08 Aug 2024
Outside of the SADC administration, the reactions to the Government’s increased housing targets have been overwhelmingly negative, with campaign groups calling on the local authority and MPs to take a firm stance against the proposals.
Shirani St Ledger McCarthy, who represents Keep Chiswell Green (KCG), said: “It appears that SADC will have no choice on the numbers – how many units to build – but what they build and where is still their choice – once they have a Local Plan in place. Until we have a Local Plan in place, we will continue to be subject to the whim of speculative development.
“With the consultation just started on the proposed changes to the NPPF, I would hope that our MPs and our local council would fight hard for historic cities such as ours to have smaller targets. One of the five purposes of the Green Belt is to preserve the setting and special character of historic cities but this is rarely considered in planning decisions.
“If it were my choice, I would build properties for social rent using initiatives such as the proposed re-development of Sainsbury’s, conversion of empty offices and replacement of unused buildings. What is needed throughout the country, and most particularly in St Albans, is social rented housing. St Albans also needs smaller properties – starter homes, retirement properties – not more four and five-bedroomed homes which is what developers want to build.”
Chiswell Green is already taking a significant chunk of new housing – 124 retirement properties at Burston Nurseries, 190 units at Copsewood, 53 at Ragged Hall Lane, and 57 at Noke Lane Industrial Estate. That’s already 424 units – a 34 per cent increase on the size of the village.
There are also a further 180 units included in the Local Plan at Burston Nurseries and 98 at Miriam Lane. This will be 702 new units – a 56 per cent increase in the size of the village before the 721 to the north and south of Chiswell Green Lane sites are considered.
Shirani says other areas of the district have also been disproportionately impacted by speculative development, like Colney Heath, but there are areas such as London Colney where local residents want to allocate a disused industrial area for housing but SADC says it needs to be reserved for any future industrial development.
She is urging SADC and MPs Daisy Cooper and Victoria Collins in making a case to the Government that the district should have lower housing targets.
“It seems inevitable that we are going to lose some of our Green Belt but we need to do all we can to influence and persuade, and use the system where we can. The land is not ours to do with as we wish; we are merely custodians for future generations.
“St Albans is already nearly joined to Hatfield, with very little separating us from Watford, and under the existing proposals for development, there will be little separating us from Hemel and Harpenden, which is itself barely separated from Luton.If the Government forces these changes on our district, it is entirely feasible that the area between Watford and Luton will become a continuous urban corridor. Collaboration between our council and MPs and other councils and MPs in similar situations may persuade Ms Rayner that her approach needs to be more individual, more flexible.”
Gee Smedley from Team CLASH and Save North St Albans Green Belt, insists SADC has the same powers as before to determine and justify its Local Plan.
“SADC should have used its existing leeway better, it may now be in a completely untenable position with the current Local Plan as we see the current situation as an unsound process.
“I personally would not allow any Green Belt developments from a local climate protection basis. Each Green Belt / greenfield site has to fulfil an evidenced lead sequential assessment, we have been urging the this council to produce that evidence for the last two years and now developers are getting itchy feet and presumptively putting in huge inappropriate applications, such as the very large EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment) Scoping 5/2024/1257, which is land owned by St Albans School and is in our view entirely badly thought out.”
This proposal is for approximately 1,000 new homes on land off Sandridgebury Lane between the railway and Harpenden Road, a project known as Woollam Park, plus a two-form entry primary school and community facilities.
“It is a flood zone (which they finally recognise), and we are advised that the flood mitigations proposed are totally inadequate. It will be a car-based scheme but the area is connected to Heartwood Forest and part of the delicately balanced ecological corridor supporting the forest, a fact St Albans School now openly advertise as a selling point!
“It beggars belief they would even think to try and make the proximity of Heartwood a selling point when putting 1,000 properties right next door will swamp the forest forever.”
She believes more needs to be done to identify and develop brownfield sites before looking at the Green Belt: “Brownfield is not just waste bits of previously developed land. It is redeveloping land that is ’under’ developed, such as the swathes of flat-roofed 1960s garage blocks that could be two to three storey properties (still with a garage underneath), plus allow for more changes of use, not just commercial, do not restrict large under-occupied houses from splitting into apartments to cater for the increasing number of single older residents and reducing birth rate, which makes sense and is done in other cities more so than St Albans.
“Get planning officers to focus on the delivery of the 5,000 dwellings already identified in the Local Plan within our existing urban boundary and on brownfield ASAP and get the potential new brownfield and windfall sites identified, rather than opting for the easy route of green field development.”
Gee is also calling for cross-party action to take the new proposals to task: “The two Lib Dem MPs are either acting for their constituents who are overwhelmingly against losing our own local countryside or they are aligned to this monstrous ill-thought-out and basically unachievable goal in favour of developers’ profits. I say ‘unachievable’, because there are not enough trades people to build this number of properties unless you allow a huge increase in immigration, and there is not enough planning capacity to allow this level of development.”
Paul King of Greenbelt warned about the flaws in the way the new targets have been calculated.
“It’s all rather depressing and originates from people in the Government that appear to have no understanding of the realities in the south-east of England, and the pressures that creates for councils.
“First of all, the new NPPF changes the way that the number of houses required to be built is calculated, based on house prices relative to average salaries in the area.
“There are two flaws with this. Firstly, it assumes that there is a direct relationship between the lack of housing and house prices. This does not stand up to scrutiny in the housing market.
“You can build another 500, or 2,000 houses in St Albans per year and it won’t affect the prices at all. This is because they will attract increasing number of buyers from, predominantly North London, who will sell their two-bed flat for £750K and buy a house in St Albans for £600K and bank the difference.
“To ensure that the increase in the numbers of houses doesn’t reduce prices, developers will market their sites in areas that they will know will attract buyers with big wallets, in order to maintain the sales price and hence their profits.
“There is an affordability adjustment in place that increases the number of houses that have to be built over and above the calculated figure, if the house prices in an area are more than four times the local salary. This formula compounds the deficit of supply, and is erroneously driven by the false assumption stated above.
“The new draft NPPF makes this worse, by essentially increasing that affordability adjustment to 240%, of the previous multiplier. This is why the housing requirement in St Albans district has been lifted from 888 per year to 1,544, which is an impossible target to meet without destroying large amounts of Green Belt.
“The other issue with the affordability adjustment, when looking at commuter towns, is that actual salaries earned by residents are higher than the local salaries, since a significant number commute to London to their higher-paid jobs. No account is taken of this in the affordability calculation.
“Looking at the housing requirement figures of 888, now up to 1,544. These are not actually the numbers that the council has to work to. There is currently a 20% uplift which is imposed, due to previous failure to meet targets, so the current figure is 1,066.
“The new requirement will not only need this 20% buffer, but is planning on an additional 5% buffer. This will mean that 1,930 houses will need to be planned for per year.
“For comparison, the last formal Monitoring Report stated that 401 houses were built in 2022/3 and 381 were expected to be built in 2023/4.
“The question must therefore be asked, how can an additional 1,500 houses be built every year in a district, without completely destroying the Green Belt? The answer is, they can’t, nor should they have to be.
“In 1963 the Beecham Report suggested closure of numerous rail lines. 60 years on, many perceive that this course of action was a mistake, but it is irreversible.
“Will it take 60 years before the Rayner NPPF, which will bring about the destruction of the 85-year-old Green Belt concept, be recognised as an equivalent folly?”
