A potted history…

The Right to Buy scheme for local authority housing was introduced in 1980. This meant that in a town like ours, with a large local authority housing stock, the number of affordable homes for rent would be quickly depleted as they were bought by sitting tenants. To compound matters, money raised from these sales was not allowed to be ploughed back into building replacement council properties for rent; a large part of the reason for our shortage of affordable homes now.

The solution being touted about a decade ago was to put planning back into the hands of local communities; let them decide what new housing should be built in their area, rather than decisions on housing numbers and location being made centrally. This was a good sound bite but it hasn’t actually happened.

What went wrong?

The government mandated Local Plan is the blueprint that sets out exactly how many new homes will be built, what type of homes, and where they will be located, for the next 15 years. This plan has now been in development for over a decade.

The council’s first document about it said the plan would be finalised and adopted by winter 2014. It’s now spring 2022 and there’s still no end date in sight. How come?

Because it’s become a protracted bun fight! We live in a mixed and varied borough; a garden city, a new town, numerous small semi-rural villages and several well-heeled larger villages in the London commuter belt. We also have a stately home (Hatfield House) that has always played a significant role in local development. Many of these players are now on opposing sides in the bun fight, with some of them wielding bigger, stickier buns than others. From the outset, the council’s planning department, in conjunction with their elected leadership, has opted to build the bulk of the new homes in and close to Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield. This was very well received in the villages who didn’t want many new homes on their patch.

It’s a fact that the elected leadership within the council has long been disproportionately represented by those village areas. Committee chairmen, leaders, and influential others have tended to hail from those leafy and affluent areas. The largest town in the borough, Welwyn Garden City, has sadly never had the clout or influence of the villages. Welwyn Garden City has a few councillors from the leading party who will, when pressed hard enough, speak up at meetings, but they then invariably go on to vote against the town’s best interests by simply voting for what their leadership wants instead. Politics, even local politics, is a messy business. The town has seen off several threats from inappropriate planning applications in recent years. Not because the council and its elected members shut them down, but because local people banded together and shouted loud enough to finally be heard.

Planning decisions are not ultimately local…

The problem now is the government appointed Planning Inspector. As previously mentioned housing decisions were apparently to be made locally and no longer nationally. The reality is that the Inspector calls the shots. He decides, on behalf of central government, what housing will go where and how much. The notion of putting development back in the hands of local communities seems to have evaporated. He is the adjudicator of the bun fight; he fires the starting pistol and watches the custard fly. He then decides if any side can win, and if so endorses their win, to declare victory and a Local Plan worthy of adoption. The same is happening around the country; local councils with their hands tied are increasingly opposing the government’s planning policies. Some have withdrawn their own Local Plans as they want to do better for their residents, Basildon council is a good example, see their recent letter by clicking here.

After ten years of bun fight there is no clear victor. Even worse, the total number of homes the government’s own nebulous housing algorithm tells him must be built locally has risen. He insists that it must now be 15,200, a rise of several thousand since the process began all those years ago. Again, none of this is originating from wishes of the local community.

Adding to the loss of power locally is the key wording in the national planning policy. It states that there must be a presumption in favour of sustainable development. However, what makes a development sustainable is not what you might think. It’s a technical definition which delivers power into the hands of developers, they can decide what is sustainable in large part. If an area, such as ours for example, doesn’t have an adopted Local Plan, a developer can then apply to build whatever they want. Local Plans were designed to be the tool to protect an area from inappropriate development. If the local council couldn’t get its act together and produce a Local Plan, which the Inspector approved of, existing residents can suffer as developers can then pile in and stack ‘em high, knowing the council has little power to oppose.

Right here, right now…

The Inspector has not found any version of the council’s draft Local Plan to be sound. The council has only officially submitted a draft plan for review once, back on the 15th May 2017. The vast majority of councils nationally now have an adopted Local Plan in place. Current government data suggests that Welwyn Hatfield is the council with the oldest outstanding Local Plan in the country. That is to say it appears that no other council submitted its plan for examination longer ago than ours did – which hasn’t already had it approved and adopted. You can see the data here.

At his most recent review the Inspector told the council it must include at least 15,200 homes, and that some of the housing sites in the leafier villages should come forward to be included, as he found many of those sites to be sound for development. Unhappy at the continuing slow progress by the council he wrote to them late 2021 with a deadline for delivering him a new plan for the 15,200. Following that there was a full council meeting on the 27th January 2022. In advance of that meeting the elected leadership decided it wouldn’t play ball by including those homes found sound in the leafy villages, despite the Inspector’s directions. It’s worth remembering, as mentioned earlier, where the leading elected members live.

As is usual the elected leadership, with the party majority of councillors, got its way at the full meeting vote on the 27th January, despite many well argued and impassioned points by a swathe of opposition members the leadership won the vote 25 to 13. The opposing member submissions can be viewed on YouTube here.

The leading party’s loyal footsoldiers, including those from Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield, voted for a Local Plan with a lower number of homes. A number which the Inspector had already rejected, and was likely to reject again. As was said on the night, to do this was to throw Welwyn Garden City under the bus. Our town would be left having to endure many new high rise blocks of flats across its heart, and see many large estate developments be bolted on at the edges. Both of these things are anathema to Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City.

It’s a cruel irony that a year after the town’s centenary, local politics are facilitating the baby being thrown out with the bath water. The council planners and elected members who have led us to this precipice should think long and hard about what they’ve done to Howard’s legacy. They certainly can’t be accused of fighting to preserve the Garden City by any stretch of the imagination.

The council subsequently wrote to the Inspector, going against his recommendations, asking him for some leniency. Those leafy villages must be saved after all. You can see their letter here. He promptly wrote back to them in short measure; he’s having none of it. He told them they must include some of the sites in the village locations that he found to be sound, and set out several other conditions in order for him to continue, and to find the plan sound. He has told the council that by March 22nd 2022 they must satisfy his requests and modify their current plan. They must also publish a date for a full public consultation of the new plan by the same date. Also, if they are not able to satisfy his demands, they must let him know, at which point he will close his examination.

In that case, the borough would be left unprotected, open to speculative inappropriate developments. It’s also worth remembering that this process has so far cost the council, and ourselves as taxpayers, something around £10 million. Not exactly money well spent if it all goes south.

The council leadership is acutely aware of their current predicament, the oft repeated “We are between a rock and hard place” phrase is proof of that. However, it seems to be a hard place they backed themselves into over the last decade. On the 10th March 2022 they report that they are requesting a meeting with the Minister for Housing, Stuart Andrew MP. Presumably seeking a Get Out Of Jail free card on the plan numbers. Importantly though, this isn’t to save the garden city. It’s to permit their plan with reduced housing numbers in the leafy village areas. There is no plan to reduce the current housing allocations in and around the garden city, including the huge site proposed on or beside what was for decades the county’s largest landfill waste site. Once more the garden city is not their primary focus. The housing minister is unlikely to be asked to spare Welwyn Garden City from over-development.

So, our garden city hangs in the balance. In no small part because the powerbrokers in this process are not invested in the town. Many have interests elsewhere and likewise many of the council’s officers are either not local, or probably at the tail end of their civil service careers and looking towards retirement. While it often feels as though those of us who support the town and all its unique attributes are just the ‘little people’ with no real voice that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to shout loudly: “Not in our name!”. The current planning system is broken. The fact is that it’s now likely to ruin our garden city serves as an exemplar of how local development is not being placed back into local communities, as was the intention a decade ago.

Around the country councils, councillors, academics and others are increasingly warning that the planning system is broken and needs urgent reform. That may well happen, but it could be too late to save our garden city. What an entirely avoidable tragic loss that would be. If our council acts to do the right thing now, perhaps some measure of damage limitation is possible. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down…show us you can do better WHBC and its councillors. Defend the garden city, not just the leafy villages.

Returning to the town’s motto of wisdom and design, our council’s planners should draw on the wisdom gained over the first one hundred years of the town, to design a viable and desirable ‘garden’ city fit for the next hundred.

Latest…

On February 24th the council wrote back to the Inspector, the letter included:

“Given the impossible situation in which we now find yourselves, and before we feel compelled to withdraw our plan, we would like to ask for the opportunity to meet with you along with our MP, Grant Shapps, to discuss the difficult position we are faced with.”

The Inspectors deadline of 22nd March has come and gone. As far as is known there is not yet any public response to that from the council.

The big take-away from the above is that pleading for a lower housing figure from the Housing Minister will do nothing to protect our town from over-development. The councils preferred lower housing figure only involves reducing the housing numbers around Brookmans Park and the villages, not Welwyn Garden City.