21 Jun 2026
Local Plans seem to be like buses. You wait 30 years for one and two come along in quick succession.
SADC is on track to adopt its long-awaited Local Plan next month after three years of work, with the last two having failed under previous Conservative administrations.
But no sooner will this Plan be rubber-stamped by councillors then work will have to begin on a new planning blueprint for 2029 which reflects the Government’s major changes in assessing housing need.
The Local Plan scheduled for adoption next month allows for the building of 15,000 new homes in the district at carefully selected sites. This figure conformed to Government guidelines at the time and includes 1,200 social rent properties.
However, the Government’s final revised National Planning Policy Framework will be published in the summer, immediately overriding any conflicting Local Plans and effectively starting the clock on their replacements.
This means St Albans district will face a 70 per cent increase in mandatory housing targets under the new Government directives, rising to more than 23,000 new homes by 2041.
This massive surge, intended to tackle the housing crisis, will place further pressure on the district’s Green Belt, with potential for extensive development on sites previously considered protected.
SADC leader Cllr Paul de Kort is not ruling out any shocks: “This Government has made many changes at different times to the NPPF, so I wouldn’t be surprised if something else popped up or completely changes its form like Labour’s Grey Belt pre-General Election description and its post General Election, starkly different, version.
“We were well aware that revisions to national planning policies were on the cards, but it was essential that we continued to work on the Local Plan that we are on track to adopt next month rather than abandon it.
“We needed to get this LP in place to deliver more infrastructure, more managed green spaces, more affordable homes, better transport provision and to help protect us from speculative planning applications by developers.
“Moreover, if we didn’t push ahead, the Government was threatening to step in and write the Local Plan instead. It was in the best interests of our residents that the Plan was produced by locally-elected representatives with a feel for the district rather than distant Whitehall officials.
“Considerable speculative development has already occurred locally due to the abject failure, twice, of local Conservatives to produce a Local Plan that met their own Government’s requirements.
“The top-down target imposed on this district by the last Conservative Government was retained and increased (over 80 per cent) by the current Labour one. The next steps for all planning authorities have been laid out with no room for local deviation. This from a Government that laughingly describes its approach as devolution when it is clearly further centralisation of decision-making.”
Coupled with this is the impending Local Government Reorganisation, which will see the abolition of the district council in spring 2028 and its replacement with a new unitary authority, long before the Local Plan is completed.
And with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) deciding last year to stop funding for the neighbourhood planning support programme, it could jeopardise the future of those Neighbourhood Plans which are in need of revising, causing another blow for local involvement in planning policy.
So what can be done to ensure ultra-local representation on planning decisions if the Neighbourhood Plans are allowed to fade away due to a lack of ongoing investment?
Cllr de Kort said: “We Lib Dems always want to see political decisions taken as close to the communities affected as reasonable, so we argue for local housing targets which reflect the pressures on our district such as those caused by the strategic rail freight terminal’s location, the large expansion of Luton Airport and the lack of brownfield land due to our local economic history.
“We also want to see planning applications reviewed by councillors local enough to understand the specific circumstances that affect our local communities. Our Liberal Democrat MPs, Daisy Cooper and Victoria Collins will keep using our representation in Parliament to make the case for localism, whether that surrounds plan making or any other areas of political decision-making. Victoria Collins made this specific point with her recent PMQ.”
In terms of LGR, what measures are being put into place to ensure continuity on planning when we move to unitaries?
Cllr de Kort explained: “SADC is being told to work to a timetable that takes no account of LGR pressures and requires us to treat it, for Local Plan preparation purposes, as if it doesn’t exist. In practice, the ‘2029 New Local Plan’ will be passed into the new unitary’s hands when it is about two-thirds complete.
“As the Government’s timetable indicates, the additional housing numbers will have to be allocated from within the district’s boundaries, assuming there is not a change of Government, or leader, or housing and planning policy by then. From what we have all witnessed, that is a pretty big assumption, but it is the only one we are able to work with right now.”
Opposition party leaders have responded to the Lib Dems’ announcement this week.
St Albans Greens leader Cllr Simon Grover said: “Work on the next Local Plan is starting now, and we intend to be in the room from day one. We’ll push hard to make sure environmental protections and community priorities are built into the foundations, not bolted on at the end.
“The Lib Dems claim they are protecting the Green Belt, but 9,000 homes in this Plan are allocated to Green Belt land. And 5,500 of those are on sites the council’s own Green Belt Review identified as too valuable to build on. That is not protection.”
He said the Government’s approach to planning was deeply troubling: “Councils are being told to hit housing targets or face intervention from Westminster, and that is not how democracy should work. Local people should have a genuine say in what gets built in their communities.
“Any move to unitary councils must include a clear, legally binding commitment to transfer all live planning frameworks and Local Plan work in progress. A gap in planning continuity would leave our communities exposed to exactly the kind of speculative development we’ve spent years trying to prevent.”
Cllr Matt Cowley, leader of the SADC Conservatives group, expressed his disappointment in the Local Plan process: “Seven years of dither and delay from the Liberal Democrats have left our district simultaneously facing a housing crisis and huge amounts of speculative development with almost no protections for our Green Belt.
“With the Labour Government giving us a target of around 25,000 houses, we must take a pro-active approach to unlocking the right sites for development. Our Conservative team have already been doing just that.
“We’ve been calling on the council to do more work to unlock the brownfield sites we will need for new houses; we have been working to ensure that appropriate council land – places like disused garage sites – are brought forward for development; and we will work to ensure that any countryside development uses as little greenspace as possible, by pursuing appropriate levels of density.
“Just this past week, I brought an item to the planning policy and climate committee asking what we can do in the Local Plan to protect the heritage of our high streets, for example. Infrastructure planning will be vital too.
“Local Government Reorganisation will present its own challenges. Our job at the district council is to, as far as possible, hand the new council a Plan which is well-developed, well-evidenced, and which has done the hard yards to identify the right places for development. That, like the housing target we have to hit, is not within our gift under this Labour Government.
“Looking forward to the next General Election, I will continue to make the case for the right houses in the right places, backed by sensible housing targets. We do need to build new houses, but building lots more houses in St. Albans and fewer houses in London will do nothing to fix a housing crisis caused by an over-heating London housing market.
“The Liberal Democrats and Labour both went into the last election with enormous housing targets but no real thought about where to build them to actually tackle historic patterns of house price growth – or what their huge targets would mean for communities like ours. We cannot afford another Government that does that.”
Mike Hobday, newly elected leader of the St Albans council Labour Group, said: “We are deeply sceptical of a Local Plan which proposes two thirds of our housing allocation on Green Belt land. The Liberal Democrat administration has repeatedly passed up the opportunity to propose homes on previously developed land, and this is a massive missed opportunity. For example, in London Colney, the abandoned Riverside Industrial Estate and the former Pastoral Centre on Shenley Lane were both passed over.
“Labour accepts the need for substantial new housing, but believes the council has not worked hard enough to identify brownfield opportunities, bring forward previously developed land, and support higher-density development in appropriate locations before turning to extensive Green Belt release.
“It was frustrating for us as new councillors, being elected at a late stage of the development of the current Plan. We had severe criticisms of the developing Plan, but our concerns were repeatedly rejected by councillors who seemed unwilling to challenge the proposals in front of them. An example of this was the Liberal Democrat determination to relabel the village of London Colney as a town for planning purposes. Local residents didn’t want this, but the administration was oblivious to their local knowledge.
“The difference this time is that Labour councillors will be involved from the very start. I now have a seat on the council’s planning policy committee and will use that opportunity to promote our views on the next Plan.
“The main reason that St Albans is under Government pressure at the moment is the council’s abject failure, for many years, to provide for the new homes that local residents need for our children and grandchildren. St Albans is the classic example of how bottom-up planning and voluntary targets – espoused by some – lets local people down. The Government has quite rightly said no to the culture of delaying housing delivery that has characterised St Albans’s approach for years.
“Labour councillors believe that the council must retreat from its Green Belt first approach. The next Local Plan must be much better. It must focus on previously developed land and the council must play a more active role in pursuing these locations. It should positively encourage landowners to put forward more suitable sites. This should also include a willingness to build higher.
“The bottom line is that the council must not continue giving its priority to further spreading of St Albans, into the Green Belt. What we want to see is St Albans council making good progress with its next plan before Local Government Reorganisation. We expect that this will lead to the Plan being formally adopted by the new unitary council that St Albans is merged into. But if we make good progress before the merger, then local councillors will have the maximum say over our future.
Independent Redbourn councillor David Mitchell added: “Redbourn residents have been very vocal on Facebook expressing their alarm at the 4,000 new houses proposed in the Local Plan for Redbourn Parish. I, too, am very concerned that Redbourn will no longer be a rural village but a giant housing estate with building work going on in all directions. “The fact that the next Local Plan is already under way for double the number of houses makes me think that the planning world’s gone mad. There will be no countryside left if we continue to build all over the Green Belt in this manner.
“One of the risks for villages like Redbourn is that developers can use the new grey belt rules to get their sites through. Towns are better protected as they mustn’t coalesce but that doesn’t apply to country villages. I’d like to see Redbourn’s status changed from a village to a town to give us better protection from ad hoc development, and that is something Redbourn Parish Council is currently looking into.
“The Government is aiming for 1.5 million new homes by the next election and it seems ‘build, build, build’ is all they are interested in. We do need more housing as a country but why destroy top-quality farmland in the process, as is happening in Redbourn? We will still be needing food in the future and we shouldn’t rely on importing from abroad because we don’t have enough agriculture going on.
“There is a whole raft of new planning rules about to be published, and I suspect things are going to get worse for those of us who care about the environment.
“The new unitary councils that come into force in 2028 will inherit the district’s planning policies along with the other districts and boroughs involved, but I have yet to see how all this is going to work out. It could be years before everything is up and running properly, and in the meantime I anticipate a great deal of chaos!”
Meanwhile a Facebook campaign is currently underway urging councillors to vote against the current Local Plan, but is unlikely to trigger any significant changes to the process.
Cllr Grover said: “People’s frustration is completely understandable, and I’ll listen to all the arguments before deciding how to vote. But we are legally required to have a Local Plan in place, and that reality can’t be ignored.”
Cllr Cowley said: “As we approach the end of the Local Plan process, it is only natural that local residents will have strong views about the draft Local Plan. Our Conservative team will be closely scrutinising the Local Plan in its final form, after the current Main Modifications process is concluded and any further changes are made, and we will make a decision about whether the Local Plan is the right one for our District.”
Cllr Hobday added: “Labour councillors will review the final proposals before deciding how to cast our votes. The petition is not ours, but it is an important and constructive contribution to public debate on the future of St Albans.”
