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RACHEL JOHNSON: We need Hobbit homes, not 'Chelsea icebergs'

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On Good Friday, I bumped into a woodcutter on a narrow Exmoor lane, so I wound down my window as we inched past each other.

‘Up from London?’ he asked, astride a muddy quad bike with a sheepdog on the back. I was at the wheel of a £52,000 new Audi Q7 I was reviewing for a magazine, so very much at a disadvantage.

I admitted I was, then asked brightly: ‘And when were you last there? In London, I mean?’

‘London?’ he said, looking scornful. ‘Me? Never been. Never seen the need.’ And he roared off, so fast that his collie’s tongue whipped in the wind.

Charlie Hague and Megan Williams, parents of baby Eli, have been ordered to pull down their self-built home by Pembrokeshire Council while planning applications by the rich elsewhere are waved through

Harmless: But planners have ordered the 'home-made house' in Pembrokeshire to be pulled down

This encounter didn’t make me feel cosmopolitan or sophisticated. It made me feel shallow and guilty.

The woodcutter is rooted like a tree to the soil where he was born. He has not made a pile, or as the super-rich call it, a ‘nut’.

Very little is enough for him. He lives in a bungalow on the outskirts of the village, as farmhouses or cottages in the National Park were pushed beyond affordability decades ago by second-homers like me.

In a list of the 30 best villages in Britain published last week, only one offered any property under £200,000. The combination of house-price inflation and planning restrictions, therefore, has probably ensured that no one on an average or low income (ie £26,500 or under) can afford to live in the village where they grew up any more.

Contrast my woodcutter, settled on the land of his fathers, to the migratory habits of the super-rich, who move in a flock of private jets between their gated properties in Gstaad, the Bahamas, New York and London, depending on the season.

They barely know what time zone and country they are in, let alone their neighbours. The only place that truly matters is where they pay tax.

  More... LIZ JONES: A whizzy life? I'd rather have a clean kitchen floor any day Mimi Spencer: Happy Easter, and may the bouncing bunny of fortune be generous to you all!

Which is why it is so wrong that when it comes to planning, as for almost everything else, the dice seem loaded against the indigenous poor, who want only to live in a modest way in the only place they know and love, and in favour of our peripatetic international super-rich, who don’t really live anywhere, and for whom everything is always for sale.

(As one moaned to me once: ‘However rich one is, and however many houses one has, the reality is one can only ever be in one place at the same time.’)

Take that eco-friendly house we read about last week, crafted by a couple on their own land in West Wales.

Charlie Hague and partner Megan Williams had lived in a damp caravan with baby Eli before building their roundhouse out of limed straw bales and timber they had gathered.

‘There is a great lack of affordable housing across Britain,’ explained Charlie. ‘And this seemed like the best option for us, as we couldn’t afford to rent or buy a place in the area we have grown up in.’

With thudding inevitability, Pembrokeshire County Council has demanded the hippies pull down their harmless home-made habitation, at the same time as London planning authorities have been merrily waving through plans by hundreds of super-rich householders to turn their properties into ‘iceberg’ homes, or suchlike.

Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, for example, have a little £10 million plan to knock together three houses in Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, ripping out internal floors and walls, and drilling down to fit in two extra floors.

Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, pictured with his son Arkady, plan to spend £10million on knocking three houses together in Chelsea

A similar mega-dig is planned on our doorstep, to create a six-storey house with a second ginormous basement, a project that will pit the new owners against us Numbings (a Numbing is the new Nimby – it stands for ‘Not under my bloody idiot neighbour’s garden’) for two long, noisy, stressful years.

Now, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is likely to approve the second basement, even though it is in a conservation area, likely to destabilise the whole street, lead to flooding, cracking, heave, and – as it happens – goes against Thames Water’s stated policies on subterranean excavations and the council’s own new guidelines for basement extensions.

So, why on earth are councillors/planners minded to approve? Well, because if the council turns down the application, the rich simply appeal against the decision.

And while the council can ill afford to go to appeal, the super-rich know that in an area like Kensington, Chelsea or Westminster, the value added to a property by brand-new, James Bond-style basement extension – complete with wine cellar, swimming pool, garage, squash court and cinema – runs into millions and is vastly greater than the cost of the planning, appeal and construction processes combined.

So residential planning comes down not to what is fair, or right, or neighbourly, or practical. It comes down to money. The rich can afford to throw money at objections until they go away.

It’s time councils changed tack. They should stop harassing hippies in their Hobbit homes and stand up to the bullying billionaires with their massively anti-social iceberg houses.

For goodness’ sake, planners. If the applicants are that rich, they can always buy a bigger house in town, or build one in the country.

Which is what they should have done in the first place.

Tweet revenge isn't the answer, Coleen

It's amazing who ends up taking a pop at whom on Twitter.

The latest spat involves Coleen Rooney who criticised the Duchess of Cornwall over some remark about her wedding dress.

The Duchess of Cornwall, left, was criticised by Coleen Rooney, right, on Twitter this week

The site is designed to generate random conflict, so new rules are needed.

If in life the rule is never apologise and never explain, on Twitter it must be ‘never respond’.

 

So what was City Hall doing allowing me to appear on Michael Cockerell’s brilliant portrait of my brother the Mayor of London (a cameo that caused far more interest than the social history documentary that I actually PRESENTED the following night).

Well, it was neither cock-up nor conspiracy. Just careless confidence on the part of Team Boris.

 

Teenagers today, eh. When I was their age, I was slipping the parental leash on weeknights to go to punk gigs or grimy pubs.

Mine have just asked if we can 'make hot cross buns together' this weekend. It's shocking.





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