Well, it was insane for councils but very, very nice for developers!
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Sainsbury’s Growth Point site to be sold to Lidl?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-33804365
With what implications for the “inter-modal freight depot” one wonders?
Developer loses legal challenge after site not included in Neighbourhood Plan
Right-wing think tank blog says “Britain needs more slums”
In a blog published on the libertarian think-tank’s website, Theo Clifford, a Philosophy, Politics and Economics student at Merton College, Oxford, proposed sweeping away safety regulations to allow the creation of jerry-built slum dwellings designed for those who enjoy living cheek-by-jowl with their fellow poverty stricken.
“Sweeping deregulation is the only way to provide Britain with the slums it is crying out for,” wrote Clifford, who describes himself as a “recovering Lib Dem” with dreams “of being a yuppie.”
“Britain has a sore lack of proper slums,” argued Clifford, winner of the 18-21 age category of the Institute’s “Young Writer on Liberty” competition. “Government regulations designed to clamp down on ‘cowboy landlords’ restrict people’s ability to choose the kind of accommodation in which they want to live.”
“Exmouth Splash” project independent Facebook Forum
https://www.facebook.com/Exmouthsplash
NOT an EDDC puff job!
Meeting: Tuesday 11th August. 7:30 p.m. The Harbour View Cafe, Esplanade, Exmouth.
Re ‘The Splash’.
“In light of the strength of feeling expressed on this [Facebook] page and elsewhere, and the conflicting and uncertain information from EDDC, the purpose of this meeting is to form a group to argue for suspension of the scheme and for a proper consultation to take place.’
It would be helpful if those who plan to come could let us [the Facebook group] know by commenting below [ on the Facebook page].
Please keep an eye on this [Facebook]page for any further updates.”
…”Hi all, for those who are unable to attend the meeting but would like to be involved, we have set up an email account – exmouthsplashdiscussion@gmail.com – if you have any particular ideas you would have liked to bring to the meeting, or would like to offer particular help, please do drop us an email to let us know.”
Criticising the critics of the NHS – fat cats criticise thin cats!
Health watchdog bloated with staff, top-heavy with runing costs:
http://www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/14006
and:
The UK’s health regulators are currently unfit for purpose and need to be urgently reformed so they better support healthcare professionals providing services, a new report has claimed.
According to the report, Rethinking Regulation, published by the Professional Standards Authority, the UK’s current regulators – including the CQC – are too expensive to fund, and are over-complicated.
The report also claims that it is not clear as to whether regulators have improved the quality of care for patients, and questions if the benefit of this approach outweighs the ‘very considerable cost’ to carry the regulatory process.
The chief executive of the Professional Standards Authority, Harry Cayton, said: ‘Piecemeal adjustments to health and care regulation have, over time, made the system cumbersome, ineffective and expensive. Every part of our health and care system is changing in order to meet future needs. If patients are to benefit, regulation must undergo radical change too.
‘Regulation is asked to do too much – and to do things it should not do. We need to understand that we cannot regulate risk out of healthcare and to use regulation only where we have evidence that it actually works. Ironically, the regulations that are meant to protect patients and service users are distracting professionals from this very task.’
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/your-practice/regulation/health-regulators-are-not-fit-for-purpose-says-new-report/20010686.article#.VcOgsue9Kf1
Housing affordability gap widens
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33786961
But we all knew that, didn’t we!
What are the reasons for call-in of a planning application?
“The Secretary of State will, in general, only consider the use of his call-in powers if planning issues of more than local importance are involved. Such cases may include, for example, those which in his opinion:
may conflict with national policies on important matters;
may have significant long-term impact on economic growth and meeting housing needs across a wider area than a single local authority;
could have significant effects beyond their immediate locality;
give rise to substantial cross-boundary or national controversy;
raise significant architectural and urban design issues; or
may involve the interests of national security or of foreign Governments.
However, each case will continue to be considered on its individual merits.”
The DCLG has refused to say why it intimated it might call in the Uplyme planning application or tell us who instigated the process.
Will it, perhaps, tell us WHICH reason above it used? And, if it doesn’t – what is to stop this Department doing this any time it wishes?
Is this democratic?
This briefing paper raises further questions:
A notice to call in appears to have to be made BEFORE a decision by the local authority takes place and takes the place of it – i.e. the application goes directly to DCLG instead of to the local authority. However, it seems in this instance the DCLG simply indicated that it MIGHT be called in. How can this be permissible.
There seems little doubt that Hallam Land Management will appeal the decision – perhaps this will then be clarified.
Devon and Somerset county merger “not ruled out” by Somerset
According to a tweet by Martyn Oates, BBC Political Correspondent today:
“.@SomersetCouncil leader @JDOsman1 on single authority for Dev & Som: Everything’s a possibility – Govt want single point of accountability.
10:15 AM – 5 Aug 2015
3 RETWEETS”
That could lead to a merged Somerset and Devon having to deal with the consortium currently consisting of Exeter, East Devon and Teignbridge!
Whither EDDC HQ then one wonders … whither ANY district council’s HQ come further amalgamation and/or devolution!
What a potential mess – from the government which originally refused to allow Devon to become a unitary authority and the district council (East Devon) that spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on refusing to merge with ANYONE back in 2007!
AND another consultation: Villages, small towns and their built-up boundaries – yep, another cart that went before horse!
Recall that, with no consultation whatsoever, built-up boundaries for Dunkeswell and Chardstock were changed and inserted into the latest draft of the Local Plan.
Dear Sir/Madam
East Devon Villages Plan – consultation on proposed criteria for defining built-up area boundaries for villages and small towns
The council is reviewing its approach to defining its ‘Built-up Area Boundaries’ and wants your input.
We have prepared a brief paper, which is attached, that sets out what we would like to do and how you can get involved. We have also included an update paper on the Villages Plan for information.
If you have any comments on the approach set out, please write to us on or before Monday 21 September 2015 so that we can consider them before we prepare the next stage of our ‘Villages Plan’.
You can submit your views by either writing to us at Planning Policy, East Devon District Council, Knowle, Sidmouth, EX10 8HL or sending an email to us at localplan@eastdevon.gov.uk. Please put ‘Villages Built-up Area Boundary Consultation’ in the subject box of the email or at the top of your letter. It would be helpful if you could respond to the 5 questions set out in the consultation paper.
Please contact the planning policy team on 01395 516551 if you have any queries.
Yours faithfully
Linda Renshaw (Mrs)
Senior Planning Officer
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays
East Devon District Council
( 01395 571683
8 lrenshaw@eastdevon.gov.uk
” http://www.eastdevon.gov.uk
* Planning Policy Section, East Devon District Council, Knowle, Station Road, Sidmouth, EX10 8HL
Another cart, another horse behind it: consultation on Gypsy and Traveller Policy
This should have been in the Local Plan from Day 1. The Local Plan Inspector warned that he could not accept the last draft partly because it was still missing.
NOW (after local elections and after EDDC admitted it is almost certainly going to be near Cranbrook) we get consultation as below! No wonder some people think EDDC rather likes not having a Local Plan – developers free for all and none of those nasty decisions they would rather not take.
The consultation letter:
Dear Sir/Madam
Gypsy and traveller accommodation – Development Plan Document (DPD)
East Devon District Council would like to hear your views to help us develop plans and policies to guide the allocation of land for gypsy and traveller use. The replies we receive will help us to determine where new sites should be located, what type of development they should contain and how they should be laid out.
With other Devon authorities, we commissioned a needs assessment by RRR Consultants, and this forms the basis for the figures in our Local Plan. The study concluded that, between 2014 and 2034 there is a need for:
· 37 additional gypsy pitches with 22 of these needed in the first 5 years;
· 3 new travelling showpeople pitches, with 1 of these needed in the first 5 years;
· 4-5 temporary/emergency stopping places, each 4-5 pitches in the first 5 years (this applies across the study area as a whole. East Devon is not specifically mentioned, although Devon County Council state that East Devon has the highest level of unauthorised stops in the County, so it could be concluded that at least one of these temporary/emergency sites should be in East Devon); and
· 23 houses for gypsies and travellers (this would be met through the general housing stock).
Most of the immediate need arises from overcrowding of existing sites and from newly formed families on existing sites (usually children reaching maturity and having their own children) who wish to stay close to extended family. Most of the need is on the western side of the District, around the M5/A30.
What should be included?
The Gypsy and Traveller accommodation DPD may cover the topics listed below and we are particularly interested to know what alternative or additional issues you think should be addressed and what factors you consider should be taken into account in the overall plan production work.
1) Consider how sites could be provided by the public and private sectors and the management arrangements to support their operation;
2) allocate specific sites and/or land areas for new development and set maximum pitch numbers or site areas;
3) include policies in respect of development of:
a) new residential pitches;
b) employment/mixed residential provision;
c) amenity, play areas and community facilities;
d) other possible uses not detailed above.
4) establish principles of development and design standards to promote high quality development;
5) define mitigation which might be required to off-set potential adverse impacts that might otherwise arise as a consequence of development;
6) determine how to monitor the success and quality of what is being built; and
7) determine whether planning applications submitted to the Council should be granted planning permission and what conditions might apply.
Getting involved
You can find out more about the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation DPD by viewing the Development Management Committee papers from the 16 June 2015 online at:
Click to access 160615-combined-dmc-agenda-compresed.pdf
Then please either email your comments to localplan@eastdevon.gov.uk with ‘Gypsy and Traveller DPD’ in the subject box or post to:
Planning Policy Section
East Devon District Council
Knowle
Sidmouth, EX10 8HL
To arrive on or before: Friday 21 September 2015.
Next steps
The Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment (2014) will form the overarching evidence base for the DPD and will set the targets for pitch provision in the District. A call for sites will invite landowners to submit details of available land for consideration and an assessment of the suitability of such sites will form the basis of, or feed directly into, the publication draft of the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation DPD. In addition to other opportunities to comment, the publication draft will be made publically available for formal comment and any comments received will be submitted, along with the DPD, and supporting evidence to the planning Inspectorate for formal examination.
Please pass this communication on to anyone else you think might be interested in getting involved.
BBC v Cabinet Office: parallels to Knowle relocation Freedom of Information debacle
Extract from the post directly below:
“I should declare an interest as someone who has made FOI requests to the Cabinet Office [now in charge of “reviewing the FoI Act]and assisted colleagues in doing so. This is one example of a frustrating recent experience:
21 March 2013: BBC makes FOI request to Cabinet Office for the cost of legal assistance provided for witnesses at the Leveson Inquiry.
2 August 2013: Cabinet Office replies, refusing to supply the information on the grounds it is intended for future publication (but without specifying a date).
20 August 2013: BBC asks the Cabinet Office to review its decision.
20 December 2013: BBC complains to ICO that the Cabinet Office has failed to respond to the internal review request.
31 December 2013: Cabinet Office responds, upholding the previous decision and still not providing a publication date.
15 January 2014: BBC complains to ICO about the Cabinet Office refusal.
19 March 2015: After taking over a year to consider the case, the ICO rules that the Cabinet Office stance is not reasonable and that it should give the information to the BBC without further delay. It states: “a denial of that right [of access to information] through procrastination is contrary to the spirit of the legislation”.
April 2015: Cabinet Office decides to appeal against the ICO decision to the Information Rights Tribunal. The case is set to be heard in September.
25 June 2015: The Cabinet Office suddenly withdraws its Tribunal appeal and announces that the cost involved was £287,491.10 – a fact which may well have been considerably more important and newsworthy when the initial request was made 27 months previously than it is now.
Cabinet Office which is now looking at weakening Freedom of Information Act has been in special monitoring – for delays in responding to FOI requests!
You couldn’t make it up: the government department now in charge of looking at ways to weaken the Freedom of Information Act
“… has twice been subject to special monitoring by the ICO due to its inadequate performance on processing FOI applications. It’s possible that the Cabinet Office may now face this for a third time.
“In the last two months or so we’ve issued six decision notices against the Cabinet Office for exceeding the statutory time limit – it’s not a good record,” says Graham Smith, the deputy information commissioner.
“Free” NHS at risk
NHS patients may face widescale charges, warns financial thinktank:
http://gu.com/p/4b8pv?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
We already pay for dental treatment, chiropody and spectacles – so “free” is perhaps not the right word.
Strange things happening on the Devon-Dorset border
It appears that, whatever the decision, the Minister at the Department of Communities and Local Government had already decided to call it in.
Whilst this might be an unpopular development, it is no more or no less unpopular than many other current applications, so what has made it so special? It might, however, be the first of several applications that eventually could link Axminster to Lyme Regis.
The Devon MP is Neil Parish, the Dorset MP is Oliver Letwin, good friend of David Cameron. The site is closer to Dorset’s Lyme Regis than Devon’s Seaton and Axminster.
Following the 2015 election, Letwin remained Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as Cameron reappointed him as an official ministerial member of the new Conservative government’s Cabinet. He has been given responsibility for overall charge and oversight of the Cabinet Office.
Wonder what they think of this really strange situation?
It also appears to have been decided by “Chairman’s Delegation Committee” – anyone heard of this before?
See Councillor Ian Thomas’s comments on this in Comments section.
Which begs the question: if a developer or one single interested party can persuade the DCLG to consider call-in of a planning application BEFORE a decision is made – what is the point of having the meeting!
Should the DCLG be asked to clarify their behaviour?
We are not alone (unfortunately)
Others in other areas have similar experiences of information being hidden from them and end up having their day(s) in court trying to get it:
https://westwayconcern.wordpress.com/freedom-of-information/
though, in their case, it took a lot less time!
AND this is information we have not (yet) seen for Knowle relocation.
Freedom of Information request, anyone?!
Yes, Minister – a bittersweet “comedy”
Some “Yes, Minister” quotes:
From the episode currently on BBC 2
Sir Humphrey: If local authorities don’t send us statistics, Government figures will be a nonsense.
Hacker: Why?
Sir Humphrey: They’ll be incomplete.
Hacker: Government figures are a nonsense, anyway.
Bernard: I think Sir Humphrey wants to ensure they’re a complete nonsense.
Others you might find distressingly funny:
Hacker: Are you saying that winking at corruption is government policy?
Sir Humphrey: No, no, Minister! It could never be government policy. That is unthinkable! Only government practice.
Hacker: You’re a cynic, Humphrey!
Sir Humphrey: A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
Bernard: If it’s our job to carry out government policies, shouldn’t we believe in them?
Sir Humphrey: Oh, what an extraordinary idea! I have served 11 governments in the past 30 years. If I’d believed in all their policies, I’d have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to joining it. I’d have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel and of denationalising it and renationalising it. Capital punishment? I’d have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I’d have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark-staring raving schizophrenic!
[The Home Secretary has been forced to resign after a drink-driving incident]
Hacker: What will happen to him?
Sir Humphrey: Well, I gather he was as drunk as a lord. So, after a discreet interval, they’ll probably make him one.
Sir Humphrey: How are things at the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, by the way?
Sir Arnold: Sorry, I can’t talk about that.
Sir Humphrey: It’s so difficult for me, you see, as I’m wearing two hats.
Hacker: Yes, isn’t that rather awkward for you?
Sir Humphrey: Not if one is in two minds.
Bernard: Or has two faces.
Sir Arnold: If once they accepted the principle that senior Civil Servants could be removed for incompetence, that would be the thin end of the wedge. We could lose dozens of our chaps. Hundreds, perhaps.
Sir Humphrey: Thousands.
Sir Humphrey: Bernard, if the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councillors, ordinary voters!
Bernard: But aren’t they supposed to, in a democracy?
Sir Humphrey: This is a British democracy, Bernard!
NPPF “insane loophole” closed
Further to an earlier post, it seems that London house prices closed this loophole, not common sense. Predictably, the Department of Communities and Local Government is appealing the decision.
Planning permission or planning completions: which is most important
Local authorities ( particularly East Devon District Council) are rushing through planning applications and consenting to them at high speed. But what is the point if developers can then drip-feed and cherry-pick which of those houses they build and when? Doing this allows for house prices to be kept artificially high and to ensure that only those houses that make the most profit get built, as this article points out:
Even though there is some evidence that public attitudes to housebuilding are shifting, it is a major achievement to secure approval for a quarter of a million homes through a system that is still largely in the control of local politicians.
As Department for Communities & Local Government minister Brandon Lewis acknowledged earlier this year, the planning system can no longer fairly be accused of stifling necessary development. He told Planning’s national summit at the end of March that “the planning system is delivering and land supply is coming forward”.
Nonetheless, the housebuilding industry is urging the government not to take its foot off the planning system’s accelerator pedal. The Home Builders Federation (HBF) said many of the units identified in the report still had to navigate the remainder of the planning system, a process that “continues to take far too long, delaying work starting on many of the sites”.
Clearly, from the evidence of the Summer Budget and the Productivity Plan, the government is minded to agree. Amongst other measures, it is aiming to introduce automatic permission in principle for housing on brownfield sites identified as suitable, a tougher development management performance regime for councils and new sanctions for councils that fail to produce local plans.
Some of these steps, notably the focus on local plan-making, are welcome. But there is a danger that ministers are focusing too much on permissions, and not enough on completions. The statistics for last year show just over 125,000 completions. While there will clearly be a time lag between an increase in consents and a rise in completions, the statistics suggest that the latter are not growing nearly as fast as the former. Ministers need to take steps to ensure that developers make more use, more quickly, of the good work done by planning authorities.
Richard Garlick, editor, Planning richard.garlick@haymarket.com
http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1358321/ministers-focus-completions-permissions-richard-garlick
Planning Court overrules NPPF on the matter of S106 threshold for small developments
The Planning Court has ruled that the NPPF cannot be used to set a threshold below which Section 106 payments must be made. The Government decided that – if a development was for 10 homes or less no payments would have to be made – it was previously set for payments to be triggered for 5 homes or less. The new ruling is effective immediately.
The claim was allowed on a number of grounds and sub-grounds including:
The policy, which was intended to create blanket exemptions, to have immediate effect and to override local plan policies was inconsistent with the statutory scheme;
The consultation process had been unfair and unlawful for two main reasons:
(i) It gave insufficient reasons for the policy proposal so as to allow intelligent consideration and responses (it failed to communicate that the motivation for the policy went beyond viability considerations);
(ii) It failed to take the product of the consultation (i.e substantive points raised by the responses) conscientiously into account.
There was a failure to take into account “obviously material” considerations when promulgating the policy, including the full implications for the supply of affordable housing land;
There was a breach of the public sector equality duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010. The impacts on disabled persons and ethnic minorities who disproportionately rely on affordable housing had not been considered when the policy was announced and this had not been cured by a less than rigorous post decision assessment;
and
Irrationality.
Following the judgment, the Government has announced that the relevant paragraphs of the NPPG [1] will be removed and this is now reflected on the NPPG website. Accordingly, with immediate effect, developers will be unable to rely on those paragraphs in negotiations as to affordable housing and tariff style infrastructure contributions. The vacant building credit will also no longer be applicable.
Report: Jeremy Wigley, No 5 Chambers
East Devon Watch 