17 Jan 2025
To use a football analogy, any decision on the St Albans Local Plan are now firmly in the hands of the VAR, rather than SADC referees.
In fact, council leader Cllr Paul de Kort is clear that whatever happens now won’t be politically motivated at all, at least during the examination stage of the process.
He also won’t be personally appearing before the independently appointed inspectors at the forthcoming hearings, leaving the technical process in the hands of experienced officers.
Inspectors Matthew Birkinshaw and Thomas Bristow will be carrying out the independent examination of SADC’s Local Plan, and will determine whether it has been prepared in accordance with the relevant legal requirements and that it is ‘sound’ – i.e. positively prepared, justified, effective and consistent with national policy.
This week the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said: “The Plan-led approach is, and must remain, the cornerstone of the planning system. We understand the need to balance keeping plans progressing with making sure they plan for sufficient housing.”
But she added: “We are proposing a transitional approach that will allow those Local Plans that have reached examination to continue, along with those who have made it to the final stage of the Plan-making process (Regulation 19), so long as they provide for at least 80 per cent of the new housing need figure.”
Does that mean the St Albans Plan is going to fall at the first hurdle? Not according to Paul.
He said that SADC was never close to the new figure, but by submitting the Plan when it did, the council avoided that caveat. It also doesn’t have having to provide an extra year’s worth of homes in their five-year housing pipeline from July 2026, a situation faced by councils which have still not moved to that stage in the process.
“We dodged a bullet there,” Paul said.
He remains cautiously positive that the current submission won’t be thrown out early in the process – as happened with the previous two – despite using the targets set under the old National Planning Policy Framework.
“We were very clear. We tested this before we went to submission and spoke with as many people as we could to say,
‘Oh, we’re thinking of doing this on the standard methodology, what do you think?’ Nobody said that would be a problem.
“I can’t say it won’t happen, but I just can’t see it. If I’m wrong, I’ll have a lot of egg on my face.
“But it’s been in since November, we’ve now had inspectors appointed, and they’re moving to the next stage, which is to start asking questions.”
During this process, which could last between a year and 18 months, SADC enters a sort of ‘grace period’, where it cannot look at any other sites for future housing, and has instead to focus on cooperating with getting the current Local Plan approved.
“It’s a hell of a lot of houses, so from a national Government perspective it makes sense that we don’t trip over our own feet.
“If somebody asks me where are the new sites that houses are going to be built, all I can say is somewhere in the district. I can say where it won’t be, and that’s Heartwood Forest, Harpenden Common and on a floodplain.”
With the Plan now in the hand of independent inspectors, it must be something of a weight off his shoulders to no longer shoulder the responsibility?
“In one sense it is, I mean everybody has had a chance to have their say and we’ve responded, but it now goes to the VAR equipment where somebody independent decides.
“I don’t turn up at these hearings, our officers do, it’s all the technical stuff now and it’s deliberately not meant to be political. They might say, is it on a floodplain or not, or this is the report from Herts county council on how they mitigate flooding. It doesn’t come back to anyone political at all in this period.
“The next political decision to be made is when it goes back to the council to decide whether we adopt this Plan, but fundamentally it will be as long as 18 months when we can’t do anything.”
Perhaps one of the biggest spanners thrown into the works when it comes to future Local Plans appears to be of the Labour Government’s own devising.
The proposed reorganisation of the current two-tier system of local government casts doubts over who will be making future decisions on planning and housing targets.
If the power is taken away from district councils and placed into the hands of much larger unitary authorities, they may find themselves inheriting piecemeal Local Plans split across different areas, then still having to find new sites for homes while also dealing with the repercussions of massive reorganisation.
“If I was in charge of the Government, and I had made a commitment to improve public services, I would not say the biggest problem was local government. I’d look at the health service, link it to adult social care, the queues in the courts, all sorts of things that need to be resolved before this. I don’t know why they’re doing it, it seems to be some sort of ideological obsession, but it’s just going to cause more confusion and less action.”
Arguably one of the biggest problems with Herts county council is the perception that it isn’t in touch with grassroots politics, something which he agrees will not be resolved by merging district councils into unitary authorities.
“You can’t compare Watford and Ware or Stevenage and St Albans, they’re very different in terms of their history, their commuting patterns, all these other ways.”
The Conservative leader of Herts county council, Cllr Richard Roberts, was recently humiliated after suggesting HCC could take the power of local district councils and manage operations themselves, only to meet vehement opposition from district leaders across the political spectrum.
“It was quite astonishing the way he took that on and lost out so badly and so quickly.”
Paul returns to the uncertainty surrounding future proposals on housing targets.
“There’s still going to be Local Plans, but who will be making the decisions on planning? Under a new unitary authority will it still be the best decision to put 80 per cent more homes in St Albans? When you’re controlling half or a third of Hertfordshire, would it make more sense to put them somewhere else, or put even more here? And you can imagine what local people would say about that. But who knows, and potentially somebody else is making that decision.
“If they say, oh no it’s St Albans district council which has to do this in the future, then what’s the point of what they’re doing? I don’t think it’s been thought through at all.
“I’ve been in meetings and webinars where different council leaders are putting in questions to the Government and they’re ducking the answers. They’ve refused to speak to any district council directly, and are only having conversations with county councils across the country, and that’s a scandal.
“You then have a problem like with Herts county council where Richard Roberts goes off with his own agenda, talks to them, and then declares what we’re getting second-hand. He thought he could just blow it all through, but was faced down by 10 districts and boroughs of all political persuasions.
“The opposition was widespread across all of the parties at the district level. In Broxbourne the newly elected Conservative MP Lewis Cocking was also viscerally opposed to it, and I believe it’s opposition from Conservatives that made Richard Roberts turn around and not go down this route.”
He says the Labour Government’s focus is on further centralisation, something which shows a lack of interest in local people at a district level: “They just want to have some bigger groups to talk to, some mega-councils.
“They’ve stated there are two main drivers for going to unitaries. They believe they can save three billion, and there’s huge scepticism about that. They think they can solve the huge local government finance crisis by reorganisation.
“And they want to have a small number of combined authority mayors they can invite to a regional forum, have them all in a room and say ‘this needs to be sorted out’.
“The Conservatives squeezed local finance so they could put their money into other priorities, and then blaming local councils for being inefficient, and Labour sadly have seemed to have gone the same way. We haven’t got any money, blame the Tories, but this is our solution, and it’s a terrible solution.”
