Memorandum submitted by Strategic Planning
Advice Ltd
SUMMARY
1. This submission focuses on the role of
new settlements in delivering additional housing whilst responding
to the demands of climate change. It draws on the proposals for
Dunsfold Park in Surrey, for which a planning application has
been submitted for a new settlement of 2,600 homes and a new village
centre, which will create a balanced mixed use community along
side a large and successful employment site.
2. The submission highlights the particular
aspects of Dunsfold Park where the proposals offer a distinctive
advantage over other forms of development in delivering effective
responses to climate change and other major environmental concerns
eg:
— developing settlements that respond
to the opportunities for sustainable development arising in the
inherent site features (inherited buildings) and in their surroundings
(woodland and Cranfold); this means taking a fresh look at standard
approaches to the location of development (urban focus and urban
intensification);
— economies of scale in delivering
sustainable development investments eg CHP versus piecemeal development
and microgeneration; and
— capturing land value to ensure that
infrastructure, including green infrastructure, and affordable
housing are delivered at appropriate scale and in time to serve
the development.
The submission also addresses the implications
of the proposed Community Infrastructure Levy.
TERMS OF
REFERENCE
3. The Committee has described the focus
of this inquiry as: "how well the Government's policies on
housing supply are joined up with those on sustainable development.
In particular the Committee will focus on the impacts that house-building
policy has on climate change mitigation and adaptation."
KEY FEATURES
OF DUNSFOLD
PARK AND
THE PROPOSALS
4. Dunsfold Park was developed as an aerodrome
in the 2nd World War and it has remained in aviation use since
then, mainly for the assembly, testing and repair of aircraft,
including the Hunter, Hawk and Harrier, by Hawker/BAe.
5. BAe's operations closed in 2000 and the
site is now owned by Dunsfold Park Ltd (DPL), who operate the
airfield alongside an inherited industrial estate of some 45,000
sq.m., which is already home to some 700 jobs. It is a brownfield
site of 248 hectares.
6. The site is located within a cluster
of villages, the largest of which, Cranleigh, is some four miles
away and is the local market town (11,000 population, 120 shops
and consumer service outlets, secondary school, leisure and cultural
facilities). The cluster of villages provides 5,900 jobs. The
importance of such rural areas for the environmental performance
of the country as a whole is illustrated by the fact that they
accommodate a third of the SE region's businesses and a quarter
of its population.
7. The site is located near but not in the
Surrey Hills AONB. Neither is it in the Green Belt. Surrey is
England's most densely wooded county.
8. The Draft Strategic Housing Market Assessment
for West Surrey shows a need for 706 new dwellings per annum in
Waverley (where Dunsfold Park is located) against an allocation
in the Draft Regional Spatial Strategy (Panel recommendation)
of only 250 dwellings per annum.
9. The proposals are for a mixed use scheme,
designed to be a national exemplar of sustainable development,
comprising 2600 dwellings to match the existing 45,000 sq.m. of
employment space, a village centre with local shops, primary school
and other services, and expansion and diversification of the employment
uses.
REDUCING, AND
ADAPTING TO,
CLIMATE CHANGE
10. The most important ways in which the
proposals will contribute to reducing and adapting to climate
change are:
— A mix of land uses and activities
on the site designed to reduce the need to travel: homes, jobs,
shops and services. Supporting measures will include giving priority
in the allocation of housing to those working in Dunsfold Park
or Cranfold; and universal broadband access and shared IT facilities
in the village centre providing attractive conditions for working
from home.
— A transport strategy designed to
maximise the transfer of trips to sustainable modes including
car user charges on residents and workplace parking charges matched
by frequent bus services within the village and to local centres,
the buses being fuelled by bio-diesel or electricity (both potentially
generated on site; see below).
— A master plan that favours pedestrians
and cycles over vehicles. For example cars in the core of the
village are kept in parking barns, not adjacent to homes and the
layout is compact (net density of 45.6 dwellings per hectare)
with jobs and homes all accessible on foot to the village centre
and to each other.
— Re-use of extensive existing buildings
and infrastructure, on-site recycling of large quantities of construction
materials (runways etc) and use of a large brownfield site.
— Avoidance of development in areas
at risk of flooding and adoption of Sustainable Urban Drainage.
— Promotion of bio-diversity and green
infrastructure through devoting more than half the site to open
space and through additional planting, active management and control
of access to sensitive areas.
— Achievement of zero carbon rating
and Level 6 (with respect to energy) in the Code for Sustainable
Homes through universal installation of energy saving devices
in homes and through on site generation of heat and energy in
a 3.5 MWe CHP station, that will be fuelled by biomass sourced
from surrounding forests and woodland. Surplus heat will be supplied
to all the homes and public and community buildings and electricity
to the grid, thus offsetting such carbon emissions as there are
from the industrial buildings.
— Achievement of Level 6 (with respect
to water) in the Code for Sustainable Homes through reducing water
consumption from 153 litres per person per day to 80 lpppd through
universal metering and through water saving devices, 25% of the
remaining demand for 80 lpppd (for non-potable uses) being sourced
from rainwater capture.
— On-site treatment of domestic waste
which will operate on the residual waste after sorting of recyclables
by households; through autoclaves and materials separation the
residual waste will be converted to fibre product suitable for
recycling or recovery for bio-ethanol, recyclables and residual
fractions for disposal. The main output of this process, an organic
fibre, will be capable of conversion to bio-ethanol in a plant
already established on the site.
11. The proposals will contribute to the
sustainability of the Cranfold cluster of villages, especially
Cranleigh, in the following ways:
— Improving the supply of labour for
local services and businesses by providing locally accessible
housing for employees, thus reducing the need to travel and improving
the viability of local enterprises.
— Improving social cohesion by enabling
people to live close to their families and communities.
— Supporting the viability of shops
and public services by increasing their customer base (the new
population at Dunsfold Park) and by improving access to the local
service and employment centres.
— Improving the viability of forestry
and woodland management in the surrounding area by creating a
demand for forestry and woodland produce (for the CHP plant);
this in turn will improve the viability of other forestry and
woodland products and enable holdings to be managed sustainably
for their nature conservation and landscape interest.
HOUSING SUPPLY
12. In relation to housing need and housing
targets, the proposals will contribute 2,600 units, 196 in institutional
form and 2,405 dwellings, of which 910 (37.8%) will be affordable
housing. They will be net additional to the supply in Waverley,
subject to how the Council assesses the sustainability of the
currently planned supply of land for housing in the Borough.
13. Whilst Dunsfold Park has not been shortlisted
as an Eco town, probably because of it is smaller than the minimum
size set by the Government, it is designed to be a model for how
Ecotowns should be developed and managed. The Committee ask in
relation to Ecotowns how they will contribute to reducing environmental
impacts "in the development of design and techniques that
could be rolled out in other developments." This raises an
issue at the heart of the Committee's inquiry: the replicability
of environmentally sound development on a large scale, the scale
of the Government's housing targets.
14. Development on the scale of the targets
will rely heavily on private investment, which in turn relies
heavily on consumers' response to the housing they are offered.
In this context the Committee, understandably but misguidedly
in DPL's view, quotes their earlier report in which they said:
"We find it deeply worrying that there is no appetite [|]
to take on the building sector and guarantee that these homes
will be built to sufficiently high energy efficiency and environmental
standards."
15. At a time when housing demand is very
price sensitive because of high price/earnings ratios, demand
will be diminished if housing built to acceptable environmental
standards is more expensive (as it is) without offering commensurate
benefits to purchasers. Dunsfold Park will be an extremely good
test of the market's response to a sustainable housing offer;
in the developer's view it will succeed if it offers a better
quality of life, not just better environmental performance. That
quality of life derives from a wide range of factors eg the development
of a whole community, not a housing estate, the convenience, high
quality and safety of the public realm providing easy access to
local jobs and services and from a wider sector of the community
gaining access to the countryside and to local villages and towns.
16. For the developer, there is both an
additional cost and a risk attaching development to higher environmental
standards, especially when the technologies and the behaviour
change (eg significantly reduced water consumption) required are
often novel and untested.
17. Dunsfold Park Ltd will be a good test
of the market's response to a higher quality of life because it
will be privately funded, not only the market elements but also
the affordable housing and the infrastructure required on- and
off-site.
18. In the context of the viability of model
schemes Dunsfold Park Ltd have two concerns about the proposed
Community Infrastructure Levy:
— The proposals so far announced by
the Department for Communities and Local Government give little
or no assurance that the proceeds of CIL will be spent on time
and for the purposes for which they are collected, which risks
undermining their effectiveness in mitigating impacts.
— Where a scheme is proposed which
will fund all the on- and off-site infrastructure and mitigation
associated with it, there should be clear guidance to local authorities
that CIL will not be payable; this applies particularly to proposals
that have not been brought forward through the development plan
(but through legitimate alternative routes such as PPS3 Housing,
paras 68-74) as the CIL is designed to be plan-led.
CONCLUSIONS
19. Dunsfold Park Ltd conclude from their
experience of developing proposals for a sustainable new settlement
that is the subject of a planning application accompanied by an
Environmental Assessment and comparative Sustainability Appraisals
that:
a. the scope for the economic delivery of development
that will perform to high environmental standards is much greater
on larger new developments that can offer economies of scale for
district-wide environmental technologies;
b. a single owner committed to sustainable development
can deliver measures not available to multiple developers eg car
user charging and priority in the allocation of housing for those
working locally;
c. the choice of locations for development should
be more strongly influenced by local conditions that are conducive
to sustainable development: in the present instance the inherited
buildings, infrastructure and employment potential of a brownfield
site and a rural area offering scope for local biomass supply
and improvements in the quality of life of a wider cluster of
communities;
d. this appraisal of local conditions should
also open the policy door to new settlements smaller than the
Eco town threshold of 5,000 dwellings if they can be shown to
be sustainable; and
e. if the private sector is to deliver the majority
of the new housing required to high environmental standards, then
the costs and risks associated with it will not be supportable
with the additional financial burden of CIL.
25 April 2008
|
