‘Really?’ is a question that you hope a journalist never asks you. It means that you’ve probably just said something a bit mad and they’d like you to elaborate.
‘Really?’ is what much of the village is saying to the local planning committee now.
This week it nodded through the building of 60 houses in the centre of the village. There are 320 houses here, so that is roughly 20 per cent growth. It will also change the nature of the village, which is linear, with a big block of what will doubtless be called Premium Executive Dwellings.
Currently, it is fields for horses. The local planning officer told the meeting that building these 60 houses on the horses’ fields would have a ‘negligible impact on the environment’. Really?
Protected and cherished
About a third of the village had turned out to oppose the scheme which had been put forward by a firm who haven’t had the decency to talk to the community, and who, at planning stage, don’t have a definitive drawing of what to expect. Really?
We might as well not have bothered. The councillors voted it through on the nod, citing the necessity to do what the government had told them. Really?
Durham Parish Council conversely has vowed to protect its Green Belt land, saying that it isn’t just space to be built on, its land to be protected and cherished. Take note, local council.
Sixty houses may not sound like much if you live in the suburbs, or a city centre.
But it is out of place in a village of 320 homes. Worse, it creates precedent for not only the rascally developers themselves, but others who are circling, earmarking any spare bit of land they can find in the village to build on. Will the planning committee stand up for the village in the future, or nod things through again?
Locals care about the village. They cheered for anyone who spoke up for it and were told by the chairman (who clearly has a sense of his own importance) that it ‘wasn’t a football match’. At the end, when outraged and tearful, some people booed, he waved us away with the words, ‘Go home’. He might have added ‘you peasants’.
After the meeting I walked up to fields to mourn their loss.
The four horses stood quietly, dozing in the evening light. A family of rabbits bounded happily across the grass. The view was of oak trees, and hedgerows, horses and wildlife. Soon it will be houses, their people, their 120 cars on narrow lanes, their noise. ‘Negligible impact on the environment’: really?
‘Who’s to blame?’ is another great journalistic question that gets to the heart of the matter. Here, you could write a list.
First, Sir Keir Starmer and his team for coming up with the 1.5m number and not defining clearly how that was going to be rolled out.
Second, the many, many people in the administration who didn’t think through how it would be implemented, who didn’t join the dots between land use, building policy and climate change, who didn’t think for a nanosecond that you might want to build where there are public transport and infrastructure, and not on fields. After all, we need to be greening our environment, not building on it.
Third, you could blame the council’s planning team whose ‘we’re just following orders’ approach represented a failure to care for the area which they oversee.
‘Spineless’, ‘gutless’, ‘shameful’, were all ways in which they have been described subsequently.
It was clear that this had been decided months ago. It wouldn’t have mattered what we said, the local council’s planning team had signed the land away.
It won’t affect Sir Keir Starmer, his team, or the local council. But building over the countryside will, in the end, impact all of us, as our climate warms and our environment changes. Yes, really.