There’s a fine line between ambition (a good thing) and being delusional about your prospects (a bad thing). County Durham’s growth agenda seems to be hovering between the two. That was effectively the conclusion reached by planning inspector Harold Stephens when, in February this year, he gave a thumbs-down to the County Durham Plan.
The growth-friendly document promised 31,400 new houses and 1,200 acres of new employment land by 2030 and a county economy refocused on Durham and its university, the obvious engine of growth. But it also ate into green belt – where 4,000 of Durham’s 5,000 new homes would go – potentially compromised the World Heritage status of Durham’s castle and cathedral, and lacked key evidence.
The planning inspector said (in the tortured language of planners) that he was not persuaded by the council’s economic ambition or its objectively assessed needs.
Last month the story took another turn when the high court finally kicked the inspector’s report into the long grass. A new draft County Durham Plan is now being prepared for scrutiny by a new inspector. If it all goes well – and that’s a big if – a new inquiry could be sitting by June 2016, with adoption pencilled-in for Christmas 2016.
The fate of the old plan – and prospects for the new one – turn in part on the case made for the 30-acre Aykley Heads site, north of Durham city centre (see box).
According to Tom Baker, associate in the planning team at Bilfinger GVA in Newcastle, the council has a hill to climb.
“Durham has vision – but the plan was a lot of vision, and not much concrete on what was needed – or when, and how, it would be developed,” he says. “It is not enough just to have a vision in a sensitive location like Durham.”
The council’s difficulty comes in three strands. First, plans for a new Durham western relief road depend for viability on housing and employment sites released from the green belt, which traps the council in a risky circular argument (housing depends on the road, road on the housing).
Second, it is hard to demonstrate the market need for commercial development on the scale proposed for the £100m Aykley Heads scheme, a monster by County Durham standards.
Third, the council needs to demonstrate that Aykley Heads is deliverable. Yet the council can’t go too far down the road of finding development partners because potential partners will want to see the planning situation resolved first. It’s a catch-22 – made worse by what one senior council source called the “presumptuousness” of selecting developers before green-belt release is agreed. If anything is guaranteed to get up the noses of local objectors, that’s it.
Council insiders say they know they need to come up with some “very strong evidence” if Aykley Heads is to make it. “We want to take another look at the narrative,” one source told EG.
James Hall, partner at consultancy Barton Willmore, has been advising Persimmon and the Church Commissioners on the Durham plan. He says: “During the examination in public, it was clear there was concern about balancing the Aykley Heads site and other jobs proposals against the housing plans. There just didn’t seem to be evidence at that session of the examination that the site would come forward for development, because speculative development is so rare and the council could not line up a list of potential occupiers. To succeed they will have to tighten up the evidence – that means a lot more work on traffic flows for the relief road, and on the employment sites like Aykley they could go out to the market a bit more.”
Council sources say they have already started doing just that and have been talking to developers, agents and local occupiers. Some observers suggest it would be helpful if the council could say something solid about a development partner by the time of the (potential) June 2016 second inspection hearings. Council officials nod sagely at the suggestion.
So what happens next at Aykley Heads? The likelihood is that the council will find the next inspection easier than the first, because this summer planning minister Brandon Lewis issued inspectors with instructions that give them much greater latitude. “The minister told them to lower the bar to get more plans through,” explains Bilinger GVA’s Baker.
Durham council is also rebuilding the evidence base. By the time the next inspector gets to look at the plan, it will have had the best part of a year to make a water-tight case.
But planning inspectors have minds of their own – and will draw their own conclusions, as Durham council has already learned. So as well as beefing up its objectively assessed needs, it is keeping its fingers crossed, too.
Aykley Heads
The £100m plan will see development of a site of more than 30 acres, which today includes county hall, the Durham City Registry Office, the local police HQ and Durham Trinity School and Sports College – as well as a museum, some restaurants and the Aykley Heads business park. The civic parts of the site will be replaced by a phased 750,000 sq ft office scheme.
New council requirement
Durham county council will need a new 100,000 sq ft HQ if the Aykley Heads redevelopment goes ahead. Vacating the existing 1960s county hall will save the council £2m a year in running costs and make way for up to 230,000 sq ft of new development on the 10-acre site at Aykley Heads (see opposite). Council officials have yet to say where the new HQ will be located, but hint that it need not be in Durham.
