Is there any way the council can take a more active role? in directing development?

Government threatens to put our housing numbers up by 250 a year if we don’t publish a draft new Local Plan in the next three months.

No pressure then! – Owl

Cllr. Todd Olive writes in this week’s local press (from print edition):

The expression “May you live in interesting times- supposedly comes from an old Chinese curse, though no source for that has ever been found.

When I first heard it, I thought it must mean “May you never be bored!”. Today, though, as East Devon’s Portfolio Holder for Strategic Planning – responsible for, among other things, production of the new Local Plan – I think of it in a different light.

Regular readers of this publication will know that East Devon has several “interesting” and challenging decisions to take soon about where new housing development should go.

Those decisions have gained added urgency with the news that the new government intends to revamp the national planning system – putting up our housing numbers by 250 a year if we don’t publish a draft new Local Plan in the next three months. That would mean adding a community about half the size of Whimple, where I live, to East Devon every year – on top of the 900 homes a year we must already deliver.

If my inbox over the last week is anything to go by, deciding where to put those homes – around 20,000 over the life of the new Local Plan up to 2042 – is not going to win any of your District Councillors, of any political stripe, many popularity contests. An apparent failure to deliver on new infrastructure, not least to contain the sewage kindly dumped in our rivers and on our beaches by our water company, has quite rightly soured everyone’s taste for new development. The purely commercially-driven approach to the building of Cranbrook hasn’t helped, either. Listening to the new Labour Secretary of State, Angela Rayner’s announcement of sweeping changes to national planning policy back in August, though, you could be forgiven for thinking that “infrastructure” wasn’t in her vocabulary – much like the previous Conservative government. Her proposed changes are heavy on housebuilding, but light on the things that make development work.

No move towards a genuinely infrastructure-led system. No new powers for your local council to hold developers to account on their promises. No sign of the revolution in local authority housebuilding needed to deliver the government’s 300,000 homes a year target – let alone the affordable homes for rent that we so desperately need.

It’s a bleak picture. That’s nothing new at East Devon, we have little choice but to take that on the chin – and try to do the best we can with the few tools we have.

One of the ways we can do that is to try to make new development large enough that we can require developers to provide shops, schools, and GP places alongside new homes. Another is for the council to take a more active role in directing development.