Finally, after an extremely long wait, we have firm dates for the Examination in Public. A Planning Inspector will hold public hearings about our new Local Plan on :

• Tuesday 23 May 2023 and run until Thursday 25 May 2023

• Tuesday 13 June 2023 and run until Thursday 15 June 2023

• Tuesday 20 June 2023 and run until Thursday 22 June 2023

The hearings will start at 10am each day.

This the final step in this extended process – it has taken six years to get to this point.

It is vital that we have a Local Plan that has been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. Without a valid Local Plan, the entire Borough is open to predatory Planning Applications from developers, against which the Borough has no defence.

The official notification can be found at https://spelthornelocalplan.info/submission-of-local-plan/news-and-updates/

Message from Spelthorne

Dear Sir/Madam,

As you have responded to Local Plan consultations previously or are on our Local Plan database, we are writing to you to tell you the Pre-submission version of the Spelthorne Local Plan was submitted to the Secretary of State for examination on Friday 25 November.

This is a crucial milestone and follows agreement last week by the Chair and Vice Chair of Environment & Sustainability Committee to minor changes and corrections to the Plan. We have received confirmation from the Planning Inspectorate that the Plan has been submitted and they will now proceed to appoint us an inspector.

We have a new dedicated website for the examination: https://spelthornelocalplan.info , where you can view the Local Plan and the supporting evidence and documents required for submission. It will be updated as we progress through the examination process and will soon include officer responses to representations people made during consultation, any letters we receive from our planning inspector, information about what stages we reach and the dates and documents for each hearing session, including links to the Planning Inspectorate videos explaining the examination process.

The hearings will be open to the public and live-streamed online. An inspector will be appointed within the next three weeks and then we will provide further details on when the hearings will take place, likely in spring 2023. We will notify the inspector of those residents and organisations who indicated their request to appear when they responded to the consultation.

The website also includes all the responses made during the Regulation 19 consultation, in A-Z order by respondent and also in policy/site order. These are very lengthy documents at around 2000 pages each so if you wish to find a particular individual, organisation or landowner, please use ‘ctrl F’ to bring up the search box where you can type the name of who you are trying to find.

Consultation responses and your personal data will be passed to the Planning Inspectorate and a Programme Officer. The Programme Officer works for the Planning Inspector who will examine the plan. The Programme Officer may contact you using the personal information you have provided.

Ann Biggs
Strategic Planning Manager

The last Public Consultation has just over five weeks to run. 5 September is the final date to submit your opinions to the Planning Inspector who will decide on our new Local Plan.

You will have heard from councillors of all flavours that the new Local Plan is not ideal. This is not through any errors by the Spelthorne Planning team. It is entirely the fault of the massive increase in housing targets sent down from Whitehall.

Nevertheless, we can be grateful that Kempton Park has been ruled out as a site for development.

But we are not out of the woods yet. Redrow and The Jockey Club will be arguing as strongly as they can – when the Planning Inspector holds the Examination in Public – that the Kempton Park estate should be opened up for development. KKG intends to be there to argue the opposite, in support of the Local Plan.

So it is vital that the Planning Inspector understands how important an issue Kempton Park is amongst the residents of Sunbury. It is so important that you express your opinion.

You don’t need any reminding of the reasons thousands of houses should not be built on Kempton Park. They would:

* destroy a vital section of Green Belt

*  increase the traffic load on the A308 Staines Road East, especially the pinch points at Sunbury Cross, Hampton, and the Hampton Court roundabout.

*  put unstainable pressure on all areas surrounding the estate, through extra flooding risk and pressure on overloaded infrastructure.

* permanently and negatively change the character of areas surrounding the estate.

You will no doubt have your own reasons.

All the details of how to respond to the Consultation can be found at https://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/localplan

Please use the Representation Form provided by the Council.

If you support Kempton Park being excluded as a site for development, our suggestions are as follows:

* Please type “Kempton Park” into the box marked “Other (Please specify) in Question 3 of Part B.  

* Please reply YES to all questions in question 4a of Part B.

* Please write your reasons why Kempton Park should NOT be developed in the box at Question 5 of Part B.

No need to write in to the Planning Inspector at length. Keep it short.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask us at keepkemptongreen@hotmail.co.uk

The draft Local Plan has been published, and Kempton Park is excluded as an area for development.

The twelve week final public consultation began last Wednesday, and will run until 5 September.

All the Local Plan documents can be viewed at:

https://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/localplan

The Local Plan itself is at:

Draft Local Plan 2022 – 2037

Kempton Park is only mentioned in passing in the above document, because it is not scheduled for development. That is because it was rated as well-performing Green Belt in two Green Belt Assessments, which can be viewed here:

https://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/Greenbeltassessment

We are going through all these documents in depth, and will get back to you with what we find.

You will have plenty of time to submit your thoughts on the draft Local Plan, and it is very important that you do.

If you would like to hear more, Ann Biggs, the Spelthorne Strategic Planning Officer, will be giving a presentation at the LOSRA AGM at 8pm on Wednesday 22 June.

https://www.losra.org/docs/LOSRA-AGM-news2022.pdf

Spelthorne Council met last evening to decide whether to send our draft Local Plan to what is known as the Regulation 19 Consultation. This will be a final Public Consultation, during which everyone in Spelthorne can have their say about the Plan.

There were fears beforehand that the vote would be extremely tight. As it happened, the meeting was run swiftly and efficiently, and there were no wrecking amendments. The motion to send our Local Plan forward to the next stage succeeded. By our calculation, the vote was 26 votes in favour vs 8 against.

The Public Consultation will run from 15 June 2022 to 5 September 2022 – so, twelve weeks, which is double the statutory requirement. Once the Consultation documents are available we will publicise details as to where to find them.

Submissions by the public will be collated and sent, together with the draft Local Plan, to the Planning Inspector who will preside over the Examination in Public of the Local Plan. That public hearing is crucial to the protection of Green Belt, at Kempton Park and elsewhere in the Borough.

So, two things:

1. Please use the Public Consultation as an opportunity to send your views direct to the Planning Inspector.
2. We are now entering an intensely legal process. Any contributions to our Fighting Fund will be most welcome.

First, a heartfelt thanks to those who came to listen to Joglaresa in St Mary’s Church at the end of April. Also to those who bought tickets even though they could not attend on the night, and to those who have donated to KKG subsequently. Altogether, a pleasing boost to our Fighting Fund.

We are now one step closer to getting our new Local Plan over the line. At its last meeting, the Local Plan Task Group referred our draft Local Plan to be considered by the Environment and Sustainability Committee. At a meeting on 26 April, that Committee resolved to refer the draft Local Plan to a meeting of the full Council for a final decision. The meeting will take place this Thursday, 19 May. It will be up to the Councillors to decide whether to send the draft Local Plan to what is known as the Regulation 19 Consultation. This will be a final Public Consultation, during which everyone in Spelthorne can have their final say about the Plan.

A number of things should be borne in mind:

1. Strangely, it appears to some that it is only Staines which is bearing the burden in the draft Plan. But that ignores other places in the Borough where sites have been earmarked for development , and the significant threat (by our NOT having a Local Plan) to many other sites – in Staines, and everywhere else – which would otherwise be protected in our Local Plan.

(See https://keepkemptongreen.com/2022/03/29/home-truths-3/)

The truth is that the unfortunate situation we are in (just like Boroughs the length and breadth of England) makes it necessary to address the targets sent down by Whitehall. We simply cannot ignore them. And the burden will fall on everyone in this Borough, one way or another (in addition, we might add, to the huge cost to every Council Tax payer across this Borough of the year-long appeasement moratorium on development in Staines – £939 000 – which could have been far better spent elsewhere, such as reducing the increase in everyone’s Council Tax).

2. There has been claim and counter claim in the press about the importance of those Whitehall housing targets. The Secretary of State, Michael Gove, said that the 300 000 per annum target wasn’t the be-all and end-all of planning policy. That claim was quickly denied by No 10, and Mr Gove has back-pedalled since. The truth is that those statements, and any other political statement likely to emerge on this subject, make not a single jot of difference to planning policy. Planning policy only changes when it is altered by an Act of Parliament, or a Regulation issued by the Whitehall department. The targets, most uncomfortable as they are, therefore remain, until specifically changed by legislation in one form or another.

Those hoping for the cavalry to come charging over the hill to reduce the housing targets are doomed to disappointment. In the last week, a meeting of Strategic Planning Officers from across the country with Whitehall officials could not extract a single answer on the issue of housing targets. The repeated questions to the officials were repeatedly ducked. That does not sound to us like a bugle call from the cavalry.

3. Our local Plan has been debated for going-on 100 hours in the various forums of our Council, before we even get to the meeting on Thursday. Everything that could possibly be said about it has already been said.

In the best of all possible worlds we would not be arguing like this over our new Local Plan. But we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. We have to make the best of a thoroughly undesirable situation. We have to get this Local Plan through to the Regulation 19 Consultation. If we think the Local Plan puts us in a bad situation, just think about what things would be like without a Local Plan: open season for developers to do as they please.

We sincerely hope that all Borough Councillors will do the right thing on Thursday evening.

Vote the draft Local Plan through to Regulation 19.

Please, no more Groundhog Days…

Housing market arithmetic

The government’s target of building 300 000 dwellings each year has been around for a number of years. It was first announced in the Autumn Budget of 2017. It was included in the Conservative Party election manifesto in 2019. Since then it has been referred to – approvingly – by any number of Cabinet ministers, most recently in the last two weeks when the Whitehall department said it was not going to reduce the 300 000 target, nor change the standard method for calculating each Borough’s contribution to this overall target.

We can take it, then, that the government is wedded to this policy. It is not going away.

If one adds up the housing targets of all the Local Planning Authorities, after taking account of the adjustment for the pandemic, and the 20% buffers applied to those LPAs not meeting their housing targets,

(see https://keepkemptongreen.com/2022/03/19/hometruths-2/ )

one gets a number that is very close to 300 000.

Thus, each LPA’s contribution is important in achieving the total. Spelthorne’s housing target is 611 dwellings per annum, which is a very high target compared with the target under the previous Local Plan of 166 per annum. But we are not alone. Other Boroughs’ targets have also risen by very large amounts.

A small number of Spelthorne Councillors want a second plea to be made to Whitehall to have the Spelthorne target reduced. (The first approach was rejected by the Department in 2020.) In addition, they want Spelthorne to produce a Local Plan that ignores this housing target completely.

The problem is, if Spelthorne were to have its housing target reduced (which is extremely unlikely to happen) then it would require some other Borough to make up the difference, in order to maintain the 300 000 total. The same applies to just ignoring the Whitehall target in a new Local Plan. As far as the Department is concerned, the dwellings have to be built somewhere, if not in Spelthorne. It really is a case of 2 minus 1 equalling 2.

But in reality they will force Spelthorne to adhere to its target, one way or another. They are already starting to do so, through the use of the “Tilted Balance”, putting all sites in the Borough at risk:

(see  https://keepkemptongreen.com/2022/03/19/hometruths-2/ and https://keepkemptongreen.com/2022/03/29/home-truths-3/ )

You can see why these plans to change and/or ignore the housing targets are doomed to failure. Central government won’t allow it, and other Boroughs won’t accept our deficit being shifted onto them, especially given that 71% of Boroughs are so far achieving their targets. Spelthorne is one of the minority that are not.

The only way to protect what we have – whether Green Belt or Brownfield – is to have a Local Plan which addresses this problem of very high housing targets, and provides as much protection as is possible, within the law. We cannot ignore the problem, or hope it will be shifted elsewhere.

We already have such a Local Plan, which gives the best protection possible. It is up to the Spelthorne councillors to adopt that plan, put it forward to its final public consultation, and remove this Borough from the free-for-all limbo in which it has languished for the last few years.

p.s. Don’t forget the Joglaresa performance on Friday 29 April. A musical evening that you will never forget. Contact us at keepkemptongreen@hotmail.co.uk to book your seat. Details below: