Examination of Witnesses (Questions 110-137)
Q110 Chair: Good
afternoon. Thank you very much indeed for coming to our inquiry
this afternoon. Thank you for the evidence you've submitted so
far. For the sake of our records, would you say who you are and
the organisation you're representing?
Ron Morton: I'm
Ron Morton, Shortwood Greenbelt Campaign.
Alice Ross: I'm
Alice Ross from Save the Countryside.
Jeremy Heron: Jeremy
Heron, Ringwood Town Council.
Chair: Thank you, and
you're all very welcome indeed.
Q111 George Hollingbery:
I'm sorry to be talking yet again; I do apologise to fellow Members.
I want to talk, if I may, from your perspective—at the
bottom, as community groups—about what was wrong with Regional
Spatial Strategies from your point of view, and whether you think
there is a legitimate place for strategic planning at a tier above
where you find yourselves, and whether you think that is a reasonable
objective for Government and others to have.
Jeremy Heron: I've
got one from our point of view, and I'm sure the others will have
different views, or slightly different views. From our point
of view, the Regional Spatial Strategy was simply too far removed
from the community. It was covering a vast area, trying to be
all things to everyone and, as such, representation that was made
to the RSS quite often got lost in the noise of everything else
that was going on, and if yours wasn't a big regional issue, it
failed to be identified and noticed. That said, I really believe
that there is a role for a strategic view across the area and
that it cannot be left solely to the very grass roots to establish
the spatial planning, so there is that need for some, but it does
need to be closer to the ground, so that it can understand local
issues and local variations.
Alice Ross: We
found such a lot of things, such as the top-down imposition of
massive housing targets for our area. I think even Mr Healey
eventually decided it was perhaps not such a good idea—the
number that was suggested for the South-West region. The dubious
statistics it was based on: going back to RPG 10 way back and
then adding on to it, and not seeming to look at local statistics
for need and so on was a real problem. Then, for the South-West
region, I don't know if this was the same for all RSSs, but we
had areas of search, indicative, so say, which pinned down exactly
where that large number of houses, wherever, were to go, without
really, truly consulting with the locals. I know we probably
had a chance to do that, but by the time we realised what was
going on, it had all gone past and, as I think you said too, the
community were not truly considered.
Even worse was the Secretary of State deciding to
add some extra things, making changes to the RSS, suddenly springing
1,000 houses here and 1,000 houses there, without any examination
in public, without following proper EC regulations on investigating
whether there was an alternative site. Problems like that made
us feel really very anxious about it indeed. Then, after that,
in this same modified RSS done by the Secretary of State, removal
of infrastructure help, which wasn't very good; removal of the
sequential test; encouragement in RPG 10 and after to go into
the greenbelt if you couldn't go anywhere else. Greenbelt, to
us, between Cheltenham and Gloucester, is very important indeed.
We were worried we might finish up with "Cheltencester"
or "Gloucestenham" if we didn't maintain the greenbelt
there.
Also, the disrespect for rural communities: nobody
thought of what was to happen to them. All the things were strategic
town-and-city based, supposedly sustainable extensions. For instance,
again, in our greenbelt, the land there is very likely to flood.
Again, in our greenbelt, one of the areas they chose was within
3 kilometres of a toxic waste dump. All sorts of things there
led us to feel that the top-down imposition of these houses on
us was not the sort of thing that should happen, so we were deeply
delighted when the RSS was revoked, particularly because our Joint
Core Strategy was sort of under way.
Now it can really look at our community and really
decide where houses should go for the best of all the inhabitants,
particularly places, for instance, like the city of Gloucester,
where, really, regeneration of the inner city is probably more
important than building new-build stuff out in green field sites,
particularly when you realise that Britain's agriculture suddenly
is being looked on as very important indeed. Food security is
such an important item in people's mind at the moment, so to go
out and build on productive land when you've got somewhere that
would require regeneration for the sake of the population of the
city sounds a good idea.
Q112 George Hollingbery:
Ms Ross, could I just ask very quickly if, by you very much welcoming
the abolition of the RSS, what you mean is you welcome the abolition
of the housing?
Alice Ross: Yes,
I'm sorry. I should have said that.
George Hollingbery: No,
it's just to be clear.
Alice Ross: You're
right. There are really good things about it. In fact, in a
way, I look on the South-West Regional Spatial Strategy almost
as a modern Domesday Book. If you take out the prescriptive housing,
the geographical description really is a very valuable document
indeed, and I'm hoping very much that, somehow or other, online,
there'll be a "Southwestipedia" or something that people
can still consult.
Ron Morton: I feel
a bit of a fraud sitting here in front of you, because we don't
have a Regional Spatial Strategy in the South-West. One was proposed.
The housing figures were never discussed, because the whole of
chapter 4 was withdrawn once it had gone through the evidence-in-public
stage. Housing targets were increased by 50%. Nobody discussed
them. Because of all this, 35,000 people objected to the South-West
RSS, so there must be something wrong with it for that level of
people to object. We were told that there would be responses,
that the GOSW would come back to us within six months. That was
18 months ago. Then we were told it was going to be in the spring,
and then it was going to be before the election. The whole thing
ground to a halt, and this is one of the reasons why we're particularly
irked by the proposal to go back to the RSS housing target figures
as the default setting, because they've never been discussed in
the South-West, and it would be totally outrageous, this level
of unaccountability.
A second problem with the RSS is that it objectivises
local communities. We are the people to whom things are done
by planners. We don't have an input to the whole process. For
example, my hamlet, which is 80 houses, is part of the parish
of Pucklechurch. Pucklechurch has produced an excellent parish
plan, which said there should be no building on the green belt
land between Pucklechurch and the urban sprawl of Bristol, although
there should be building within the village itself, because it
recognises the need for families there to keep the school going,
to keep the shops going—all those things. We need growth,
but not this encroachment onto the green belt. So, what does
the RSS produce? Building on the green belt. What did the planners
in South Gloucestershire Council want to pursue? Building on
the green belt.
Nobody is listening to what ordinary people have
to say, and they have expertise. There has been arrogance in
some of the comments we've heard, disparaging remarks about communities—all
your local and regional planners live in communities. All your
nuclear scientists live in communities, and communities can call
on that sort of advice when they're putting together their proposals.
And if you consult the communities, you will find that there
are communities with sensible ideas about where there should be
growth, where there should be development, where it is organic,
where it fits, where it will work. What we don't want is a monolithic
top-down system coming down on to local communities. And top-down,
if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, like we are, also means
the local council deciding unilaterally, without consultation,
which is what we're finding. As authorities produce their core
strategies, the last people to know what's happening are the residents
living in the towns and parishes. They don't know about housing
development until the bulldozers move on to the field.
Q113 George Hollingbery:
Just to follow up, Chairman, there is nothing wrong with being
a Nimby—I want to put that out front. Being very concerned
—
Ron Morton: No,
we are not Nimbys; we are Lambys. We are Looking After My Back
Yard.
Q114 George Hollingbery:
No, that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with fighting
your corner. I want to make that plain before I start, but we're
talking here about the Regional Spatial Strategies and a strategic
level of planning. If your local authority did lots of collection
of evidence and it looked at its housing need surveys and it looked
at people who were living in bed-and-breakfast accommodation,
and it came up with assessments of how many people needed to be
housed in your local authority area and they had rigorously gone
out and tested this, would you still be against the appropriate
level of housing being built to accommodate all those people in
your areas, or would you happily take that into account?
Alice Ross: We
would take it into account, but insist, please, on them looking
to find out what there is available in housing stock existing,
to be refurbished or to be brought out of being empty. I believe
that the Secretary of State has just recently put a sum aside
for doing that. It sounds very sensible to me that you should
check that the people who need homes because they can't afford
them are helped, but that you should not build 70% unnecessary,
open-market houses to achieve that on greenfield sites. That
seems to me absolutely shocking. You should also see where you
can regenerate urban areas and so on, and try not to spread out
paving across our green land. That is the thing that I would
ask to be done.
Q115 George Hollingbery:
Could I push you a little harder on this? I don't mean to be
too aggressive with this, but in my local authority area of Winchester,
all those options were more than adequately addressed. There
was no urban infill. There were very few brownfield sites. The
only option to accommodate the 3,500 to 4,000 people on housing
waiting lists was to start building sizeable communities in green
areas. If it was reasonably evidenced to you that that was the
case and that this extra overfill into refurbished houses and
so on was genuinely not possible to meet housing need, could you,
as campaigners, see a place where you could accept it?
Ron Morton: We
do. In the co-ordinating group around Bristol about the various
campaigns, no one's saying, "Don't build any affordable housing."
This is what we don't understand. How you described Winchester
is perfectly enlightened, but that's not our experience from the
South-West Regional Spatial Strategy. What we have is hundreds
of thousands of houses to be built as urban extensions to Bristol,
to preserve it as a vibrant European city.
Now, I don't see how building £250,000 executive
homes on the edge of Bristol helps people in need in the far South-West,
where there are real problems of social need, low pay and all
those things. I don't see how having joint equity schemes for
affordable housing, where the potential resident has to raise
a mortgage on £125,000, is going to work. I don't see how
the schemes for these 100,000 houses around Bristol are going
to help any of the 40 people who are sleeping rough on the city
of Bristol's streets tonight, because it's not the sort of housing
that they need.
What it is is housing that developers want to build,
and the compact between developers and local councils and the
planning system has broken down. Here we are, in, to all intents
and purposes, a recession, and how many of the houses being built
are 33% social housing? None, because the market's collapsed,
so the builders aren't building, so we're not getting the affordable
housing. If South Gloucestershire needs 1,000 dwellings to meet
the issues of homelessness and what have you—the figures
don't indicate that, but let's say it is that—let's build
them. But that's not the way that the system that has been legislated
for is working.
The last point on all this is that South Gloucestershire
is a very prosperous area, and if you look at the affordability
ratio, it's the same as the national average. Yes, houses are
very expensive, but local wages, because of hi-tech industry and
the financial sector, are very high. The issue of the need for
social housing isn't met by the RSS proposals for where the developers
want to build the houses, and that shouldn't come as any surprise,
because it's the building consultants—the developers—who
wrote the figures for the South-West Regional Assembly, wrote
the figures saying, "We need this many houses," and
then they're acting as building consultants for the Stadium, the
Ashton Park development. It's the same company, the same people.
Jeremy Heron: I
have a slight disagreement on that view. We have a significant
housing need in our area, and it is documented. It's documented
by the housing waiting list. If you are young and you want a
house in our area, I suggest that your parents put your name down
when you're born, because otherwise you're not going to get one
before you retire. We're listed as one of the top 10 least affordable
areas. We had the relevant statistics just to check it up.
In the past few years—three years here, but
I don't want to bore you with the past four applications—for
more than two houses, we've had a six-house application, 15 objections,
one petition and no one in favour of it. In a 24-housing application,
28 objections and no one put their name forward to support it.
In the previous one, 12 dwellings, eight objections, no one put
their name forward to it. So, if you leave it locally, everyone
is very aware there is a housing need in the area, but they do
not want it if it takes out the field that they've looked over
for the past five years. So, if you leave it to a simple local
decision and local planning, it will end up in a hiatus, because,
as elected representatives, your job is to support them. You
know that these people will remove you if you don't support that
view.
Q116 Clive Efford:
Can we just take you back to the question, which was about whether
there should be any strategic decisions made over and above the
local community? I assume your answer to that is absolutely not.
Ron Morton: No,
quite the reverse. My answer to that is absolutely yes. It's
a question of how you get to that strategic level. You don't
get to that strategic level by starting at the top and saying
they are the decision-makers and moving it down. You get to that
level by starting at the bottom and building up to it, and I personally
trust councils; they want their authorities to grow. They want
them to be vibrant authorities. They will take this on board.
They are honest, decent, reasonable people.
Q117 Clive Efford:
So, local authority level is —
Ron Morton: No,
in the area where I live, there is what is called CUBA: the Councils
that Used to Be Avon. That's Bristol, South Gloucestershire,
North Somerset, and Bath and North East Somerset. They are used
to working together. There is the West of England Partnership.
They are used to doing this sort of planning together. You could
even go wider to the West of England, where Gloucestershire and
Wiltshire would come in. The problem is Cornwall and Devon are
entirely different economies.
Q118 Clive Efford:
But if we take the list that Mr Heron has just read out, his local
authority clearly, at a local level, recognises that there is
a serious need for affordable housing in that area. Now, that's
local level. Those are facts, irrefutable and undeniable, but
how do you respond to that need? Because your houses were built
first, you're denying anybody else the opportunity to have their
houses built.
Ron Morton: Well,
you're assuming that there is no social housing in the village
that I represent, and there is.
Clive Efford: I'm not
assuming that at all.
Ron Morton: And
there are also Traveller enclaves at both ends of the village.
We are a very diverse but small community. South Gloucestershire
has plans for 21,500 homes in its Core Strategy. Areas will be
affected. It's not meeting resistance to those 21,500. Those
were the figures that it originally wanted to build. The objections
and the difficulties come when some unelected bureaucrat from
the Government Office for the South West decides to up the ante
and jump, in one go, from 21,500 up to 33,000 homes, which can
be met only by building on the green belt—the green belt
that was put there specifically 50 years ago to stop the urban
sprawl going out into the countryside. The green belt has become
a local authoritycontrolled land bank that is drip-fed to
pushy developers over the years. It's constantly moving out,
and I want to know how far developers and regional planners think
it should move out before it's too big.
Q119 Clive Efford:
But there is a necessity, is there not, that we respond to need,
where that has been identified at local level? Now, the figures
from the Government Office, presumably—I can't quote chapter
and verse on the South-West Regional Office—are based on
the figures that are produced by the local authorities in that
area.
Ron Morton: When
you look at them all together for the South-West, there are these
issues. When you look at the urban fringe of Bristol, the case
is not there. Whenever we use the Government Office for the South
West statistical brief to argue against their proposals, there's
just silence. The numbers of people in bed-and-breakfast accommodation
in South Gloucestershire are really quite small and manageable,
and yes, let's build housing for them next week—let's start
and do it—but why, if South Gloucestershire needs 1,000
social housing units, can we get them only by building 3,000 houses
on the green belt, which is supposedly protected under PPG 3,
at some time in the future when the developers finally want to
get round to it?
You were talking about communities objecting to housing
people in social need; the only example of that I can find in
recent times is when developers wanted to reduce the ratio of
affordable housing in the Emersons Green East development, which
includes 2,000 new homes. They wanted to reduce the affordable
housing by something silly like five. Because of the hiatus that
caused—it had to go back and be discussed—we fell
into the whole collapse of the financial and banking systems,
and it's taken two years to start turning over the turf and building
those houses. It was the developers who wanted less social housing,
not the council and not the communities.
Q120 Clive Efford:
Can I just set aside the current economic climate? Is it developers
who decide where the houses go or is it demand?
Ron Morton: It's
developers. From Shortwood's experience, because of the evidence
in public for the South-West RSS—the evidence submitted
by the Shortwood Landowners Group—they're specifically saying
Shortwood's the ideal place, because they can just drive their
bulldozers on and start digging. And they also, in that same
document, complain about the delay within South Gloucestershire
for processing their applications, so, "Perhaps we should
have regional mayors with planning powers, so that we can get
our houses built quicker." It's in there, in their evidence.
Q121 Chair: We'll
move on now. Some colleagues will want to come back, but can
we just finish up at the end and just get the two other issues
dealt with? And could we get slightly briefer answers now, because
we are a bit time-constrained and we want to make sure you get
all your key points across?
Q122 Stephen Gilbert:
I'm a South-West MP and I know that the region that stretches
from Bodmin to Bournemouth and St. Austell to Swindon is very
diverse, very disparate and very difficult to balance needs within,
but I'm also 33 and I had to get elected to Parliament to be able
to afford to live on my own. If I wanted to move to Pucklechurch,
do you think you'd have an obligation to provide housing for me
there?
Jeremy Heron: I
don't think that any community can provide 100% opportunity.
I think to do that runs the risk of destroying especially the
rural community, so no, there is no ability or possibility to
provide 100% guarantee. If you want to live here, you'll move
here, because you'll probably move here, and when we've done that
for everyone else who wants to move into a particular area, you'll
probably decide you want to move out because it's not what you
moved to. I think that you have to temper the need with a realistic
ability to maintain a community in a manner to which it exists.
You can't turn a village into a city simply because it's a very
popular village, because it just won't be a particularly popular
city and it will not have the infrastructure.
It was interesting listening to other people give
evidence earlier on—the discussion about PUSH. Now, PUSH
was very much designed as an economic growth. That was its remit.
It would deliver housing only on the back of the economic growth,
the economic forecasts and the provision of infrastructure, none
of which, I note, is forthcoming, so one would assume that PUSH's
housing figures will equally shoot down. I'm also aware that
Hampshire aren't quite so keen on PUSH as they were when it came.
I suspect New Forest, which sits on the fringe of PUSH and just
has a toe in it along the waterside, probably aren't quite so
keen, since its Head of Economics is now also part of ABP, and
they will probably be looking at Dibden Bay with a greedy eye.
So, these things, as a voluntary group, may not perhaps
function quite so well when they're not getting the incentives,
and those incentives have to be seriously large, because we all
know that all these areas, especially the main urban areas, are
groaning under the pressure. So, they need serious money and
it just isn't available, so you're not going to hold that sort
of thing together if you don't have the bucks to back it up.
Alice Ross: We'd
agree with that for our area as well. The 5,000 houses proposed
to the north-west of Cheltenham, which I've been speaking about,
would have added, well, 7,000 workers to our 110,000 population.
Where would they go to work? They'd have to leave and go somewhere
else to work, I should think. They would have added a huge burden
to our infrastructure. I know that if you had just come and if
you'd got a job and all the rest of it, probably that would have
been all right, but if you think about it, that number of people
attached to a small town couldn't possibly be sustainable, although
they claimed it was a sustainable urban extension.
Q123 Stephen Gilbert:
Mr Morton, do you have any comments to make on that?
Ron Morton: If
you all wished to move to Pucklechurch, you'd be made very welcome.
Q124 Stephen Gilbert:
What I'm trying to get at—perhaps I can help you—is
that there is obviously a tension between some of the views you're
talking about and some of the needs to keep our cities and economic
drivers across the country going at full tilt. Are communities
prepared to accept people moving into them, although I accept
that, as an MP, the chances of me getting a real job are probably
diminishing by the day? Let's assume that I was going to come
and be an economically active part of the community and help drive
the prosperity of the community and the wider region. Isn't that
something that communities have to take into account when looking
at housing provision?
Ron Morton: Absolutely,
but there is the assumption that people don't want growth, people
don't want housing. That's not the case. It's a matter of degree.
The South-West has a higher-than-average burden of growth laid
upon it. Now, already that has implications for the regions in
the Midlands and the North, because if the South and the South-West
have got much higher than average, it means other areas, even
though they see in their RSSs that they're getting growth, think
they're getting growth, but it's below-average growth. Those
communities are being wound down, because in the South-West, the
suburbs of Bristol are being turned into Silicon Valley, in essence—massive
growth.
So, the South-West is getting overburdened with growth.
The policy then was to channel the bulk of that growth to Bristol,
so then the figures are huge. If you go back to the figures that
the councils are more comfortable with and spread that across
the whole South-West, you can tackle some of the issues in the
far South-West that need tackling. You can tackle issues in Norton
Radstock, where they need more housing to make a vibrant town.
Those issues can't be tackled at the moment because the RSS said
these huge figures were going to go around Bristol.
Q125 Bob Blackman:
In your evidence, you're quite sceptical about the New Homes Bonus.
Can I ask you, without going into that evidence, what incentives
would encourage house building in your areas—they could
be financial, they could be otherwise? Could you give me some
flavour of what that would be?
Ron Morton: I think
a financial incentive is the worst possible option. I think the
biggest incentive would be to involve local communities in the
future of their communities, in the growth and the development
of their communities—just that; just the involvement—because
they are the ones with the expertise. They know what they can
cope with, the sites that are available and what the need is.
Q126 Bob Blackman:
Could I cut across you then?
Ron Morton: Yes.
Q127 Bob Blackman:
Are you saying that the only growth within your type of community,
your type of area, would be internal, organic growth—that
is, homes for the local people, without people such as my colleague
here, who wants to move to the area and who has a new job somewhere
a short distance away? There's no space for them?
Ron Morton: No,
I'm not saying that at all. There is growth in the Pucklechurch
parish plan, and if you multiply that by 50 with other communities
around South Gloucestershire, who knows what figure we could sustain
in the future. The problem is in a top-down approach that decisions
are taken by people who don't know the local context.
Q128 Bob Blackman:
One final thing in terms of financial incentives: the Government
would say, "We're giving this financial incentive to encourage
not only the new homes to be built, but the infrastructure to
be developed around those new homes." Are you saying that
that financial incentive shouldn't be there, so you shouldn't
have the infrastructure?
Ron Morton: I don't
think it would work on the ground in the practicalities. Our
perspective is built from seeing what's happened on the ground,
in the way that people don't know about planning applications—don't
know what's intended for their area—because they weren't
involved. The decision-makers, even at town council level, didn't
consult with local people. It's the isolation of communities.
If you're involving them, it will grow. Paying a financial thing
won't work, because, when the builders come in and build, for
example, they will be loath to leave sufficient ground for a football
pitch. They'll put in a community pond, they'll put in a playground,
because they can fill odd corners, but a football pitch or bigger,
they just wouldn't do it.
Q129 Bob Blackman:
Sure, but that's an issue of planning.
Jeremy Heron: A
significant number of people agree that they need houses. When
you get to the point of being site-specific or even trying to
level that amount of housing without some mandate of some sort
of spatial strategy, everyone who lives in that section comes
up with a good reason why they shouldn't be built there. They
totally agree that you need 20, 50, 100 houses—not talking
even big numbers like the Regional Spatial Strategy does, but
even on those numbers, they all agree they need to be built.
It's just that they need them built on the other side of the town
or not where they always walk their dog. So, you have to have
some sort of mandate from a spatial strategy to establish what
is going to go there, because if you leave it to a very local
level, the amount of pressure that you get will exceed the desire
to push that housing through. So you have to have some sort of
pressure that requires that housing to be built, above and beyond
the housing list that is in existence. That is one level of pressure,
so you do need more than that.
Infrastructure is vital from a local-authority point
of view, in that they do desperately need it and they do need
that built, and it is excellent that that would follow a consent,
but it will not influence the people whose favourite walk is going
be built over. So, you have two issues there.
Q130 Bob Blackman:
Can I just press you? Are you saying, from your council's perspective,
that financial incentives should not be provided?
Jeremy Heron: I
think that they are excellent; financial benefits from building
are a good idea. As far as an incentive, I don't think it is
a sufficient incentive to see that come through. I do believe
that they should be there, but I don't think, as an incentive,
they would encourage the consent to go through.
Chair: Four colleagues want to come in.
A very brief question and brief response, and if you agree with
each other, please don't duplicate. George, Toby, Chris then
James.
Q131 George Freeman:
I ask this question as someone who wants to believe that local
communities can be empowered to think about their own future and
do planning. The question is, inevitably, some things in the
planning system are not attractive — waste disposal, all
sorts of strategic things that have to be done. As localists,
where do you think is the appropriate level at which the wishes
of a local community for its own growth and the needs of a wider
area should be fused? Many people coming from the opposition
say the county council in a rural area is the natural body. It
has a sense of identity, it's legitimate, it's democratic, but
it's strategic enough. Is that your view or is there another
mechanism?
Jeremy Heron: Yes,
it's accountable. It's at a level that's accountable. The local
people who don't like it can vote their county council out—they
feel they can. They feel that they can deliver that level, yet
it is widely enough removed that, at a county level, you don't
think that the political make-up will be changed through that
objection or through that thing. I think they have enough space
or enough size to be able to make an informed choice yet still
be democratically accountable, so I think that that level of county
and rural areas works very well. Of course, I'm quite safe, because
you lot made ours virtually a National Park, so we're not going
to get waste, but we did very much object to London trying to
send their waste down to us.
Alice Ross: Are
we assuming that we are going to have in the Localism Bill and
in the Simplified Planning Bill the same planning framework simplified
that we have now, because that is very much in control of how
a county will handle these things?
Q132 George Freeman:
I'm inviting you to assume nothing and dream, and tell us.
Alice Ross: If
that's going to exist, that plus a county will work, but if the
county has to reinvent the wheel for itself, I think we're in
trouble.
Q133 Toby Perkins:
In terms of the contribution of some sort of strategic overview,
do you accept that there are wider needs for society in terms
of the number of people who are homeless and the number of people
who are inadequately housed, and that it is impossible to understand,
when you're simply a village of 80 people, that sometimes we all
have a contribution to make to solving the problems of the whole
country? Some areas are already overdeveloped, and sometimes
it will fall unfairly on some areas, so do you accept that, at
some level, there are people who have a strategic view of the
needs of the whole of our country, the whole of our region, the
whole of our county, and that it's impossible for us fully to
appreciate on a local level?
Ron Morton: On
communities who object to being bulldozed in this way by planners,
one of the problems we have to face is that we are all assumed
to live in picture-postcard villages and to be behaving in such
a Nimby manner, and we are not from the real world. Well, Shortwood
is from the real world. It is ethnically and socially disparate.
We have a civic refuse site in a quarry, backfilling as it goes
along. We have an emergency social housing unit for battered
wives and suchlike. We have—
Q134 Toby Perkins:
With the greatest respect, I'm going to stop you for a moment,
because my question really has nothing to do with what you're
answering. What I'm saying is, do you accept that there will
be people at a strategic level who have an understanding of the
needs of the wider community that you couldn't possibly have at
a local level? That's my question.
Ron Morton: No,
I go back to the list I was making. I won't expand on it, but
I think people in Shortwood do have that wider view, and we are
all grown up. We know what is required and we are prepared to
do our share. What we find difficult to accept is that a village
of 80 houses should be threatened with a development of 1,456
houses swamping the area, all of which is on greenbelt land, which
is supposedly protected from development, unless you want to build
housing for rural employees on low wage, which you can do, but
the builders don't do, because it wouldn't be a sufficiently large
project to attract them.
You can build social housing in the greenbelt, but
in small units, which is not attractive to developers. The point
I would want to make is that the whole process is being driven
by the needs of the developers, who are treated as stakeholders
in the whole process, and the people who will experience life
in these new communities—their stakeholding is totally ignored.
Q135 Chris Williamson:
It's a brief question, or comment, and I'd like your reaction:
listening to all the evidence from all three of you, I think a
surprising consensus has emerged, in that I think what I've heard
you say is that there is a need for a Regional Spatial Strategy,
or some semblance of a regional strategy; it's just that the process
as to how they've arrived at the targets for housing and how they've
arrived at the overall direction of travel for the Regional Spatial
Strategy is something that you fundamentally disagree with and
that, in a way, it seems to me what you are saying is that abolition
of the Regional Spatial Strategies has thrown the baby out with
the bathwater. Is that a fair summary or is that completely at
odds with what you've said?
Jeremy Heron: I
think you've slightly missed the point, and that is the fact that
the Regional Spatial Strategy—I was surprised at how much
agreement we had, because I thought we would be at slight odds—was
too broad a brush; it was too big and too large, and effectively
it had a desire to deliver a vast number of homes with very little
local understanding of what it was trying to deliver. And so,
the consequence was, the gentleman down there, they're trying
to double the size of where he lives, with no concept of the infrastructure
or what effect it would have simply visually on that sort of area.
For somewhere like us, where we're a new National Park, where
the incumbent Government felt that it was sacrosanct, we got under-housing
provision, would you believe, which is quite miraculous, really—
Q136 Chris Williamson:
Is that not down to the process? If you were able to influence
the process more —
Jeremy Heron: The
process was a game. The process was a method of a number of discussion
groups and a number of forums. The trick was to get enough people
so that you had somebody with your opinion sat on every single
split-out working group, and then, when they amalgamated the working
groups, you found that someone on every single working group had
mentioned your pet topic and it went to the top of the list.
That is how I managed to get back-up grazing as a serious issue
for the South-East Regional Strategy; the only people who knew
what it meant lived in the New Forest, but I managed it and they
decided it was a very important issue.
Alice Ross: I keep
wondering why, in our case, our two tiers—the structure
plan and the local plan—didn't work, because it seemed to
me that they understood local issues, that they consulted and
that inspectors all along the line agreed and modified things,
and we got five years of comfort and all the things that we wanted
for that area were covered— conservation, the countryside
and so on. I'm wondering why we had to go regional. I always
suspected slightly that it was a European thing: they wanted us
to have regions so that we matched them with départements
and länder and all the rest of it.
I didn't quite get to answer your question, I think,
about how you would manage with the duty to co-operate and so
on. I just don't see why that level of local authority can't talk
to each other, why they can't manage, why a strategic level would
be necessary above them. Maybe, for instance, you could use the
inspectorate there as an arbitrator if there was a problem with
the duty to co-operate and somebody was being undutiful and not
co-operating. Those are some thoughts, because it seems you've
wrecked a perfectly adequate and comfortable way of carrying on.
Q137 James Morris:
Mr Heron, you talked about a wider spatial level at the county
level. What powers would you envisage residing at that level
if you got your way, as it were?
Jeremy Heron: I
suppose similar to the old parish and county structure plans—the
same issues that they do, which is broadly in line with some of
the issues that were provided for in the Regional Spatial Strategy,
so it is a determination of strategic infrastructure and a provision
down of housing numbers across the districts.
Chair: Thank you very
much indeed. I hope you've had a chance to get all your points
across. You've certainly given us a lot of information to think
about, so thank you very much for coming.
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