It’s a pity that Christopher Booker can’t tell his NPPF from his SPPS and that it is only when planning problems hit the Home Counties that people suddenly take notice and get press coverage.
“It’s a pity that David Cameron could not, 10 days ago, have taken time from traipsing round Europe to visit the pretty Thames-side Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, not many miles from his constituency. He would have seen the main street flooded with sewage – just one consequence of his wish to see hundreds of thousands of new homes built across southern England, many of them in villages like Sutton Courtenay with its 1,000 homes (and where George Orwell, rather appropriately it seems, is buried in the churchyard).
Under Mr Cameron’s policy, which gives a cash incentive to councils to build as many new homes as possible under their own “Local Plans”, the Vale of the White Horse district council wants to see an additional 20,000 going up in the next few years. Those proposed for Sutton Courtenay, some already built, could be as many as 1,835, thus trebling the village’s population almost overnight to more than 7,000 (one of six current schemes may alone add 800 houses).
One of many glaring problems all this poses to residents is that, while the council seems only too eager to hand out planning permission to big developers, the local planners seem far less concerned about the colossal strain this will place on the village’s “infrastructure”, of which the recent tide of filth overflowing from its creaking Victorian sewerage system was only an early warning sign.
The village has just three shops, a small primary school and its surrounding roads are already under strain from a growing weight of traffic, not least a narrow bridge over the Thames which at busy times can already create long tailbacks. But when the villagers ask what plans there are to provide new infrastructure to support this avalanche of development, one document they are directed to is the government’s Strategic Planning Policy Statement (SPPS), which in 2012 boasted it would slash thousands of pages of planning rules to little more than 50.
The SPPS opens ominously with a claim that “national and international bodies have set out broad principles of sustainable development”, beginning with UN “Resolution 42/187”. The word “sustainable” is repeated 107 times. There are 18 mentions of “climate change”. But although there are 46 references to “infrastructure” there seems remarkably little to suggest that, to ensure genuinely “sustainable” development, it might be an idea for the planners to pay rather more attention to the need for new roads, shops and even an adequate sewerage system.
When Orwell wrote of how, in his world of the future, “Peace” meant war and “Truth” meant lies, he did not foresee how “Sustainable” would likewise come to mean its very opposite. In Sutton Courtenay churchyard he must be smiling wryly in his grave.”
