By Spelthorne Borough Council
In October 2020, Spelthorne Council announced that it intended to revise downward the housing needs figure for its new Local Plan, following heavy criticism of the Government’s original formula for calculating the number of new homes needed in local authority areas. This was derived from the Government’s plans to change the ‘standard methodology’ that resulted in a lower figure for Spelthorne in a recent consultation on changes to the current planning system. The Council learned on 16 December 2020 that the Government has now decided not to press ahead with the new methodology, which puts Spelthorne back to a higher housing need again.
The formula that was consulted on would have seen Spelthorne’s number drop from 606 homes per year to 489, a figure that would mean we could have delivered a better Local Plan with fewer or zero Green Belt sites needed for residential development. To revert to the higher figure takes away this opportunity and leaves the Council with an extremely onerous number to try and meet.
The decision to scrap the revised methodology seems to have stemmed from pressure by other local authorities in the south-east who saw their numbers go up, detracting from the Government’s aim to ‘level up’ cities and districts in the north. Whilst other nearby authorities will welcome the news that their figure goes down again, Spelthorne is one of the areas that is back to where it started.
Deputy Leader of the Council and Chair of the Local Plan Task Group, Cllr Jim McIlroy, said: “This announcement comes as a crushing disappointment after we made so much effort to lower our housing number, which we thought we achieved, only to see it go up again. We are trying to prepare a Local Plan that our communities will endorse and whilst the 489 homes per year figure was still high we felt it was a significant improvement that meant we could take out many of the largest and most impactful sites that our residents don’t want to see developed for housing. We will fight the Government on this and push for what was promised – that housing delivery would be balanced across the country and not concentrated in areas like Spelthorne that are already heavily constrained by Green Belt, waterbodies and pressures on infrastructure. I have written to our MP, Kwasi Kwarteng, and will write to the Secretary of State at the Ministry for Homes, Communities and Local Government.”
Spelthorne is the second smallest borough in Surrey and also the second most densely populated (on paper) with almost 2,000 people per km2. However, this density figure is actually far, far higher when you remove the assumptions in the algorithm and do the actual maths.
Spelthorne contains a very high percentage of land which, though quoted in official docu-mentation as “greenbelt” and therefore as-sumed available for housing projects, is actu-ally unavailable. This includes areas like, H.M.P. Bronzefield, Charlton Lane ‘eco park’ and Shepperton Studios expansion which are all still classed as Greenbelt. Our greenbelt also includes acres of gravel pit ‘lakes’ and large reservoirs.
The fairest way to re-allocate this housing target is to re-state our greenbelt and remove these anomalies. We urge you to contact our MP Kwasi Kwarteng to get his support on campaigning against this figure.