08 Mar 2024
Green Belt campaigners have dismissed suggestions that St Albans faces an onslaught of 64,000 new homes should the Local Plan not be approved.
This week in response to calls for an emergency Full Council debate on the planning blueprint:, St Albans Liberal Democrats told the St Albans Times: “The Local Plan is very much in hand. The Local Plan is guided by an expert committee, which is open for the public and all councillors to participate. After the last two Plans failed, we cannot allow our attempts to be derailed.
“The derailment of this [Local }Plan would be disastrous to residents as uncontrolled developments would then occur, risking the putting of anywhere up to 64,000 homes across most of our local landscape.”
Gee Smeadley, representing Team CLASH, fighting to protect north St Albans Green Belt, said: “The council has claimed an extraordinary number of houses could be developed in an uncontrolled way if this version of the draft Local Plan is not delivered.
“The idea that over four times the housing than is already in the Local Plan can be delivered in an uncontrolled way is baseless scaremongering in our view. If landowners put forward a site for consideration in the Local Plan process, it must by law be found to be “suitable, available and achievable” of delivering sustainable housing. To test this, there must be technical assessments such as assessment of infrastructure such as roads, schools, healthcare, environmental assessments, flood risk assessments and more.
“”If the land is on Green Belt, then there also needs to be a very special circumstance to remove Green Belt. So there is simply no way that development can happen in a uncontrolled way, even in a district where the council has been put in special measures due to bad performance in the planning department.
“In March 2022, this council wrote to the Government wanting to deliver one-third of the housing that was being put forward using the out of date Standard Method which is still in the draft Local Plan as it approaches the next phase. This lower figure is amounts to 5,000 homes in sustainable and deliverable locations. That is what the council should get back controlling and delivering as soon as possible.”
After we questioned the source of the figure of 64,000 homes, a Lib Dem spokesperson explained: “This figure is the number of homes put forward by land owners/developers in the “call for sites” aspect of the Local Plan. It represents therefore the total that we could expect to be built in the district if no new Local Plan is rapidly agreed.”
