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Letter: How Will the Council Ensure Infrastructure is Provided Before Development is Allowed?
Published on: 17 May, 2017
Updated on: 17 May, 2017
From Lisa Wright
Cllr Susan Parker asks how the council will ensure adequate infrastructure is provided before developments outlined in the draft Local Plan are permitted. I think it is a good question.
I can’t see where it says in section “ID1” that all sewerage, roads, flooding mitigation, doctors and school places etc. will be provided before any housing is built.
I do see reference made to timely delivery of infrastructure or planning permission would be refused but how many times have we seen developers follow an initial planning approval with a change of conditions?
How can the council possibly police this? At what point will the council intervene when infrastructure is not forthcoming at the start of a build? What about broadband, electricity and water? How does the council and developers control the external organisations who provide these services?
So again, how is Guildford Borough Council going to ensure infrastructure is in place before any houses are built?
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Responses to Letter: How Will the Council Ensure Infrastructure is Provided Before Development is Allowed?
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Jules Cranwell
May 17, 2017 at 9:34 pm
The short answer is that GBC is powerless to control these external agencies, and so cannot guarantee any of the improvements needed to sustain their proposed, ruinous, increase in housing.
Also, they do not seem to give a damn, as long as they trouser as much as possible of the government’s new homes bonus to swell their coffers for useless vanity projects.
Yes, it will help their personal political ambitions, but at such considerable cost to the rest of us.
Jim Allen
May 18, 2017 at 9:49 am
A “Grampian clause” is the only answer to back up Local Plan assurances of infrastructure before development – though I have not found it yet. I wonder why?
The Grampian condition is a facet of planning Scottish case law established by Grampian Regional Council v City of Aberdeen District Council (1984). The term is commonly also used in England and Wales.
It is a planning condition attached to a decision notice that prevents the start of a development until off-site works have been completed on land not controlled by the applicant.
Luke Anthony
May 18, 2017 at 1:20 pm
Whatever happened to the Slyfield link road which surely was an attempt to provide infrastructure before development?
Jim Allen
May 18, 2017 at 6:19 pm
It was suddenly realised – by the council that they didn’t know in which direction the traffic wanted to go. They hadn’t actually surveyed the estate users to discover if vehicles were going to Godalming (south) or Aldershot! (west) when the road was ostensibly going north. Planning infrastructure requires understanding what is needed and where before actually announcing it.
Paul Bishop
May 18, 2017 at 4:58 pm
How is it imagined infrastructure is controlled today? What assurances does one have that when a three bedroom house is turned into a six bedroom HMO (house of multiple occupancy) that there will be any infrastructure improvement, despite easily tripling the number of inhabitants in the property, the number of cars parked on the streets and the usage of all utilities?
The simple fact is, you don’t get any assurances and there is never a thought to it. To get so caught up over this issue just shows a complete lack of real world understanding for how Guildford is changing and the issues people of facing.
Large houses are turning into flats, medium houses are turning into HMOs and small houses are full of families. People need to live and work in the area, travel to it, wash with water supplied to the area and produce waste for the borough to deal with.
Whether we build extra homes or not, more people are moving to the borough and will continue to do so, this will put strain on the existing infrastructure. At least with the new developments there is a clear review of required infrastructure requirements and it is planned in and provided. We won’t get this the way the towns population is currently growing.
It’s incredibly naive to think that by stopping development you’ll magically stop the population growing. The population is growing, and if it isn’t properly addressed and planned for we’ll soon see what real infrastructure issues cause.
Jules Cranwell
May 18, 2017 at 8:40 pm
It’s also rather naive to believe that population growth can be absorbed to any significant extent in the south-east.
There is a limit to how many people and homes can be sustained in a given area.
There is population negative growth in many areas of the UK. The migration to the South-East is due to the failure of successive governments to ensure infrastructure and jobs growth elsewhere.