Letter: There Will Be Further Consultation on the Local Plan But No Requirement to Heed It

Published on: 5 Sep, 2018
Updated on: 6 Sep, 2018

From Susan Parker

leader of the Guildford Greenbelt Group and borough councillor for Send

In response to: The Local Plan – It Seems We Are Being Stitched Up

Well done to Adam Aaronson for making the points so clearly.

Unfortunately, this level of debate was not engaged in at the Executive meeting on Tuesday night [September 4, 2018] which debated modifications to the Local Plan. It can be viewed on the webcast and the agenda shows the redlined version of the Local Plan, ie it shows the changes.

The revised draft of the Local Plan was put forward following discussions with the examining planning inspector, to be voted on only by six members of the Executive (since the others could not be bothered to be present).

This plan will not be presented to the full council for debate, and it has been privately agreed with the chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Caroline Reeves, leader of the opposition and the Liberal Democrats group) that this matter cannot be called in and so the Local Plan is not suitable for debate in that forum either.

Opposition councillors were given only five minutes maximum each to make any comments on the local plan, a new constraint.

It should be stressed that the changes to the plan have been discussed privately between GBC and the inspector and the changes that we see were not all discussed in the Examination in Public. It isn’t, therefore, clear which were originated by the Inspector and which have been spontaneously proposed by the council itself.

The inspector, Jonathan Bore, stressed throughout the Examination in Public that he was commenting only on the soundness of Guildford’s local plan; he wasn’t seeking to improve the plan and the plan was purely that put forward by Guildford Borough.

Other plans could have been sound, but that was not his concern. He did, however, note that he was implementing government policy. Our government and our local government, both Conservative, have driven this policy and the changes to our borough, and they will have to accept responsibility for it at the ballot box. They cannot pin the blame for this appalling plan on the inspector.

We get a further six weeks to comment on the new changes, starting on September 11. I’d urge everyone to do so. The consultation will be public.

The proposed changes to the plan now include allocating a further 805 homes, 755 of which are in the green belt, to meet the Inspector’s requirement for 500 additional homes. While housing numbers may be in fact lower than needed, we are going to determine that 672 homes per annum is our housing need, which remarkably seems like justifying the number first thought of.

Furthermore, while it is now acknowledged that retail need is lower than previously anticipated, still no new brownfield land in the urban area can be allocated within the plan for housing so we supposedly still “need” to utilise the large areas of green belt which have been allocated.

While we welcome the new policy S3 that suggests a need for brownfield renewal (why did it take the inspector to insist on this?) it is desperately disappointing that despite this, there is no new allocation of urban brownfield housing.

Given that Guildford Borough Council and Surrey County Council own much of the brownfield within the town centre, it isn’t necessarily surprising that proposals to develop this land haven’t come forward. What are they keeping it for?

Remarkably it is as if the plan has been driven – in each iteration – in order to seek to prove the need to build the homes on the green belt which have been planned for years. It is a self-justifying ordinance, seeking to provide an excuse to build on our green fields, and we will all suffer in consequence. Public consultation may be required, but no law requires our leaders to heed it.

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