permitted development rights' — which until now have allowed them to erect small works like garden walls and garden sheds without having to go through the long-winded and expensive planning process. A shame, really: there will be no shacks to leave for future generations.
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