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Letter: We Need to Strike A Balance Between Preservation and Meeting Social Need
Published on: 24 May, 2017
Updated on: 24 May, 2017
From Gordon Bridger
Hon Alderman and former Mayor of Guildford
In response to: Support for Development on the Green Belt is Overwhelming in the Town Centre
Mr Smith makes some very valid points and Mr Paton, in response, wants some facts.
The most important fact is that Guildford Borough has 89% of its land in the green belt. The average for the UK is 13%.
The average house price is around £ 400,000 and the actual building costs for an average house likely to be less than £150,000 – land costs are around 2/3rds of total costs.
We cannot attract the younger skilled British workers in our schools, hospitals and cannot attract the young highly skilled workers who are needed in future.
We have been fortunate in attracting hard-working immigrants who are prepared to live temporarily in institutions or substandard accommodation.
Our productive highly skilled enterprises find it difficult to recruit British and indeed foreign skilled staff because of high costs housing.
There is certainly scope for more housing in the town centre, provided it is in scale and character, and the current plans to allow for 40,000 sq metres of retail (a 40% increase on current retail) are based on a flawed consultant’s report which needs challenging but this would be for housing most suitable for the elderly and single people, not families.
The need for more housing is such that some very modest encroachments on the 89% greenbelt can be justified in certain areas – between 1 and 2%. I and almost everyone would prefer to have our houses surrounded by green belt and cannot be blamed for objecting, but one needs to weigh one’s personal interests against a broader social need- and not seek to adopt the moral high ground which could be parodied as a struggle between better views and the needs of bees and birds against the need for homes. A not entirely unfair comparison.
I, and almost everyone, would prefer to have our houses surrounded by green belt. Those objecting cannot be blamed for doing so, but one needs to weigh one’s personal interests against a broader social need- and not seek to adopt the moral high ground which could be parodied as a struggle between better views and the needs of bees and birds against the need for homes. A not entirely unfair comparison.
When one starts to weigh up facts one can have a better balanced discussion about the needs for preserving our environment and meeting our social and economic needs – both are important and where we draw the line is a genuine grey area.
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Responses to Letter: We Need to Strike A Balance Between Preservation and Meeting Social Need
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"Found any?" - "Nope, it all looks green to me!" (See Opinion: The Future is Congested, the Future is Grey)
Christopher Dalby
May 26, 2017 at 4:45 pm
Excellent piece and I totally agree with pretty much all of it, I didn’t realise Guildford was in an area of which 89% is green belt, I guessed it would be high but not that high and that does explain a big part of the problem we face.
Times change and the demand for housing is much higher than in previous generations but it appears that some people haven’t realised that yet, which is a real shame.
I know many people (including myself) that have been forced to move away from Guildford due to incredibly high rent and lack of affordability and when I hear people objecting to each and every proposed development without giving any thought or ideas on alternatives it makes my blood boil.
We simply must plan for the future and modernise. Places like Blackwell Farm are prime areas for development in my and many other peoples opinions but are fought against tooth and nail by the same old people.
Unless attitudes changed we are doomed – and that includes descendants of many of the people objecting to each new proposed development.
Open your eyes people, please.
Peter Shaw
May 26, 2017 at 5:00 pm
Hon Alderman Bridger makes some valid points, but before we can have this debate, in my opinion, we need to know how many homes we need to build and more importantly we need to have confidence in that figure. We can only have confidence in that figure if we can go through the calculations and methodology ourselves, in the public forum so it can be debated and people can make informed opinions.
The Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) which should tell us how many new homes per year Guildford should build, was commissioned by Guildford Borough Council and paid for by tax payers money. We should be able to scrutinise it, but every Freedom of Information request to date (as far as I’m aware) to look at the calculations and methodology has been denied.
Why is this issue so important and why don’t people have confidence in the process? The SHMA number in the 2003 plan was 322 new homes per year (which was successfully defended in the Law Courts when challenged), in the first draft of the new Local Plan it initially jumped to around 870 new homes per year with no explanation of how this number was derived. Currently, the SHMA number resides at approximately 650 new homes per year.
Some good people of Guildford have pointed out flaw after flaw in the numbers presented by GBC in the SHMA and in various drafts over the years. There is real anxiety over the number presented, with no confidence in it whatsoever. The current feeling from those who have done extensive work trying to replicate the methodology of the SHMA is that there are still significant issues with the number that is presented to the public. The only way to resolve this is by seeing how the current SHMA numbers are calculated in detail and see if the calculations and formulae used are correct and accurate.
Without having a housing number that people can have confidence in, how can we even start to try and strike a balance between preservation and social need?
John Lomas
May 27, 2017 at 2:05 pm
Can I inject some statistics into the discussion without taking a specific position in regards to the local arguments for Guildford?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096
Concludes that 2.27% of England’s landscape is built upon.
I do have some quibbles about what is still natural after all farmers’ fields aren’t natural and large parts of our “natural” wildernesses have been quarried in the past.
Even Dartmoor and Exmoor were de-forested by mankind.