Reigate and Banstead Borough Council

Debate between Jonathan Lord and Crispin Blunt

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Sheridan, for allowing us to start a couple of minutes early, which is always helpful in such circumstances. I am grateful to have secured the opportunity to debate the core strategy of Reigate and Banstead borough council.

The strategy has been more than eight years in the making, since the introduction of the local development framework system in 2004. To say that the process has been fraught would be an understatement. There have been more than a dozen iterations, consultations, submissions, amendments and further amendments, and we are now in a public consultation period on further amendments that ends on 4 February. I intend my speech to be the basis of my contribution to the latest public consultation.

Before I get further into the details of process, which are of course where the devil sits, in an almost impenetrable fog of regulation, affordable housing needs assessments, employment and migration forecasts, judgments about housing demand and household social behaviour forecasts—all of which are being made against a framework of directives from the European Union overlaying national policy, overlaying regional plans, which may or may not be valid subject to potential judicial interpretations of EU law—let me highlight the key fact that something is badly awry with the process. Simply put, green fields in the green belt are being zoned for potential future development. That has had its first public presentation in the further amendments to the core strategy now being consulted on, and two sites for 500 to 700 homes each have been identified in technical papers supporting the consultation.

Unsurprisingly, as this wholly unexpected and unwelcome development has become public and people have realised that their interests are absolutely engaged in terms of local planning blight, the value of their property and the quality of their environment, they have started to express concern in debates in public meetings and on web pages. Greenfield development in the green belt, against the wishes of the local planning authority and its people, is surely a violation of two central tenets of our Government’s policy of localism and protection of the green belt. Set against what people rightly understand about our policy, what is being contemplated seems scandalous. How have we got into this position, and how can we get out of it?

Protection of the environment and the centrality of planning policy in my constituency have been plain to me ever since I first applied for the Conservative nomination back in 1997. The constituency is wholly within London’s metropolitan green belt and because of the ribbon developments down the A23 and the A217 the green belt is at its narrowest and most fragile. The villages to the north of the M25, which bisects the constituency east to west, including Banstead, Walton-on-the-Hill, Tadworth, Kingswood and Chipstead, have their own character and charm. Their individuality has been sustained by green belt protection and, before that, by the existence of substantial tracts of common land, and the determined policy of the borough council.

South of the M25 and the north downs area of high conservation value, the adjacent towns of Reigate and Redhill complement each other in age, style, history and planning policy. South of Reigate and Redhill are the significant housing areas of Woodhatch, South Park, Earlswood and Whitebushes, much of which was conceived as social housing development. Without the protection of the green belt those areas would have sprawled to envelop the villages of Salfords and Sidlow and form one continuous development into Horley and on into Crawley. However, those settlements enjoy abutting on to green fields, much of which make up the floodplain of the River Mole, which is a significant plus of living in those areas, which do not possess some of the architectural or downland charm of other parts of the constituency. It is that asset and the principle of preventing sprawl development that is now under long-term threat in the proposed core strategy of Reigate and Banstead.

It is not the purpose of this speech to criticise the position of the borough council or the inspectorate. In the end, they are the prisoners of the national planning process and if things are going self-evidently wrong in Reigate and Banstead, we must of course look to the Minister to put things right. He is the policy supervisor of the planning process, and I look forward to his response, both in reply to this debate and on a more considered basis over the weeks to come, about how to turn around the alarming environmental outlook for my constituents.

Having tried to paint a picture of my constituency, let me go into some of the detail. Reigate and Banstead borough has the largest population by district in the county, and it is projected to grow by 18% by 2027, mainly due to the large amount of development in recent years, which has attracted young families and therefore the highest birth rate in the county. It is far from being the largest borough. It is not as though the borough, despite the green belt designation of much of it and the entire Reigate constituency, has not done its bit in contributing to national housing need. The annual housing target at 500 houses per year since 2006-07 has seen 3,689 housing completions in that period, exceeding policy by more than 20%.

The infrastructure is under serious pressure. We are already short of two primary schools and we will shortly require a new secondary school. The local road network becomes paralysed as soon as there is trouble on the M25, as it is already beyond capacity. This time last year, we were panicking about future water supply, and today we are recovering from the latest occasion on which the River Mole burst its banks on Sunday. Development will only make flooding worse, not least because the major development flowing from the 1994 borough development plan saw water retention and run- off factors built into a development of nearly 2,000 homes on the encouragingly named Great Lake farm.

Taking all factors into consideration, the proposed housing target for the borough of 460 houses per year is unsustainable, and undermines the green belt and the principles of localism. Frankly, it also undermines any sensible national regional policy because enabling development in the south-east further undermines the economic prospects of England’s less prosperous regions. That number drives everything, and takes us into the contentious area of defined housing need, which the Government set and on which the inspectorate hangs its decisions.

What is our objectively assessed housing need? It is not something that local policy seems able to influence. It is a number, which in its latest iteration, has been spat out of the 2008 strategic housing market assessment. How that process was to be done was imposed by central Government, and is so complex that local authorities cede it to specialist consultants. That number, at 981 is nearly double the requirement produced by the discredited regional south-east plan. It includes market demand and a requirement to meet the needs of migration, the sensitivities of which were again reflected at Prime Minister’s questions today.

Reigate and Banstead borough council is about to submit a third draft of the core strategy to the Planning Inspectorate, the previous two drafts having been withdrawn due to the planning inspector’s non-acceptance of the plans on the grounds that, notwithstanding the council’s assurances on site allocations, he did not consider that they would meet the stipulated housing targets. Here, I would enter an important concern about the process.

Windfall sites have made up much of local provision over the past decade. That is hardly surprising when nearly every property owner stands to make a life-changing development gain for their family given local property prices if they can secure unrestricted planning permission. The inspector should be able, indeed required, to include that historical pattern in his review of the council’s ability to meet its housing target. The council, including all Conservative and Green councillors, whom I have found equally committed to the defence of the environment, has unanimously endorsed a housing target of 460 per annum. That is significantly higher than councillors would wish, in actuality, but on the strong advice of their officials, is the lowest practical target they believe they have a chance of defending. The council’s figure is taken from the south-east plan, which remains in place due to the impact of EU regulation. I seem presciently to have predicted in my maiden speech in June 1997 that that would happen.

It should be deeply ironic to any Conservative that the core of the Conservative borough’s case is that to be allowed a strategy that will give it a measure of local control, it must rely on a regional plan, which Conservatives wish to abolish, but cannot because of EU regulation that Conservatives oppose, to give it a housing target that is unsustainable and inconsistent with any sensible balance of environmental and economic policy, compared with one that would be utterly catastrophic if consistent with central Government’s 2008 formulation of a strategic housing market assessment that could hold sway otherwise.

The threat of a much larger number being imposed by inspectors at planning appeals driven by developers, some of whom have already land-banked parts of the green belt in the absence of an authorised local plan, is forcing the council’s hand to contemplate future development it would otherwise not want. Under that impossible pressure, the borough council has had to issue for consultation a third draft core strategy, which refers to green belt development by way of two large but undefined urban extensions in the south of the borough, and holds out the prospect of future development around the village of Salfords after 2027.

All that is deeply inimical to the interests of my constituents who, left to their own devices with their representatives, could properly balance economic, environmental and social pressures. However, we now have a situation in which every strategic objective of our policy, be it localism, protection of the green belt, or a sensible regional balance across the country between the economy and the environment, is being undermined by how planning policy is delivered in practice.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a powerful case for his constituents and his constituency. Does he agree that many of the voters in Surrey, which includes my seat as well as his, gave us their vote at the last election because they believed that we would protect the green belt, and they felt that we believed in localism, which was a central tenet of our manifesto? That is what they want to see MPs, our council and our Government deliver now.

[Mr Blunt]

I am extremely grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. He neatly makes the point that I will come to next in my peroration.

Clarity is required for my constituents, their councillors and the inspectorate on which national policy trumps which: the delivery of local autonomy through meeting perceived national housing need, or the protection of the green belt? Our rhetoric implies—this is the point that my hon. Friend made, with which I absolutely agree—that the green belt has priority when those two clash, as they do in my constituency. I hope that the Minister can make it clear that that is the reality of our policy as well.