25 Jan 2025
St Albans district council urgently needs to start addressing new Government housing targets or risk being caught out by speculative developments.
That is the call from councillors concerned about the lack of drive towards hitting the revised figures of the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) now that the Local Plan has been submitted for examination. These could see St Albans having to find sites for an additional 775 homes per year on top of those already identified in the Plan.
Speaking in last week’s St Albans Times, council leader Cllr Paul de Kort said they were unable to look at any sites for future housing during this stage of the process, which could last as long as 18 months.
But that’s not the view of other district councillors, including Conservative Matthew Cowley and Independent David Mitchell, who fear the Liberal Democrat administration will be putting the district at risk from speculative planning during this period.
Cllr Mitchell, who sits on the planning policy and climate committee, says they need to start finding sites for additional housing now, and he has submitted an item onto the agenda of the committee’s next meeting which addresses his concerns.
He highlights two clauses in the new NPPF:
“234. For the purpose of preparing Local Plans, the policies in this version of the Framework will apply from 12 March 2025 other than where… (234b) the Plan has been submitted for examination under Regulation 22 on or before 12 March 2025…
“236. Where paragraph 234b applies, if the housing requirement in the Plan to be adopted meets less than 80% of local housing need, the local planning authority will be expected to begin work on a new plan, under the revised plan-making system provided for under the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 (as soon as the relevant provisions are brought into force in 2025), in order to address the shortfall in housing need.”
Cllr de Kort insisted the council had dodged a bullet with regards to these clauses by submitting the Plan when they did.
But Cllr Mitchell insists otherwise: “The Government has issued an indicative local housing needs assessment which, for St Albans City and District, is 1,660 new houses pa.
“Given our draft Local Plan only makes provision for 885 pa, there is clearly a shortfall of 775 pa. – 885 is only 53% of 1,660, way short of the 80 per cent that the Government is setting as the benchmark requirement.
“There is a serious risk that developers will be looking to fill this shortfall by putting in speculative planning applications for development on the district’s Green Belt. Therefore, the council needs to start work on identifying where the shortfall could be met so unsuitable sites can be rejected and applications refused.
“In other words, we should be working on a new Local Plan process now and not wait for the outcome of the recently submitted Draft Local Plan.”
He is also concerned that not enough work has been done to support the existing Plan, highlighting a report about feedback from the Regulation 19 consultation, which covered the technicalities of the submission.
“It says that no red flags were found, yet the report includes quotes from the Environment Agency saying ‘based on the evidence currently available, we find your draft Local Plan, particularly the site allocations, to be unsound’, and National Highways saying ‘in our judgement there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the Local Plan growth can be accommodated in transport terms on the Strategic Road Network’.
“These are serious flaws yet SADC was happy to submit the Plan four months before the original timetable in an attempt to beat the Government’s new planning policies; a tactic that seems to have backfired.”
These comments are echoed by Cllr Cowley, who told the St Albans Times: “When the Local Plan was being debated at council, my biggest concern was that we would spend all this time and money defending it to a Planning Inspector, get to the end of the process and then be back at square one and have to start again with a new Local Plan to find a huge number of completely new sites to achieve the Government’s housing target of nearly 25,000.
“That would present our district with a real challenge. Because it would be very difficult to do things like go back to look at sites in the Green Belt we have already allocated in this current version of the Local Plan and say ‘could we find a way to build some more houses at this location, so we don’t have to find new Green Belt sites’.”
Cllr Cowley said when he raised this in council meetings he was told the focus was on getting the existing Plan in place so they did not need to worry about the new targets, only for the latest version of the NPPF to say this did not apply.
Although he disagrees with Cllr de Kort on when SADC will need to start again, whether when the examination is finished or as soon as relevant provisions are brought into force in 2025, either way it means they need to start working on a new Local Plan.
“We will be, as I was so concerned about before we submitted this Plan, back at square one. But now with less flexibility, millions spent, and hungrier and hungrier developers eyeing up our Green Belt for any slips from our five-year land supply that mean it is unprotected.
“That’s a real failure for our residents. And it means another long Local Plan process full of uncertainty, on the back of decades of Local Plan processes full of uncertainty.
“So what should we do now? Well, firstly in the next Local Plan we need to be much more ambitious in our pursuit of development that is good for our district.
“We need to work much harder to proactively identify areas where residents want to see development. We need to work much harder to find and unlock brownfield sites – the council failed this time to even unlock some brownfield sites that it owns.
“We also need to make sure that any development that gets allocated on our Green Belt delivers the maximum number of houses that can be accommodated there – even if that means the council has to work harder to unlock better
infrastructure improvements for our residents.
“Too often at council, I’ve seen an attitude that councillors know better than residents what is good for them. I hope that in our next Local Plan, we will bring residents into the room for a real conversation about the future of our communities.”
One of those residents could very well be local campaigner Gee Smedley, the driving force between CLASH and Save North St Albans Green Belt, who said she was gobsmacked by Cllr de Kort’s comments last week.
“I’m not sure who informs him, but St Albans is going to be caught out by the new requirements of the NPPF. This Local Plan delivers no protection whatsoever from the higher housing targets.
“What the council should be doing is properly working strategically with neighbouring councils to deliver housing on a strategic basis, reviewing all land, not just Green Belt and really focusing on affordable options for the region. St Albans cannot continue to work in silo.
“The Devolution Bill will be a sledgehammer to the district model and any hesitation by Hertfordshire County Council to withstand the changes will be a fruitless endeavour.”
