Councillor, you can’t hide in the Green Belt anymore…
It has been an exciting old week with our Angie calling in the 8k homes application in Swale three hours before the committee was planning to turn it down. What is the lesson from this? The Government means business on housing numbers and they won’t shy away from using their extensive powers to make decisions.
Which brings me nicely on to the topic of using the Green Belt as a one-stop-shop to block development. There are two very recent decision by inspectors where Councils used the Green Belt as an excuse not to allow development. In both cases, the councils had abysmally failed to deliver housing numbers.
The first is a case in St Albans where they have a 1.7 year housing land supply. The Council is now (at last) working on a new Local Plan and one of the emerging sites, some 4 acres had an application for up to 95 units. Officers recommended approval, Planning Committee thought they knew better and turned it down and it resulted in an appeal (undefended btw) with the inspector saying: “The scheme would deliver up to 95 dwellings to help reduce the deficit and would not undermine the ability of the council to adopt a plan-led approach to addressing the remainder of the shortfall or other plan requirement. The contribution of the scheme to helping resolve the undersupply is a benefit of substantial weight in favour of the scheme… green belt harms and other harm resulting from the proposal would be clearly outweighed by the other identified considerations such as to justify a grant of permission”, and that “very special circumstances” existed to justify the consent.
We now move on to Thurrock Council, where in August they published a new housing land supply position, revealing it has less than a year’s worth of deliverable housing sites. (the lowest figure of any council in England)
The Council sat on an application for 1,000 new homes and a school and an appeal for non-determination was launched. The Council subsequently said planning permission would have been refused for eight reasons including inappropriate development in the green belt; conflict with green belt purposes etc.
The inspector said in his decision that the development “would harm the green belt for reasons of inappropriateness and loss of openness”, to which he gave “substantial weight”, but found no other harms. He said it would “deliver market and affordable housing in an area with an extremely poor record of delivery of both, with no signs of this improving in the future” to which he attributed “very substantial weight”. He added: “These factors would, taken together, clearly outweigh the harm to the green belt by reason of inappropriateness, loss of openness and harm to purposes”.
He concluded these constituted the “very special circumstances” required to justify planning permission on green belt.
Conclusion, don’t hide in the Green Belt, you’ll get spotted you wally!
Until next week,
Henry