08 Aug 2024
Can local campaigns fighting housing developments in the district succeed in the face of intense pressure on council bosses to hit targets?
Even before the Government’s recent announcement of new house-building figures, SADC was in the unenviable position of having to accommodate thousands of properties on land which was largely Green Belt.
Various campaign groups are fighting to prevent specific developments from being included in the draft Local Plan, but with no alternative sites put forward in their place.
Now there are even less options on the table, as SADC has to find space for a further 10,500 homes on top of the 15,000 it has been told it already needs built by 2041. That’s an annual increase from 885 homes to 1,544 – 411 more a year.
For some time, SADC has been pushing forwards with their blueprint for future development in the district, conscious of threatened Government intervention should a Local Plan not be in place within the designated timetable.
And despite the uncertainty surrounding the revised housing targets announced by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner last week, this drive towards completion will continue over the coming months as the Plan enters the Regulation 19 stage – the second stage of the consultation process.
Council leader Cllr Paul de Kort, who is also chair of the planning policy and climate committee, ardently refused to pause the Local Plan process when urged to wait for the revised housing targets, and has no hesitation in stressing the urgency of getting it approved.
“We’re on a really tight schedule with the Local Plan, to basically put [consultation stage] Regulation 19 in in mid-October, which would then allow us time to receive feedback, deal with it, and submit the plan in March, maybe early April.
“There has been an increasing rush of councils looking to join us to hit that timetable, who have accelerated the resources they’re putting in to get their plans submitted by the end of June. The reason for this was that the previous government said they were going to completely rewrite the framework for how you filled in a Local Plan, and the advice we had was that if we missed that deadline we would go into a sort of purgatory, and we just felt we could not get into that situation.
“Certainly in a place like ours where we have a very old Local Plan we’re losing on appeal on Green Belt land as we’re just not protected.
“We were advised by civil servants that we’d basically have to start again, and as it’s more than a three-year process for us that would be disastrous.”
With growth identified as the key strategy for the new Government, housing is seen as the main factor holding this back, and although local authorities maintain their ability to choose the sites for development, they cannot choose the number of houses built.
Cllr de Kort said there was no surprise that housing targets went up rather than down, but locally the impact of the rail freight terminal needed to be considered as a decisive factor in any future development.
Despite the ongoing campaigning against the scheme, and possibility of a judicial review, he said SADC has to plan as if the terminal is going to happen.
“It could take more than a year for this judicial review to be resolved, it always takes a long time, but if we put in our Local Plan without including [the rail freight terminal], which was what was wrong with the last Plan, that’s just going to make it collapse instantly, and crucially that’s not just bad for the administration, it’s terrible for our residents.
“If we don’t get this Plan through, it will just be basically developer anarchy, and they will be able to build wherever they like, piecemeal, unplanned. It’s already happening at three sites down in the south of the district, and there could be more to come in that time period.
“For leaders like me and senior officers, there’s a policy issue which a lot of people understandably focus on. Who should set the targets? What is Green Belt? Grey Belt? That’s policy, decided by politicians, but there’s also practicality, and to some extent these are linked.
“We’ve had clarity on the number, but we need to hear about the timing.”
Will the Local Plan look any different after the Regulation 19 stage of the process?
“I don’t imagine so. There was something of a misunderstanding about Regulation 18 when that went forward, as people said we hadn’t got all the infrastructure plans, we hadn’t said if a site was reasonable to access, but it was never intended for Regulation 18 to have that amount of detail.
“That’s what’s been happening in the last year, and the reason is pretty much practical. There are all sorts of people who’ve got to take a look – and a lot of it falls on Herts county council for highways and transport – so they did a screening exercise before, with a lot of it based on the [development consultants] Arup Green Belt review.
“For example, there’s a site in Harpenden South at Cross Lane, about 130 houses and like a lot of sites, highly controversial. What happened there, and it wasn’t a surprise because there’s common land all around it, is that the Herts county highways and transport officers looked at what they would require in terms of access – pedestrians and pavements as well as cars and roads – and how they would get in and out.
“They could not find any way of accessing that site without crossing common land. Common land cannot be transferred and used without an Act of Parliament. So that now looks unlikely to be put forward.
“Another example is another site in Harpenden, towards the River Lea, near the Thames Water sewage works. They put forward that site for 60 homes, and they’ve now withdrawn it.
“So what that then leaves is a sort of ranking of sites, and that will be a controversy. There’s obviously brownfield first, but all the brownfield has been looked at and turned over two or three times. If anybody finds a new brownfield site there’s always an issue with it, or it’s being used for another purpose like a commercial business.
“Then there are the sites which have got planning permission already, because you can’t change approved planning permission and take it away without an Act of Parliament. Once it’s gone through appeal and any judicial reviews the notion that somebody can say ‘actually we’ve found out something else and it shouldn’t happen’, just doesn’t work unfortunately.
“We’ve then got a big chunk of sites that were highlighted in the Arup Green Belt review, which was much more detailed than the previous screening study, and looked at the key components of what Green Belt is trying to do, which is preventing coalescence with the villages, the quality of the green space and its sustainability – so you don’t stick a thousand houses out in the middle of nowhere with no way of anyone getting around.
“In simplistic terms, if you’re going to have to build on the Green Belt in the district, in a technocratic way, these are the sites. If you do it in a political way, that way madness lies, because everybody shouts ‘I don’t want mine!’ and it becomes a kind of performance theatre as everyone’s got to show how hard they struggled.
“So that took us to about 11,500, maybe even 12,000, and that’s the land that the district council ‘accepted’ that if we’re going to build on the Green Belt then that’s the number we’d like to put forwards as what we consider an appropriate local target.
“This is Green Belt land that an independent company says can be given up without losing the primary elements of what Green Belt was intended for when it was laid down in the last century.”
So ultimately are any of the local campaigns going to make a difference? SADC has its back against the wall in terms of increased housing targets, so to withdraw any of these major developments is impossible without finding alternative sites – arguably the ultimate in NIMBYism as it effectively passes the burden from one section of the community to another.
“I’ll say two things, and I’m careful because I don’t want to be quoted saying they won’t make a difference! I’m not saying they shouldn’t bother, and I’m not saying that they haven’t got a legitimate concern.
“There’s two issues. When people understandably put forward their objections and councillors do as well for their residents, it’s all heard in the context of a silent group of people who are saying ‘We’ve got to get a Local Plan through’. If somebody then says, ‘OK then you’ve made a really strong argument for that site, so it’s out’, we’ve still got to get to that number, so let’s go over there, and suddenly people say ‘What?!’…
“I’ve got an example of that in my own ward, where there were two really big sites put forward. One was not chosen, Aldwickbury Golf Course, and one at the moment is in, Harpenden North East. The Government says this is the number and you’ve got to get on with it, and it doesn’t matter that it’s on the Green Belt, this overrides it. There can then be a further debate about the appropriate site selection, and Regulation 19 allows that to happen.
“But it would have to be a case of something coming up, or arguments having been made, that not only further question the inclusion of that site, but you also have to examine the other sites of a similar scale that weren’t included, and say, ‘Is that site now more appropriate?’
“So I’m absolutely not going to say that it couldn’t happen between now and March next year, because you’ve got to take account of the consultation.”
Of course, the increased housing numbers have given SADC even less wiggle room when it comes to including different sites in the Local Plan, something Cllr de Kort says we need to be cognizant of as a whole district.
“It’s a really difficult one, because we have wards, where councillors listen to their local residents, and then we have a district Local Plan. It’s not a ward plan, and it’s got to make sense.
“I mean, some people say, ‘Is it fair? Has it been done fairly?’ There are two types of fair, aren’t there. There’s fair as an equal. Is it going to be equal? Well no. Is it going to be equally shared out? That would be easy to do – you can go round to each ward and work out the population and say you all get 800 houses and they you do it yourself or whatever.
“There’s also fair as in following a correct procedure. We all know that. Was it fair that kid got punished and that kid didn’t? Well yes it was fair because one didn’t do the homework and the other did. So I think that’s going to be important as well.”
