21 Jul 2023
As the dust starts to settle on the vast number of sites proposed for St Albans’ draft Local Plan, stunned community leaders have hit back at the scale of the developments and what they will mean for the district.
Members of SADC’s planning policy and climate committee moved the district’s blueprint for growth up to 2041 into the first public consultation phase last week – formerly known as the Regulation 18 consultation.
A further consultation on the draft Local Plan that emerges from this process is due to take place from July to September 2024. This is known as the Regulation 19 consultation and could result in further changes.
Existing government targets call for approximately 15,000 homes to be built over the next 17 years, with sites earmarked including vast swathes of Green Belt around Redbourn, Harpenden and north St Albans, prompting anger from local residents.
At the recent PPC meeting, council leader Cllr Chris White told councillors: “I get far more emails, messages and conversations from people who are worried about the fact that they are in sub-standard accommodation, that their children – like mine – have had to leave the area because it is unaffordable, and of course an unaffordable community is an unsustainable community.
“We owe it to younger people to find housing for them, and affordable housing, and within affordable housing social housing, and that is partly what this Plan is about.
“The second thing is about providing the infrastructure that people worry about most. The Green Belt is there in particular to prevent coalescence and I think in all cases it has done that as far as we are concerned.
“It is not there to be a burden to us and what is exciting about this first stab at the Plan is the infrastructure it delivers, and the challenges that it delivers. Problems like the shortage of school places are on their way to being solved, even if we have to look further over the next 12 months at some of the numbers the county council has produced. The prospect of change going forwards is exciting.
“In terms of density, what has increasingly blighted this district in recent years is low-density housing. Executive estates being built on the edge of towns generating traffic, but not actually generating homes for people from St Albans, but for people who would like to come to St Albans and Harpenden to have homes. We need to look after our own and this is a way of so doing.
“Yes we could pause the process. If you want to hand this process lock, stock and barrel over to central government let’s pause the process. That would be a betrayal of the people of St Albans and I for one could never vote for anything quite so offensive.”
Cllr Simon Grover, St Peter’s ward councillor and leader of the Green and Independent group, accused the Lib Dem administration of “fire and brimstone” in their response to criticism over the draft Local Plan.
He said: “The council administration is claiming that the government ‘has a gun to our head’, giving us no option to plough on with the Local Plan process, launching into the ‘Regulation 18’ public consultation. Cllr White has talked in apocalyptic terms of ‘betrayal’ if we don’t immediately proceed.
“This is in spite of 50 other councils choosing to pause their Local Plans to wait for new, lower, housing figures,
that are expected in the next few months.
“The council could easily approach the government to talk about pausing and gauge reaction. But they refuse.
“By starting this consultation, they are in fact giving more ammunition to aggressive developers, who will use the contents of the draft Plan to bolster their case for applications.
“When we get the lower housing numbers, we’ll have to go through this all again, so why waste time and effort on it now?
“Councillors and residents have repeatedly asked for a nuanced, careful approach to this, and every time the administration comes back with black and white arguments and emotional warnings of doom. We need calm debate and collaboration, but instead we get fire and brimstone, with any criticism or questioning angrily dismissed out of hand.”
Meanwhile, in Redbourn there has been alarm at proposals for nearly 4,000 new homes on Green Belt land within the parish, with the Hemel Garden Community sites set to narrow the gap between the village and Hemel Hempstead, and the west Redbourn site only accessible through quiet country lanes.
Parish councillors are now preparing to fiercely oppose the mooted developments, recognising that although there is a need for new housing in the district, they feel Redbourn appears to have been made a sacrificial lamb in the process.
Redbourn Parish Council Cllr David Mitchell spoke out against the Plan, urging SADC’s spacial planning manager Chris Briggs to provide vital additional information on why the shortlist of sites was selected for inclusion.
He said: “As a district councillor I think it was entirely predictable that we would be asked to provide the site selection evidence, and I know others are asking for this information too. I really don’t understand why this isn’t being published in the evidence base and made available for the Reg 18 public consultation.
“Even councillors on [the planning policy and climate committee] have not been allowed to see the detailed reasoning behind the site selections and this cannot be right. By saying the information will be provided in 2024 before the Reg 19 is a very peculiar way of being “transparent”. It seems to me the council is leaving itself in a weak legal position that may prove to be a big issue when we get to the Examination. So, I urge you to make the information available now.”
Campaign group CLASH, which is fighting the proposals for developing land near Woollams Playing Fields, said the Local Plan should be a strategy for economic growth, housing, brownfield regeneration, infrastructure and environmental protection in the face or extreme climate change – not a plan for ‘local houses for local people’.
Spokesperson Gee Smedley said: “Pitting residents against each other on the basis of age and origin is not a Liberal value. The Government has already said the forecast housing numbers are wrong.
They will make an announcement on this in September. The expected new guidance for population growth is a lot lower – only 5,000 homes. As SADC says, land is already identified for this. This administration does not need to build on the Green Belt to deliver 5,000 homes.
“The Green Belt in the district boundaries is the countryside adjacent to Hemel, Watford, Hatfield and Welwyn. As guardians of that land, which is primarily used to grow our food, it is vital that proper assessment is done when proposing the sites. It has not.
“Wherever you work, however long you have lived or plan to live in St Albans, open market affordable housing should be accessible to you here as it is anywhere else in our wonderful country. Or does SADC feel that only those who are what Chris White describes as “our own” residents have the freedom to buy here? Shall we start a visa system for people who want to buy a home who were born outside of the AL postcode?
“House prices have come down in the last year. Prices are directly linked to the availability of credit ie interest rates and wage inflation. No house builder would build houses to crash the price of them.
“I can honestly say, I didn’t expect the Local Plan process to take such a divisive turn.”
Although other residents’ campaign groups have condemned the draft Plan, one has remained conspicuous by its silence. Stop L&G, the group fighting the proposals for north-west Harpenden, has not spoken out in response to the consultation.
