Planning minister lays into 'pig ugly' new house designs

Planning minister Nick Boles is under fire for saying that the design of new homes is ‘pig ugly’, and for calling for the amount of land to be made available for new homes to be increased by one third.

The Green Party accused him of riding roughshod over the British countryside. The Campaign to Protect Rural England told him to stop behaving like an ‘intellectual gadfly’ and to get to grips with a serious job, and the National Trust accused Boles of making ‘back of the fag packet’ calculations.

However, the NHBC called for action. It revealed that house building this year is well behind that of 2011. It said that in total 89,600 new homes have been registered this year to date, compared with 101,600 for the same period last year.

Boles said that people should be prepared to have homes built on open land, but that this could be in exchange for Green Belt continuing to have protected status.

The amount of land Boles envisages as being necessary to build new homes equates to more than 1,500 square miles of open countryside – around the size of Devon, or twice the size of Greater London.

Boles also laid in to the design of new homes, describing some builders as ‘lazy’ and current designs on many new estates as ‘ugly rubbish’ and ‘pig ugly’.

Boles said that not all open land was beautiful, and said that ‘sometimes buildings are better’. But he called on developers to talk more to local people about what they want.

He went on: “If people want to have housing for their kids, they have to accept we need to build more on some open land.

“In the UK and England at the moment we’ve got about 9% of land developed. All we need to do is build on another 2–3% of land and we’ll have solved a housing problem.”

Boles also insisted that having a house with a garden was a “basic moral right, like healthcare and education”.

He said: “There’s a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in.”