FIELD FARM FACT SHEET

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1 FIELD FARM FACT SHEET Prepared on behalf of Broxtowe Liberal Democrats By Councillor David Watts Broxtowe Borough Council has this week given planning permission for a development of 450 houses at Field Farm in Stapleford. This fact sheet explains the reasons behind that decision and why Liberal Democrat members of the committee voted in favour of the scheme. The Pre-2010 Position Back in the 1990 s Broxtowe Borough Council (then under Labour control) prepared a new development plan for the area to run from 2002 to One of the sites that they put forward was Field Farm in Stapleford. Local residents, supported by their local councillors, (Brian and Christine Wombwell in Stapleford and Ken Rigby in Trowell) objected to this. In due course the plans went to a public enquiry. The inspector there recommended that Field Farm be taken out of the green belt and declared as white land, which is land safeguarded for future housing development. By this time however political control of the council had changed to a Lib-Dem/Labour partnership, and we decided not to follow the inspectors recommendations but to keep the land in the green belt. Even at the time however many of the original objectors recognised that this may only be a temporary reprieve. Under the previous Labour Government Gordon Brown and Co decided to micro-manage the provision of housing across the country and set a figure for every borough in the country setting out how much new housing they would need to provide. Local authorities had no say in setting these figures, they were imposed on us by central government. The only issue for each local authority was whereabouts in their area they would allocate the housing. When the coalition came to power the new Secretary of State, Eric Pickles, announced that he would abolish these requirements, and has now The East Midlands Regional Plan contained the housing figures in the Regional Spatial Strategy. done so for the East Midlands. He also announced that the many thousands of pages of planning guidance issued by the previous government would be torn up and new rules, contained in a document called the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), would be introduced.

2 The Need To Build All councils are required by law to comply with the Governments National Planning Policy Framework. This says that every council must have a development plan for their area setting out how much development they will permit over the next 15 years. Councils have a duty to co-operate with each other over a housing market area (in our case Greater Nottingham) and they must ensure that sufficient houses are provided for the entire anticipated housing demand to be catered for. The NPPF also says that building on the green belt should only take place in exceptional cases and that green belt boundaries should only be reviewed when preparing a new development plan. Finally the NPPF says that councils must always have a six year supply of housing land available. This means that every council must be able to point to specific sites that it has identified for development or given planning permission for, and show that if all of these were built at the average rate of building for the authority then it would take six years for them to be built. (The wording of the NPPF actually says that authorities must provide a five year supply plus 20%, which is why you may often hear councillors or council officials talk about the five year and supply but five years plus 20% equals six years.) Here in Broxtowe using the most favourable reading of our figures possible we only have enough land currently allocated to sustain building for about three and a half years. As well as the planning rules for new building the government has made it clear that it regards new building as a way of improving Britain s economic position. Both the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and the Secretary of State for Local Government, Eric Pickles, have given speeches emphasising that councils must allow building and be pro-active in bringing new sites forward. Here in Greater Nottingham the local councils have worked together in a body called the Joint Planning Advisory Board (JPAB). JPAB has commissioned a significant amount of research to establish the Why Do We Need More Housing? It s tempting to think that if new housing wasn t allocated then things would stay exactly as they are now. However this won t be the case. If council s do not ensure than new housing is built then homelessness is bound to increase. This is not designed as a statement to scare people. The population of the UK is increasing, and as a result more people need homes to live in. People are living longer and therefore occupying their properties for longer. Not only is the population increasing but the nature of our households is changing. More people live alone, and as divorce rates have increased we ve seen a situation develop where families which would once have occupied one house are now occupying two. Housing charities have referred for a number of years to there being a housing crisis in this country. Housing is becoming more unaffordable and unless substantially more housing is provided this will get worse. anticipated level of housing demand in the area over the next 15 years. Various methods were used to estimate this demand and many of them came up with very similar figures. In round figures it is anticipated that Greater Nottingham will need an extra 52,000 houses over the next 15 years or so. Part of the role of JPAB has been to decide how much of that housing demand is to be provided by each local authority. Here the actions of the previous Government have caused a significant problem. There has had to be a slight adjustment to the numbers because we are now looking at a slightly different time period but apart from this no authority in Greater Nottingham has been willing

3 to accept any more housing than the figure that was previously imposed on them by the Labour government. Because the whole demand needs to be provided for this means that no authority locally has been able to set a lower figure and accordingly we are all having to stick with the numbers set by Labour. For Broxtowe the figure that leaves us with is 6,125 houses. This is the lowest of any local authority in the area. This reflects the fact that we have the least available land of any authority with the exception of Nottingham City itself. This is the challenge that Broxtowe faces, to show where we will allow 6,125 houses to be built, and to show that we have land available for building for the next six years. Can We Just Ignore These Numbers? One question that has been raised is whether the council is free to simply ignore these housing numbers. Rushcliffe District Council decided to try this approach, dropping out of JPAB s housing numbers and preparing their own plans allocating a significantly lower number of houses. Anna Soubry MP repeatedly encouraged Broxtowe to take the same approach Houses allocated by authority Sites in Broxtowe The process of preparing a development plan for Broxtowe has been ongoing for a number of years. During this time literally hundreds of different sites have been looked at and appraised, to Broxtowe Erewash Gedling Nottingham Rushcliffe Unfortunately for Rushcliffe when they submitted their plans the inspector told them that as they had failed to provide enough housing or show where the shortfall would be built she was bound to declare their plan unsound. As a result they had to abandon this completely and now have no development plan. The Secretary of State, Conservative MP Eric Pickles, has a long record of granting planning permission for development against the wishes of a local authority where they have no local plan in place. This is a situation that councils need to avoid. If a council has no plan then effectively every part of their green belt is at risk, not just the small amount that they may have been willing to release. determine how many houses could be built there. From these we then had to determine which sites we would support for development and which we wouldn t. Sustainability assessments were carried out by consultants on a number of sites, although a number of these have proved very controversial and local residents have highlighted what they regard to be errors in a number of these. Very early in the process of identifying appropriate sites the borough council established the criteria that it would work by. Most importantly we wanted to prevent communities merging into each other. Equally we wanted to make sure that development was shared out across the borough and not all dumped in one place.

4 The biggest site of all for development is the Boots site. This is entirely a brownfield site and incorporates parts of the current Boots campus together with the current site of Beeston tip and also the Severn Trent site next door. Part of the site makes up the Nottingham Enterprise Zone. Everyone is committed to bring this site forward and the Government are putting a significant amount of money into the site (as are Boots) to pay for infrastructure improvements. However it will take a long time for this site to be ready to be built on. Severn Trent are not due to finish operations on their site until 2017 and it may take several years after that to carry out decontamination work on the site. Whilst this therefore counts towards the total number of houses in the plan it cannot be included in the land supply figures. This meant that we still need to find sites which can be built within the next few years. Brownfield Sites The first stage of determining which sites we would support was to look at all the brownfield sites in the borough. We ve checked these very carefully, down to sites which could only house one house. Adding them all up provides us with some 4,500 or so houses. I have the plans of these showing the detail and if anyone wants to see them just drop me a line on davidwatts@broxtoweliberaldemocrats.org.uk. Clearly therefore including all the brownfield sites doesn t get us up to the figure of 6,150 houses. There will be some plans come forward that we are not expecting, and so we have included a figure in anticipation of these, called a windfall allowance. When the NPPF was originally published in draft it said that councils would not be allowed to include an allowance for windfall sites, but I was one of many council leaders who argued this face to face with the minister and the Government eventually changed their mind. Without this we would have been in a more difficult situation. A windfall allowance is now included in the figures as well. Green Belt Sites Other Possible Sites Having counted all the brownfield sites and included as big a windfall allowance as we could we still could not get up to 6,150 houses. This meant that we had no option but to identify at least one green belt site which could be used for building. A number of possible sites were looked at and two of these were identified as preferred sites which were then put out for public consultation. One was Field Farm and the other was the land to the west of Stapleford Lane in Toton. After considering the representations made by the public the council dropped the Toton site. The advantage of the Field Farm site over Toton is that it has a clear, defensible northern boundary along the railway line. This makes it easy to redraw the green belt line to match the new development. The decision by the planning inspector at the time of the last local plan also needs to be borne in mind. Although the council decided not to implement the recommendations what the inspector said is now a matter of public record and would have been referred to by any appeal by developers if an application was rejected by the The council looked at a whole range of different green belt sites before taking forward Field Farm as the preferred site. Amongst the other sites considered were: Land to the west of Stapleford Lane, Toton Land to the west of A6002, Trowell Moor Land to the West of A6002 by junction 26 of the M1 council. The situation has changed since 2002 but not for the better in terms of demand for housing. It would be foolhardy not to bear this in mind. For these reasons it became clear that preventing development at Field Farm was nigh on impossible. If the council chose to allow development at Toton in preference to Field Farm then the end result would be that the rejection of the Field Farm scheme would be over-ridden by the government and as a result two green belt sites rather than one would be lost.

5 The Field Farm Site A planning application was then submitted by Westermans builders to develop Field Farm. They have owned the site for many years. The application is for outline planning permission. This means that it seeks to establish the principle of development and in this case includes the road layout, but the details of the design and type of houses (including the size of them) still need to be determined. The developers will need to come back to the Development Control Committee with all these details at a later date. I ve heard people say in the past that the proposals are all for large four and five bedroom houses but this is simply untrue. The details haven t been determined yet and the council requires developers to ensure that 25% of the homes they build are classed as Westermans Application Site Layout affordable. There were two major questions that the Development Control Committee had to determine when it looked at the application by Westermans. First were there exceptional reasons to permit development in the green belt? The only factor could amount to a really special circumstance would be that the council does not have a five year supply of land available. With the identified brownfield sites there was no realistic prospect that enough of them would come forward for development quickly to address this problem, and as I explained earlier one green belt site would need to be allocated for housing. Secondly if the committee agreed that there were really special circumstances were they satisfied that the Field Farm site was the most appropriate site for development? The issue was discussed at length by the committee. The report prepared by the officers was over 80 pages long and the discussion lasted nearly two hours, which is a highly unusual length of discussion. Having looked at the issues the committee voted in favour of granting permission. The committee also looked at the fact that the developers have agreed to sell the land to the Trowell side of Boundary Brook to the parish council for 1. This land will then be protected from further development and will ensure that a clear boundary is maintained between Trowell and Stapleford. Traffic One of the concerns that objectors to the scheme have raised is the issue of traffic. Most of the traffic from Field Farm will probably head toward Nottingham. At peak times Ilkeston Road is already congested and the concern is that the new development will make things worse. The borough council are not traffic experts and in every application the Highways Department at the County Council are consulted. They have asked for improvement works to be carried out at the Sherwin Arms, the double roundabout by the Jaguar pub and the Balloon Woods traffic lights. The scheme also proposes widening Ilkeston Road and creating two right turn lanes for traffic coming from Nottingham heading into the development to ensure that through traffic is not held up by cars turning right off the main road.

6 Traffic congestion around the Sherwin Arms Island is a major issue. The aim of the improvements asked for by the County Council is to ensure that matters are not made worse by this development. Legally the council can ask for no more than this. If the Conservative controlled County Council have no objections to the scheme on traffic grounds it is almost impossible for the borough council to refuse permission on traffic reasons. Developers would challenge this on appeal and in the absence of expert evidence about problems caused by the new scheme any refusal of planning permission on traffic grounds would be overturned. Concern has also been raised about the impact of traffic from a possible development at Stanton. At the moment there is no planning permission for Stanton, although an application has been submitted to Erewash Borough Council. As Field Farm has now been approved it will be up to the developers wanting to build at Stanton to prove that their proposals can work with the extra traffic from Field Farm. Planning law says that things have to be done that way round - the later application must work with the permissions already given. What Happens Now? Because this would involve a development in the green belt the council s decision is not the end of the matter. It is now referred to the Secretary of State and he can order a public inquiry if he wishes. A decision on this will usually be taken within six weeks. The council in the meantime will continue to develop it s housing plans for the next Eric Pickles fifteen years, along with other local councils. Once these are completed they will be the subject of a public inquiry as well. The role of the inspector in this inquiry will be to determine if the plans are sound. To be sound the development plan must be based on solid evidence and to have provided for the full housing demand for the area. Any objector will be able to make submissions to this inquiry, and these will all be considered by the inspector. At the end of the inquiry he or she will produce a report for the Secretary of State who will make the final decision about whether to approve the plans or not. I hope that you have found this fact sheet useful. If you have any questions or want more information please contact me by at david.watts@broxtoweliberaldemocrats.org.uk or ring me on