Democracy in Action.

Courier Countryside Column 29^th March 2013

Democracy in Action: Parish battles for affordable homes

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty for villages like ours to find suitable locations for affordable housing.  People are naturally concerned about development on greenfield sites and there’s a general presumption against building in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a designation that covers almost our entire area.

So when a local institution recently applied for planning permission to consolidate buildings on their sprawling site, and to build twenty-four new houses to finance the work, our Parish Council took a keen interest.  This, we thought, could be a win win situation since there’s an obligation on developers to provide a percentage of affordable housing on new builds of more than 10 units.

Then we found the planning officers at Tunbridge Wells had determined the site was too far from the village centre and so was deemed ‘unsustainable’ for affordable units. Worse still they identified no local need for social housing, and said the developers could by-pass their responsibility by handing a sum of money to the Borough Council.  This could be used by our village if we could find suitable sites, or ‘cascaded’ out to nearby towns if we could not.

It was extremely disappointing. The development was likely to be the largest in our village for a generation and a golden opportunity for us to get the affordable housing that we knew was desperately needed.  And it was on brownfield land!

I was delegated to speak at the Borough planning meeting in Tunbridge Wells. The committee members – elected councillors – took a keen interest and questioned our case closely.  But the officers – civil servants –maintained outright opposition.  All seemed lost when a motion to pass the application unamended was proposed and seconded.

Then one Councillor said how concerned she was about the lack of on-site affordable units and proposed a deferment.  This generated some support. A showdown seemed imminent.  Suddenly the developers were whispering to the chief planning officer; an adjournment was granted; urgent phone calls were made, and huddled meetings conducted in the corridor.

Thirty minutes later the developers returned to the committee saying they would alter their application to include eight affordable units on-site. I could hardly believe we had done it. The borough councillors seemed equally delighted. And we all congratulated the developers for their flexibility.

As I left the Town Hall I reflected that this really had been and example of local government working for local people.