Notes from the Green Belt: welcome to Basildon
Are you sitting comfortably? Belted up? Then come take a drive with me past Canary Wharf out of London eastwards on the A13. Skimming along to the north of the Thames Estuary. And where are we headed? It doesn’t get any better than this, traveller. We’re off to Basildon. You lucky duck. Now, you may be asking: why oh why have you taken me here? Well. I’ll tell you:
Basildon (from the Saxon for “Beorhtels Hill”) has been around for over 1,000 years. But until only a few decades ago, it was a modest hamlet sandwiched between Laindon and Pitsea. Its recent history, and the transformation into the Bas Vegas some of you may know and/or love, was shaped by two complementary currents in the early English planning system: the New Towns movement, and the advent of the Metropolitan Green Belt.
A little history? Just a smidge: after the 2nd World War, 11 new towns were designated in the 1st programme of construction under the New Towns Act 1946. 8 of them formed a ring around London: Stevenage was the first in 1946, followed by Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield, Bracknell and Basildon by 1950. At the same time, under the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 [there’s some proper planning reform for you, Ed.], local authorities were required to survey their areas to produce a new-fangled kind of document called a “development plan” - to identify where the roads go, the buildings, the industrial sites, the parks, the nature reserves, all of it. Do the survey. Draw it all on a map. Submit it to the Minister. What could possibly go wrong. And - an important bit this - review the thing “at least once in every five years” after adoption. At least once. That requirement for regular reviews was baked into our system from the start.
And that takes us to the Green Belt. That planning policy most known about but least understood. The confusion starts with that name. It’s not all green, and it definitely isn’t a belt. If they were called “urban containment zones” or something a little less poetic, more of us might understand what Green Belts are actually for.
The idea of green “girdles” around our cities goes back to the 19th century. But the story of the modern Green Belt – or Green Belts really, as England has 14 of them – starts a few years after the birth of the New Towns movement in 1955 when Duncan Sandys, then Minister of Housing and Local Government, told the House of Commons:
“I am convinced that, for the well-being of our people and for the preservation of the countryside, we have a clear duty to do all we can to prevent the further unrestricted sprawl of the great cities.”
A Government Circular (what other shape could it have been?) followed which set our first national Green Belt policy. A remarkable document. Because over 65 years later, after countless rounds of reform, that policy has barely changed.
Today almost 13% of England is in the Green Belt - over 1.6 million hectares. The Metropolitan Green Belt around London is half a million hectares, 3 times bigger than Greater London itself, bigger than Trinidad and Tobago and twice the size of Luxembourg. Here’s the current lie of the land:
Is the Green belt “under threat”? Depends who you ask. But to give you a feel: in the last year, the area of England’s Green Belt increased by over 24,000 hectares. It’s well over doubled in size since the late 1970s. So. Worry not. England’s Green Belt isn’t exactly on its last legs. We desperately need to have a proper, grown up conversation about the Green Belt - what it’s actually for, how it works, and how its mangled and misapplied by policymakers and politicians. Which is something I’ve been moaning about for years - including here in the Financial Times here, and (I’m sorry to say) many, many times on this blog including here. But all that’s for another day.
So. Back to Basildon. Where, I’m sorry to report, those 5-yearly reviews haven’t quite been happening. Not by a long shot. Basildon’s last local plan was adopted in March 1998. When the charts were ruled by Celine Dion’s Titanic epic “My Heart Will Go On”. That 1998 local plan was designed to meet the needs set by the Essex Structure Plan, which itself was first adopted in 1982. It’s all getting a little long in the tooth.
Today, 63% of Basildon district is within the Green Belt - essentially everything outside its urban boundaries. A new plan for Basildon was submitted to the Secretary of State for examination in March 2019 which - among other things - proposed to release swathes of land from the Green Belt for housing, infrastructure and other things. However, earlier this year, Basildon’s members decided to withdraw that emerging local plan (citing - you guessed it - the old song and dance about “mutant algorithms”. Another example of the harm caused by the dreadful misreporting of issues around housing numbers I talked about here) and there’s now no prospect of adopting another one until - the Council tell us - the end of 2027. At best. Which will be 3 decades after the previous plan. Like Celine Dion’s heart, it’s goes on and on and on and on.
In the meantime, of course, the needs of the people who live and work in Basildon (and the many more who would like to if only they could) don’t disappear. They compound. For instance, there are now almost 2,300 households waiting on the housing register. That’s a 44% increase on the year before – amounting to 13 new households joining the register every week. Meanwhile, the Council had spent years producing an evidence base to decide where new houses should be located in order to meet those needs. So what happens to those sites? Do they go in bin alongside the discarded local plan?
No they don’t. Last week, after a planning inquiry in September, Inspector Owen Woodwards allowed an appeal at a site called Maitland Lodge - one of the previously-preferred sites for allocation for a new residential development in the Green Belt on the southern edge of Billericay. The decision is here (full disclosure: I acted for the developer, Inland Homes).
The Inspector noted that significant Green Belt release in Basildon is inevitable. He acknowledged that, as a new local plan is many years away, it is necessary to consider this through the development management process. He described the shortfalls in housing land supply and delivery in Basildon as “stark” and affordable housing delivery as “abysmal” - all, of course, the consequence of not having a plan in place for so many years. In the end, he afforded “very substantial positive weight” to the scheme’s provision of market homes and “very substantial positive weight” to its provision of affordable homes.
What are the take-aways from an appeal decision like this:
We’ve taken a trip to Basildon today (and I hope you’ll come again), but we know that the failure of the plan-led system in Basildon isn’t unique. Far from it. There are lots of comparable disasters in e.g. St Albans and Welwyn Hatfield that I wrote about in my blog about my appeal in Colney Heath last year: here. We’ve seen similar debacles more recently in Hertsmere and Castle Point. Add to that, the massive and growing list of authorities who’ve placed their plans on long-term hiatus - Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, East Hampshire, Epping Forest, Medway, Slough, Stockport, Thanet, Three Rivers, Wealden and on and on. But again: when plans are withdrawn or kicked into the long grass, the pressure to meet needs in those districts doesn’t dissipate. The planning system still seeks to address those needs. But without a plan, the system’s forced to address needs through the process of development management on quote unquote “speculative” planning applications, which will include - if members refuse applications locally, as often they will - the need for an appeal.
As Inspector Woodwards made clear in the Mailtand Lodge decision, a draft local plan may be withdrawn, but the evidence base which supported that plan (and its proposed allocations) can still - and will still - attract weight.
All of which means that when plans are withdrawn as they have recently been in e.g. Basildon, Herstmere and Castle Point, we can expect many (many!) more appeals like the one at Maitland Lodge over the next 18 months or so on sites in the Green Belt which had been proposed for allocation. And some sites which hadn’t been. Not all those appeals will succeed, of course. But many will - note that over the last 12 months, almost 6 in 10 appeals decided at inquiry have been successful across the board. But let’s be clear. This is not plan-led. There’s not a plan-led thing about it. Still, successful appeals like the one at Maitland Lodge are (I think, anyway) an inevitable consequence of Councils like Basildon turning their back for so many years on the need to have an up-to-date local plan. So. Watch this space. There’s more to come in the world of Green Belt planning appeals.
What’s the real answer? To curb the need for all of this so-called “planning by appeal”? Sing it with me: WE. NEED. MORE. PLANS. Ours is a plan-led system (on which, more here). At least, it was supposed to be. But here’s the catch: plan-led systems don’t work without plans. And, in many districts, and in particular Green Belt districts, our system manages to reward local politicians who vote to stand in the way of progressing desperately needed new plans. Until we make it in the interests of planning authorities to produce plans, we’ll be banging our heads against the same wall. Time after time after time.
I hope you’re hanging in there, #planoraks. I’ll bet you can’t wait for the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, right? Where we’ll find out together how much planning reform we can expect alongside what we expect will be further cuts to local authority budgets all over the country. I hope you can stay cool. Through all the madness. And those of you involved in local plan-making - good luck, and keep at it! You’re doing god’s work. The politicians will have to come around eventually - just like they did last week in North Hertfordshire (BRAVO). Until then, stay well. And, most important: #keeponplanning.
