In a letter to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government on 29 November 2024, Daisy Cooper MP demanded that the government urgently step in to enable St Albans District Council to use their Draft Local Plan to shield from speculative developments on greenbelt areas. Read this letter in full:
Dear Secretary of State,
Subject: Urgent action required to give immediate weight to St Albans District Council Draft Local Plan
St Albans District Council has today submitted its Draft Local Plan for examination so I’m writing to ask that Ministers take urgent action to enable the Council to use this Draft Plan to shield itself from speculative development with immediate effect.
I recognise of course that the Draft Local Plan is only this – a Draft – and that the Planning Inspector will need to give it due consideration in the proper way. But that process can take many months if not years, and during this time planning authorities such as St Albans District Council still have no tools with which to shield land that is not earmarked for development.
Ordinarily, as any Draft Local Plan passes through the various stages of Inspection, it accrues more “weight.”
But I would urge you to issue a Ministerial statement – directing the Planning Inspector to give this Draft Local Plan more weight from the get-go – for two compelling reasons.
First, the District Council has done everything possible to meet the new government’s earlier deadline, imposed by the draft National Planning Policy Framework changes published in July. It would be deeply unfair if the Council’s efforts to meet this earlier deadline were not recognised or reciprocated with similarly urgent action by the government.
Second, we know that the government want to see a plan-led system and so does our council. But St Albans District Council is facing the prospect of a tsunami of planning applications from developers, trying to ‘get in under the wire’ by exploiting the period between the Draft Local Plan being submitted and approved.
Developers and landowners have identified 355 separate greenbelt sites across our district on which they want to build – that’s a total of more than 57,000 homes they are seeking to build on our precious countryside. So I urge you to act so we can achieve that plan-led system.
More broadly, I know that you and your department are familiar with the particular circumstances of our area.
The Liberal Democrat administration at St Albans District Council have worked at pace to prepare this draft Local Plan, in partnership with residents and stakeholders across the district. This follows two failed attempts by the previous Conservative administration to protect our area from speculative and inappropriate development.
I am mindful that preparing this plan has been no easy task, given the considerable pressure the government’s standard method for imposing central housing targets has put on our community. The Liberal Democrat administration has followed the direction of your department, and the advice of the Planning Inspectorate, and put forward sites to accommodate the more than 14,000 homes – 885 per year over the plan period – demanded by this algorithm.
This has meant tough choices for our communities. Much of our historic city is quite properly protected from excessive densification by virtue of being in a conservation area, and there is very limited availability of brownfield sites. The result is that the District has had to prioritise protecting the most valuable green belt land, while offering up some as sites for new housing developments.
You will recall from my detailed consultation response in September this year, that I am firmly of the view that green belt should only be sacrificed for development where the homes built on it can be genuinely affordable social homes. I look forward to your response to that consultation, and sincerely hope that the government share my aspiration for a new generation of much needed social housing.
However, as it stands under the Conservatives planning framework which is still in operation, there is no such distinction and the big developers are ready to take full advantage of that. Once adopted, this draft local plan for our area will finally protect our precious green belt from the years of Conservative failure to tackle these applications. But in the meantime, we need urgent action from you to ensure the policies in our draft plan are given significantly more weight. That would mean that developers could no longer ride roughshod over our local planning service and build in the green spaces our communities are so desperate to protect for future generations. And Planning Inspectors would no longer be forced to accept appeals.
For all the reason, I urge you to issue a Written Ministerial Statement so that draft local plans such as ours can be given significant weight from the moment they have been submitted for examination.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Daisy Cooper MP
Member of Parliament for St Albans