Housing Bombshell

At the start of the year Cornwall Council had a Local Plan and a Five Year Land Supply. These are important documents which set out how many houses we’re going to build up to 2030, where we’re going to put them and that we have the sites (land supply) to support this. These are particularly important documents if the Council refuses a planning application.

The Developers can appeal to the Planning Inspector and the first question he asks is do you have an up to date Local Plan and a Five Year Land Supply? If you don’t, there’s a presumption in favour of development, and the Council is more than half way to losing the appeal.

Up to the 1st January we could have confidently answered yes. Our target is 2,707 houses per year, and we have the sites for them. We don’t always manage it, there are lots of variables beyond our control like availability of builders, finance, etc. but we’re ok. Or we were. During January the Government in London dropped what one Councillor described as ‘a nuclear bomb’ on us. They announced, without warning that our new target would be 4,421, with immediate effect. That means our Local Plan is out of date and we no longer have a Five Year Land Supply.

This puts Cornwall completely at the mercy of speculative developers. It doesn’t matter how many people object or if our Planning Committees vote to refuse the application, the Inspector will say if there’s no Local Plan, there’s a presumption in favour of development. The last Local Plan took four years to prepare. I asked ‘Can’t we just cross out 2,707 and write 4,421 and be compliant?’ But of course it’s not that simple.

We have to have the land to put these extra houses on, and we don’t.

The answer seems to be higher density, going up, three or four storey blocks. Nobody wants that, but we’re scrabbling about for solutions at the moment. I’m not against development, our young people need somewhere to live. If the Government was giving us grants to build affordable rentals for young people, or social housing, I’d be there. But what they’ve done is usher in a Wild West where speculative developers will be jumping on land that wouldn’t have been considered for development as recently as December. And your local Councillors didn’t vote for this, it’s come from London, and shamefully some of our local MP’s put their hands up and voted for it. The next step is that at the end of the month Cornwall Council will put out a call for sites, and the wrangling will begin!

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