Council must own decisions – and explain them to public
IN one of the final acts of 2021, Rossendale Council signed off its new Local Plan, which sets out what can be built and where, in Rossendale over the next 15 or 20 years.
It has been a source of controversy for a number of years, not least because it has taken the council a number of years to actually complete.
And while it’s true to say that the council has to meet rules set by Government in the plan - such as the number of houses it must find space for - ultimately, it is down to the council to decide what goes where.
Housing, as we know, has been a controversial subject.
Some of the sites proposed for new housing have caused outrage.
But what has been perhaps more remarkable has been the reaction of leading Labour councillors to that outrage.
The attempts to absolve themselves from the decisions they have made is something we should expect to become a hot local election issue in the summer, when Rossendale Council will once again be up for grabs.
Reports from the full council meeting held to approve the plans - which were backed by Labour councillors and opposed by Tories - revealed councillors somehow trying to pass the blame on to the planning inspector for approving Rossendale’s Local Plan.
It’s not the job of the planning inspector to protect Rossendale’s green fields from the local council. It’s the inspector’s job to make sure the rules are not being broken.
If you want to protect green fields from being built on, don’t propose building houses on green fields.
Councillors also argued that the plan had cost £750,000 to create, as though that therefore meant it had to be adopted and used.
Presumably it’s that same approach to money which has seen the Empty Homes Scandal rise in cost from £2m to an estimated £7m last year.
For a small council like Rossendale, that’s an awful lot of money.
The plan may have cost £750,000, but that doesn’t make it right.
Take Edenfield for example, where more than 400 homes are planned in a village of 900 houses. It involves using Green Belt land supposedly protected.
In the planning inspector report back, we learn that Edenfield is described as having a range of local services, including a primary school, retail facilities and public transport links.
But the same report also says that the local primary school will have to expand to accommodate an extra half a class a year.
That’s a nightmare for any school - half-year classes always are - and where’s the money coming from to increase a school by 50%?
Apparently, Lancashire County Council, as the local highways authority, is confident Edenfield’s main street can cope with cars from an extra 400 houses, plus presumably everything else that comes with it - deliveries, for example.
Has anyone from LCC ever driven down Market Street in Edenfield during the day?
Then there’s the fact that the National Highways, which runs the A56, is unclear whether it might need some of the land to widen the A56 in the 2030s.
So by building on the site, the options to expand the A56 may become more limited or, at the very least, houses on the site may suddenly become much closer to a busy road than when the owners bought them just a few years before.
And that’s just one part of the Local Plan
It’s a Local Plan, and Rossendale Council needs to own its decisions and the councillors who voted for it need to explain to their constituents why they voted for something which, every time we look at it, seems more and more questionable.