Jane Wells is concerned. A few weeks ago, she and several of her neighbours received a letter from David Wilson Homes enquiring about the field next to her house in the Herefordshire village of Leintwardine.
The field is one of three in the east of the village that have been identified in Herefordshire council’s strategic housing assessment as potentially suitable for around 100 houses. In a village with little more than 200 houses, that represents alarmingly rapid growth.
Several years ago, Wells and her neighbours bought the field, fearing just such development plans. So they had no hesitation in promptly rejecting the approach from the Barratt subsidiary. Now they wonder how the owners of the two other fields have replied.
This everyday story of country folk fighting massive housing plans comes at a tricky time. Not only is Herefordshire council putting the finishing touches to a Local Development Framework that will mean one in every three houses built in the county will be in small villages such as Leintwardine (up from one in four in the first draft), fears are mounting that the Localism Bill, and the National Planning Policy Framework introduced under it, could leave the village’s 900 residents less empowered.
Public meeting
Alarm is so great that word-of-mouth alone tempted 50 people to crowd into a neighbour’s house to discuss the Local Development Framework. A hastily arranged public meeting in the church the following month saw pews packed with 150 local residents. Strategic planning has never been such a hot issue.
Wells, secretary of the newly formed Leintwardine Civic Group, explains: “The proposed planning is out of proportion to the existing village settlement. This is beyond the settlement boundary. The Localism Bill is not clear to me, and I fear it may not help our cause. We don’t know what to believe. There are so many contradictions.”
What worries Wells and her team is a localism agenda that threatens not community empowerment but community obedience to plans made in Hereford (25 miles away) or in the National Planning Policy Framework in far distant London.
Wells is not alone. The National Trust has weighed in to oppose one of the cornerstones of the localism agenda and the draft NPPF. The Trust says it could lead to a return to the large-scale ribbon development that blighted rural areas in the 1930s.
Economic angle
Lee Scott, associate planner at rural surveyor Smiths Gore, suggests that the Localism Bill and NPPF could indeed herald more rural development.
“The draft NPPF puts more emphasis on the economic angle to sustainability, with social and environmental factors behind,” he says. “Previously, that was reversed. We are always coming up against policies designed to treat the countryside like a playground for urbanites – about tourism and access in planning policy – rather than what is sustainable for that neighbourhood. A little bit of development can often make a big difference.”
Scott says the biggest single obstacle to development was the presumption that development that involved car use was unsustainable and should be discouraged. Since rural areas depend on cars – Leintwardine is an 18-mile round trip to its nearest Tesco – this effectively ruled out all but the smallest infill developments in rural areas.
“Planning has largely applied the precautionary principle to the duty to promote sustainable development,” says Scott. “So, where development cannot categorically be demonstrated to be harmless, or harm is suspected, the burden of proof rests with the applicant.
“No one who loves our countryside wants to see it concreted over, but too often much-needed rural development is resisted on the grounds that to allow it might lead to unsustainable travel patterns involving car travel.”
He adds: “Putting people onto the edges of medium-sized towns, which is the alternative to development in rural areas, won’t necessarily reduce car use because, in suburban areas, cars are used quite a lot.
“Until now, councils have tended to send development to certain kinds of urban-fringe areas, which tends to disadvantage the smaller communities that haven’t been allowed to grow. What people in villages don’t want is large-scale development that is out of proportion – but they may be more than happy to see a small amount of growth if it allows local facilities to stay open.”
Councils in rural England are now rushing to complete their often long-delayed Local Development Frameworks before the NPPF is introduced. They want a defence in place to check the flow of approvals once the Localism Bill’s “presumption of consent” comes into force.
Could go badly wrong
Some believe the Bill and the draft NPPF do not go far enough, but others think the NPPF will change very little in practice. Either way, the reforms introduced by the Localism Bill and the NPPF could still go badly wrong, if previous efforts at change are any guide.
Scott points to the 2004 reforms that introduced Local Development Frameworks. “The 2004 reforms didn’t turn out as expected,” he says. “The idea had been to simplify, and the LDF was meant to be shorter and simpler than structure plans had been. These were laudable aims, but it turned into a beast.”
Scott says there is a risk that the significance given to LDFs as a defence against the broad-brush presumptions in the NPPF could make planning more, rather than less, complicated.
Others share similar fears. David Pardoe, Salisbury-based director of Chesterton Humberts’ rural division, says: “It seems wilfully unreceptive not to support the broad sweep of the localism agenda, particularly in the rural context. But the proposed changes to the planning system are not the fundamental changes that might have been hoped for. The result feels like an untidy compromise and a missed opportunity.”
So do the Localism Bill and the NPPF offer much to either Wells and her campaigners in Leintwardine, or to the big housebuilders massing on her boundary fence? Alister King-Smith, rural planning surveyor at Bruton Knowles, says the answer could be “no”.
“My initial thoughts are that the draft NPPF, with its presumption in favour of sustainable development, is generally likely to foster more development in rural areas than the current planning system, although it may well favour larger schemes rather than individual or small-scale projects,” he says.
That is exactly what Wells does not want to hear, but it might cheer the housebuilding fraternity.
Little change expected
Far from opening the door to rural development, some feel the NPPF is not going to make much difference.
According to Ben Simpson, associate director at Drivers Jonas Deloitte, the policy adds up to almost nothing.
“I don’t see anything in this guidance that moves things on from where we already are,” he says.
Simpson suggests the NPPF’s definition of sustainability may not have changed as much as some in the property industry had hoped.
“Paragraph 81 of the draft NPPF concerns the rural economy, but says little of substance, simply stating that planning policies should support sustainable economic growth in rural areas by taking a positive approach to new development,” he says.
“Sustainable development is defined at paragraph 9 of the draft NPPF, using what else but the venerable Brundtland definition. This definition has been around for nearly two decades and commands enough authority while being sufficiently woolly. Far too much hangs on this definition to make it anything other than all things to all men, so I think it most unlikely that decision-takers, or the courts, will interpret it as a ‘green light’ for development, as some seem to fear.”
Framework ‘not gone far enough’
The NPPF has not gone far enough in opening the door to rural development, says Andrew Bull, director at LaSalle Investment Management.
“Perhaps we should welcome the lack of prescriptive detail on diversification, but it hardly reads as though the potential of the rural economy is being taken seriously,” he says. “The government has introduced a couple of lines of policy support for rural businesses, but the emphasis remains on tourism and leisure. Is that really the limit of our ambitions for the rural economy?
“The framework encourages clusters of high-technology industries, but those are not going to reach their potential on restricted urban sites. We need a clearer acknowledgement that some industries belong in rural areas, close to raw materials and with space to expand. Combined with education and research facilities, these clusters can transform local labour markets.”
In December 2010, LaSalle negotiated a 150-year lease of the 1,047-acre Stoneleigh Park estate from the Royal Agricultural Society of England, and committed to investment of up to £50m over the next 10 years.
