What a change! Definitely a touch of Dickens’ Uriah Heep…
The Chair of the Environment & Sustainablility Committee has written to the Inspector regarding the Extraordinary Meeting on 29 February.
You can read his letter by clicking here.
Note the change in tone from the letters written by our Paramount Chief.
Perhaps Cllr Beecher should run a letter-writing course for his fellow councillors.
Catriona Riddell – planning consultant, and Best Friend of our Paramount Chief (for a fee) – summed it up at the start of the Extraordinary Meeting of the Environment and Sustainability Committee on 29 February:
“The Council cannot withdraw the Local Plan from Examination, because the Minister forbids it. Only the Inspector can withdraw the Local Plan from Examination.”
And so the Committee duly resolved to provoke the Inspector into doing for them that which they could not do for themselves, by proposing VERY substantial changes to the existing draft Local plan, resulting in a 13% reduction in the housing target.
Standard procedure is that any decision made by Environment and Sustainability Committee would take the form of a recommendation to the full Council, whose members would then decide, but our Paramount Chief has decided to dispense with the standard procedure. So these decisions will go forward directly in a letter to the Inspector.
Three votes were held, on the topics of Green Belt Sites, Flood Risk Sites, and the Staines Development Framework. There were three options for each topic, except for the Staines Framework, which had two options.
Below are the three options decided upon. Those councillors who voted for each motion are shown.
1. Remove all Green Belt allocations from the Local Plan with the exception of the two allocations that meet the need for Gypsy, Traveller and Travelling Showpeople.
2. Keep all proposed flood risk sites but remove those at high risk of flooding and move some higher risk sites to later in the Plan period (11-15 years) to allow the River Thames Scheme to be operational and effective, the design code to be completed, and subject to no resolution objection from the Environment Agency.
3. Withdraw the Staines Development Framework as a core document.
The options availables, and the option chosen are shown in the table below.
As regards how the Inspector will react, it is not a binary position. The Inspector may indeed return the Plan to the Examination, including this substantial reduction in the housing target, but then the Council will need to brace itself for legal challenges from developers.
The Inspector could withdraw the Plan and tell the Council to start again and produce a sound plan, which is what the Paramount Chief wants, but which leaves the Borough exposed to an open-ended season of predatory planning applications.
Or the Inspector could be creative. Mr Bridgwater showed during the Examination hearings that he is a very creative man.
Click here to read the letter.
Yes. So would we.
In other news, it seems that our Paramount Chief has abandoned her plans to replace the Rt Hon Kwasi Kwarteng as MP for the Spelthorne constituency …
We already know that Council Leader Sexton likes to write to the Minister.
You can read her various missives here.
On 11 December her tone changed when writing to Lee Rowley, the new Whitehall Minister, for the first time. And she dropped her threat to sue the government (always an empty threat in any case).
But her requests for a face-to-face meeting remained the same throughout. She must feel that she can charm the Minister into giving Spelthorne a free pass. Who knows. The members of this current Spelthorne coalition have never been accused of living in the real world.
But as we have said before on numerous occasions, it is no use arguing that Spelthorne is special. Every borough in the country thinks it is special. If the Ministry gave way on one Borough, every other Borough would be clamouring for special treatment.
So, last Friday, 26 Jan 2024, the new Minister replied to Cllr Sexton. “Thanks, but no thanks” to her demand for a meeting…
And just in case she missed the point of his letter:
“I look forward to further updates on progress on resumption of the examination hearings.”
“Get on with it…”, in effect
You can read his letter here.
And if Cllr Sexton thinks that the new Minister is going to be more malleable than the Minister he replaced, then she should think again. Last week, the new Minister wrote to Mole Valley District Council, another Surrey Borough, ordering them not to withdraw their Local Plan from the Examination process …
Council Leader Sexton has been railing against the Whitehall Housing Minister for months, threatening legal action against the Ministerial intervention while demanding an urgent face to face meeting with the Minister.
Click here
and here
to read her previous letters.
Her language in Council meetings has been equally intemperate.
But now, in the stand-off with the officials, she has blinked.
She still demands a face to face meeting. You can read her latest letter here.
It is a mystery why she thinks this will change anything. Council leaders and officials have been writing to the Ministry and meeting with the Ministry for years, each time trying to get the housing targets for Spelthorne reduced. And each effort has failed.
It’s all very well saying that Spelthorne is special, but every Borough in the land thinks the same. If the Minister concedes to Spelthorne’s demands he will have to concede to the demands of every other Borough as well.
Periodically, Spelthorne Council holds meetings between the political leadership and the Borough’s Residents’ Associations. If you had attended the last one, on 26 October, you will have been struck that the current political leaders of this Borough are very adept at blaming other people for problems they created themselves. Again and again, it happened. At one stage, in response to criticisms from the Associations, our Paramount Chief tried to blame the Associations themselves.
“I feel like you’re putting me on trial for decisions taken by the Council as a whole,” she complained.
Well…er…yes. The buck stops with you, Cllr Sexton. You are the Paramount Chief, after all. You make all the decisions, and your deputy agrees with your every word.
And all the while Little Chief Bateson sat nodding his head dutifully in agreement with her every word.
Cllr Sexton, of course, blames the Ministry for intervening, to stop her withdrawing our Local Plan from the Examination process completely, binning it, and starting again from scratch. At vast unbudgeted expense. (With Cllr Bateson nodding in agreement with these excuses in the background) You can read her (and his) complaints here.
Well, the Minister has replied. No doubt on legal advice, she has dismissed every excuse made by Cllr Sexton, and told her to get on with it.
You can read the Minister’s letter here. (Rachel Maclean was replaced as Housing Minister shortly after this letter. But the intervention in Spelthorne’s plan was by Michael Gove, her Secretary of State, so the letter is official rather than personal.)
So, Cllr Sexton’s sole policy – binning the Local Plan – has gone up in smoke.
You can bet you won’t read that in HER Christmas smoke signals this year…
The latest excuse (in a list of previous excuses) for delay at the last Extraordinary Council Meeting, for a further “pause” in the Examinaton in Public of the Local Plan,was:
“Extend the pause in the Examination timetable until the proposed changes to the National Planning Policy Framework have been published (expected in the autumn) before determining the next steps and take immediate legal advice to confirm the validity of the minister’s directive”
Well, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill received Royal Assent yesterday. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-laws-to-speed-up-planning-build-homes-and-level-up
And just how is that threat of a Judicial Review of the Minister’s intervention going? Paramount Chief Sexton, two days ago, blamed any delay in taking the Minister to court on the Minister herself: “I am waiting for a reply from the Minister to my letter.”
It doesn’t quite work like that…
To the Council Offices in Knowle Green last evening (25 October) for the first pow-wow between residents’ associations and the new Sexton Paramount Chieftaincy. Sat next to her was her deputy, Little Chief Running Horse.
At one stage the discussion turned to the topic of predatory development – a topic of much interest these days as the Borough flounders with no valid Local Plan, raising the severe risk that sites in the Borough – whether Green Belt of Brownfield, large or small – will be prey to predatory development, or planning-by-appeal.
Little Chief Running Horse said:
“Last week the Planning Committee considered the Running Horse application [where a developer wishes to build a retirement complex on Green Belt – our comment]. I can assure you that the Local Plan has nothing to do with that application.”
We beg to differ, Little Chief. As we and others pointed out last evening, predatory development, or planning-by-appeal, takes place at a higher tribunal, when, if the Borough Planning Committee refuses an application, the developer takes it on Appeal to an Inspector citing the lack of a valid Local Plan, and therefore the inability of the Council to prove a five-year supply of land. It is no use hiding behind the Borough Planning Committee. It hasn’t happened yet for the Running Horse site, but we wouldn’t bet against it.
And the reason we say that is because the developer threatens to do it in their application.
Little Chief, please read the document:
which is publicly available on the Council’s website. This is a document written by one of the developer’s consultants and submitted as part of the application. You will find it illuminating reading, not least the following paragraph 1.3 which we reproduce here for your convenience:
Dear Little Chief, you are a member of the Planning Committee, and should really have read the application documents before making a decision on it. You really need to up your game and provide better answers than you did.
Keep Kempton Green 