09 Aug 2024
It was the last day of Parliament before the summer recess when the fresh housing targets were revealed for councils across the country, an eleventh hour announcement which left many MPs reeling.
So is there anything St Albans representative Daisy Cooper can do to shape national policy and help protect the Green Belt, something she campaigned passionately about in the run-up to the election?
“The Government has published this document which is 69 pages long, and that’s just the consultation document, on top of that they’ve got a new version of the National Planning Policy Framework which will have tons of changes to it, and there’s a whole bunch of annexes as well, so there’s a lot of material for us to chew through.
“It’s not at all clear to me yet whether there are any exceptions, exemptions or protections for the Green Belt, but we’ve got to be in no doubt that Labour are continuing with top-down housing targets and massively increasing them too, and that’s going to have a big impact.
“But it’s not yet clear to me what time frame that’s going to be, how we’re going to be affected given the state we’re at with the Local Plan, and what kind of homes those would be, what powers our local authority will have to ensure that there is infrastructure, and there isn’t any nature depletion as a result.
“I think the honest answer is that we’re all a little bit startled. I mean, Labour were very clear that they wanted to have mandatory housing targets.
“We knew that they had a big ambition to build 1.5 million homes, but it wasn’t at all clear what that was going to mean for individual areas.
“When a party talks about a really big top number, no one really knows how it’s going to be distributed, and there are lots of different ways in which they could have worked out how many homes should go in every area.
“There’s a world in which it was a completely different method, starting with housing need and taking into account the Green Belt, but it appears as though they looked at where the demand is in terms of where people want to live, and therefore in places like St Albans, which is clearly a very desirable place to live, and where house prices are very high, that means that you would almost automatically attract much bigger housing numbers.
“But I haven’t looked at the overall picture and that’s basically my summer recess sorted because I need to chew through all those documents in the next couple of weeks and really work out what that means for our area.
“In terms of what I can do specifically, I mean I’ll be responding to the consultation in the same way that I responded to the last consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework. I think a lot of the feedback from local councils themselves will be really important.
“I’m not going to lie, there are some things that we would welcome, like the fact that they want to review the Right to Buy Scheme. I’ve asked about what that means and whether or not, if local authorities do sell council homes, they can actually use that money to replace lost stock. So let’s see. I don’t know what the answer to that is, but it looks like it could be promising.
“I’ve also had a long-running campaign to scrap the Government-imposed cap on planning fees, because we’ve had a situation where our local taxpayers are subsidising big developers to the tune of three million pounds a year.
“There are things that might strengthen our planning departments, give them more money and resources and powers to tackle the misbehaviour of big developers and to make sure we get more social homes, but the bottom line is that it does look like we’re going to have to build a lot more homes and we
just don’t quite know how quickly that’s going to have to happen.
“In the draft Local Plan that the district council are working on, when you take into account all the remaining brownfield sites and what we’ve always called the previously-developed Green Belt but which is now being called the grey belt, that basically counts as about 5,000 homes that they can build.
“They still had to build at least 10,000 more and now it seems like it might be a lot more than that.
“My hunch is that there will be a big debate over whether you have bigger sites or whether you have to build up. In some areas, it might be their decision to build upwards, but of course that will need to be sympathetic to the local area, and in St Albans, with so much of our character and history, and low-level rooftops, you couldn’t have a really big development too close to residential areas.
“The honest answer is we don’t know, and we’re going to have to look through this kind of monster document over the next few weeks to really get a sense of what it means for our area and what the choices are.”
