Obviously there's a bit of room for wiggle in all of this kind of stuff. Have a sit down with national highways, reassure them in some way. If the locals aren't kicking off about the nature, you can sway that too. You can "clarify" the local plan a bit, or find an exemption.

Presumable, further to what Joe has said, the officers would say "not a lot you can do tbh, we've applied the local plan, we've applied the local nature rules, and we've got national highways all over this, you can try change the decision but you'll get into trouble for it".

It's possibly a disconnect in our levels of knowledge of the law (with mine being lower) but I really do think that BANES could have referred this to committee (which every council I know describes as "calling in") rather than leave it fully with the officers as they did here.

How is California able to be at the forefront of technology and Texas at the forefront of energy when locals in Connecticut can block housing! The Federal Government MUST intervene.

<parody of American economists tweeting about Britain> it's amazing that the USA has any economic growth at all when everyone and everywhere is a NIMBY like this! </parody of American economists tweeting about Britain>

It hinders it, but it doesn't block it.

I don't think I've been fortunate. I think I've chosen and voted well. And unless that carries some advantage and power, people won't vote well.

I think free movement within our country is a national issue. I would like my national government to require free movement.

That's just not my experience. We seem very pro-development in Leeds. Where I last lived in Manchester was the same. I certainly don't want the generally anti-growth national government to have more power where I am.

This checks out. A reminder that, 1/ we already have a very national planning system and demanding further nationalisation "to quash local NIMBYs" is often wrong. 2/ people in Bath (or the general area) should mostly get to decide what happens in Bath over people who don't.

Yes. xitter.cf/thomasforth/status/211…

In order to build the consensus, in a democracy, to say Yes most of the time. Few people would argue that Manchester City Council (nor Leeds City Council) have not been overwhelmingly positive about giving permission for growth. But that doesn't mean they always give permission.

There is a strain of British YIMBYism that I think is a bit naive. It comes close to thinking that you can and should just centrally push through all growth. I much more believe that pro-growth places, like Manchester, need the power to say no sometimes. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmd7…

That sounds really bad. Have the councillors in power at the time been voted out? Did you vote against them?

And loads of places in the USA have similar protections to the "town centre first" part of the local plan that's been applied here. I was in New Haven a month back, their Aldi is banned from central districts by local zoning law, and so it is built outside of the centre.

There's a national habitat protection issue on this site in Bath. That would be much rarer in the USA because the federal government is much less involved at the local level, but in states like California such protections would be pretty common.

As far as I understand things very similar to this Bath case happen all the time in the USA. There's a zoning system that defines land available for retail. Very similar to what happened here. Apply for retail permission outside of the zone and you risk being rejected. As here.

In a pro-growth city like Leeds the legal/officer decision would probably have been called in by councillors and taken politically and permission then given. Which is the power and outcome I want.

The decision was a legal one, following the legally required local plan and national planning law. It was very explicitly not taken by councillors.