Stephen Hodgson

Archive for the ‘Planning’ Category

Charnwood Borough Council’s Plans Committee this evening (27 May 2010) voted by a majority of 6-4 (if I counted correctly) with 1 absention to approve the application by David Wilson Homes to build 58 houses on land off Loughborough Road to the south of Hathern. The report that went to the Plans Committee can be accessed on Charnwood Borough Council’s website.

The application was opposed by neighbours and other Hathern residents, by Hathern Parish Council and by both Charnwood Borough Council ward councillors (including me). In the end the Plans Committee seemed unable to find strong enough reasons to reject the development. My personal view is that this development is a mistake. Here are some of the problems I envisage:

1. There will be increased congestion and dangers on the busy A6 road through Hathern because there is a single access road off the A6 to the 58 new houses, with an inadequate right-turn lane and on the edge of the speed limit boundary from 60mph to 30mph. The developer has promised to contribute £10,000 to ‘traffic calming’ on the A6 but it is difficult to imagine what form this will take and that it will make the A6 any safer – certaintly ‘traffic calming’ will not reduce the volume of traffic on the A6 or allow for a bigger right-turn lane.

2. The development is on open countryside and represents not only a threat to Hathern’s separate village identity (as land is increasingly ‘filled in’ between Hathern and Loughborough and Hathern and Shepshed) but also a permanent loss of important (and constantly threatened) green space.

3. The plans make no effort to integrate the 58 new houses into Hathern. The development is effectively a stand-alone housing estate on the edge of Hathern, with a single access road and no integral links to the heart of the village. These houses are not an effective way of building the community in Hathern.

The development even contravenes planning policies relating to increasing development on ‘brownfield’ sites (rather than green space) and ensuring developments contribute to community-building. Unforunately not enough members of the Plans Committee found these issues sufficiently persuasive. Sadly the Plans Committee’s thinking seemed to be dominated by the previous national government’s rules requring the local planning authority to ensure a ‘five year’ supply of housing, even if that means building outside the limits to development on open countryside next door to a small village.

Frustratingly for those of us opposed to the development, the planning policies that allowed this development to go ahead may be changed in the near future by the new coalition government so that applications like this may not be so readily approved. Any changes now will come too late for this part of Hathern.

Respondents now have until 28 April 2010 to submit comments to Charnwood Borough Council’s planning officers in relation to the controversial plans to build 58 new homes on open countryside off the A6 to the south of Hathern.

Documents relating to the planning application, including objections submitted to date, can be viewed on the council’s online Planning Explorer.

I am personally opposed to the development as the plans stand primarily on the following grounds:

• * The development is on open countryside and will erode green space;
• * The development threatens the separate identity of Hathern; and
• * 58 new houses in this location will exacerbate traffic problems on the congested A6.

Villagers have a number of other concerns as well and it is important that as many people as possible from Hathern and surrounding locations have their say by submitting comments to the council by 28 April 2010.

The easiest way to submit comments is to do so online via Planning Explorer. Comments can also be sent by post, quoting application number P/10/0415/2.

On Tuesday evening (19 January) I attended the public meeting of the recently-formed Shepshed Against Incinerator Group – or “SAIG”. The group’s purpose is self-explanatory – it is a campaign against plans by Biffa to construct an incinerator on the edge of Shepshed. The proposal is currently being considered by Leicestershire County Council.

SAIG was formed by local resident Carol Weller. The campaign has a website and a Facebook group.

Tuesday evening’s meeting was well-attended – I counted at least 40 members of the public plus five borough and county councillors. Most of the hour and a half was taken up with a presentation by Keith Kondakor – a member of Friends of the Earth (FOE) from Nuneaton – who told the meeting about the science and environmental issues concerning incinerators as well as touching on the political process and the strategy the campaign should adopt to successfully stop an incinerator being built in Shepshed.

Whilst SAIG and FOE representative Keith Kondakor are clearly well-intentioned, the meeting didn’t go particularly well, which was evidenced early on by the number of people who left mid-way through Mr Kondakor’s presentation. Audience members complained that Mr Kondakor was spending too long talking about details of science and health effects of incinerators rather than speaking about the particular plans for Shepshed and how residents can campaign effectively.

I found Mr Kondakor’s presentation quite interesting and he clearly knows a lot about incinerators and about the planning process for incinerators but things went downhill when Mr Kondakor starting talking about local councillors. The five borough and county councillors present had all introduced themselves at the start of the meeting but this didn’t stop Mr Kondakor describing councillors as “like children” and “stupid”. Not the best campaign tactic I’ve come across.

Sadly, it got worse. Mr Kondakor went on to say that Biffa is offering “bribes” to councillors and “lucrative jobs” to county council waste department staff to make sure the incinerator gets the go-ahead. I thought this was not only patently wrong but also potentially slanderous and dangerous. The SAIG campaign should probably consider distancing itself from these sorts of comments otherwise its reputation could be damaged. I can only assume Mr Kondakor, despite his previous campaigning experience, didn’t realise that alleging at a public meeting that councillors are being offered bribes is such a serious matter that councillors at the meeting are required to report the allegations to their council’s monitoring officer (the officer in charge of monitoring professional and ethical standards, conflicts of interest etc), which I have done.

All that aside, there is clearly a lot of interest from Shepshed and west Loughborough residents in the incinerator site and there are a lot of people who will put a lot of effort into campaigning against the proposed incinerator. The challenge now is for SAIG and concerned residents to stick to rational, cool-headed discussions and campaign tactics.

The next public meeting about the Shepshed incinerator has been organised by Shepshed Town Council to take place on 8 March 2010 at Shepshed High School – no doubt fuller details will be available in due course in the local press and on SAIG’s website.

Update (22/01/10): Keith Kondakor of Friends of the Earth writes in response to this blog post:

Dear Stephen,

As you should know the meeting in Loughborough was not arranged by the Shepshed group but by a fellow councillor. If the Shepshed group had arranged it then a location in Shepshed would have been used.

I have no evidence of Biffa doing anything illegal or improper. In response to questions I told the public of what has happened in other places where communities are “bribed” by gifts from large waste firms. Local Charities are given minibus, sports clubs are given grants and miners welfare clubs are refitted. I even have a photo of a local councillor handing over the keys of a minibus that is being presented to a local community group. The gifts are not illegal and are not presented to those who take the decisions.

Waste PFIs also creates new highly paid post at the council and many councils go on to form free-standing waste partnerships, waste board or even arm-length waste companies. The top waste officers at other councils have significant job upgrades when they manage a PFI project with around £10,000 higher salary. Senior waste officers who work on PFI projects are very marketable. Some move round authorities and get better packaged and some retire to become waste consultants.

I am more than happy for you to alert the public that waste firms may offer substantial gifts to community groups but I did not say BIFFA currently doing this here.

The lucrative posts comment was in response to  a question about why the staff are pushing ahead with the PFI. The council puts staff in lucrative posts to manage the PFI process and these posts would not exist if the PFI was scrapped. This is nothing to do with which firm gets the PFI contract.

I would welcome you adjusting your website so that it reflects the debate on the evening. I really hoped the campaign would put party politics aside and was glad that what party people belonged to was not an issue at the meeting.

Keith agreed that I could publish his e-mail to me in full by way of clarification.

In response to Keith’s comments:

* I was led to understand the meeting on Tuesday evening was a formative meeting of Shepshed Against Incinerator Group (SAIG).

* Keith’s comments on the evening came across to me as suggesting Biffa were or would imminently be offering “bribes” (the term Keith used) to councillors in Charnwood and Leicestershire – both cash and “in kind”.

* I welcome Keith’s clarification regarding “lucrative jobs” and the interaction of the incinerator proposals with the PFI contract.

* I don’t think the Shepshed incinerator has become a party political issue – if it has, I’m certaintly not currently aware of where the parties stand on it.

The long overdue Loughborough Eastern Gateway project, which will see new homes and roads constructed in east of the town and improvements to Loughborough railway station such as better pedestrian access and, hopefully, platform lengthening, could now start as early as April this year.

Loughborough MP Andy Reed accurately points out that the project was delayed in large part by drawn out negotiations between Charnwood Borough Council and Network Rail (the government rail quango which owns a lot of the land on the project site).

What Andy Reed rather less accurately says is:

I [Andy Reed] have been working on this project for 15 years!

Very curious I thought. I’ve been on the Charnwood Borough Council committee overseeing the project for two and a half years (the Community and Partnerships Scrutiny Committee) and not once has Andy Reed’s name come up, nor has he ever attended a meeting of the committee or, to my knowledge, sent a representative. Speaking to another councillor last night, who has been on Charnwood Borough Council since 2003, it seems there was no sign of Mr Reed’s involvement in the project at that time either. Mr Reed’s “15 years” of involvement must have been very much “background work” or “deep cover”. Perhaps he was involved in top secret negotiations with Network Rail?

I’d love to know what Mr Reed’s involvement with this project has been – other than trying to take credit for it!

I’ve just returned from the Full Council meeting of Charnwood Borough Council. The “highlight” of the meeting seems to have been a heated 45-minute debate over whether the Plans Committee would be renamed the Development Management Committee. One person described the debate and the subsequent vote as possibly the most exciting thing that has happened during his time on the council but I’m not sure I’d personally go quite that far!

It was proposed in the annual review of the Council’s constitution that the Plans Committee would be renamed to better describe what it does – which is a mixture of reviewing and approving planning applications and carrying out other local planning authority functions like enforcing planning decisions and, generally, doing what could be described as “development management”.

Labour councillor Geoff Gay proposed an amendment to scrap the proposal to rename the “Plans Committee” the “Development Management Committee”. A number of councillors then made passionate arguments about why we should stick with the name “Plans Committee”. The reasons given included making sure the committee’s name continues to be understandable to members of the public and avoiding unnecessary change.

After a tense vote, the amendment was passed by a vote of 25-23 and the Plans Committee will now continue to be called the Plans Committee.

I am proud to say that I voted for the amendment. It seems to me to be a vote for common sense. The name “Plans Committee” is widely recognised and understood by councillors, officers and members of the public, and whilst the Plans Committee might have a wider role than just looking at planning applications, almost every member of the public that comes into contact with the committee does so in relation to a planning application – either as an applicant, as an objector or as another interested party. The name “Development Management Committee” also smacks of the kind of government newspeak jargon that we can do without.

On the same day that Labour Equalities Minister Harriet Harman came up with the term “the wellderly” to describe healthy older people, I definitely didn’t want to be party to the popular government pastime of imposing what might be termed a “modern”, “forward looking”, “dynamic” name on the good old Plans Committee!