Council has chance to refocus housing plans
WHAT should be at the top of the intray for Rossendale’s Labour leader Alyson Barnes, after the party strengthened its grip on power following the local elections?
Delivering on town centre improvements, the new leisure facilities promised becoming a reality and managing increasingly shaky finances due to inflation and diminishing government support all need to be priorities for the Labour leadership.
But there is also a compelling case for the council to reopen its Local Plan, the Governmentrequired document which determines what every piece of land can - or cannot - be used for in the borough.
It took two attempts for the council to get to the current Local Plan - not having one runs the risk of developers being able to do anything, anywhere, with little room for the council to oppose to reject planning applications.
However, the current Local Plan is unpopular on a number of fronts, especially around house building.
The council has allocated large swathes of green field land for housing development, arguing that the Government expects it to find space for new homes, and it needs to be land which house builders are prepared to develop on.
When it started putting together its Local Plan, the council had an annual housing target from Government.
Working with local MP Jake Berry, the council convinced the Government to reduce that target.
Latterly, the Government has said that those targets should be seen as ambitions, rather than targets which must be hit.
Lots of councils have now started rowing back on their previous housing commitments as a result.
Obviously, if everywhere in the country said that we didn’t want to build any more homes, there would be a crisis.
We need the new homes. The right sort of new homes help keep people in the areas where they grew up. They help improve the economy, and provide jobs too.
For an area like Rossendale, the right house building in the right locations is key to economic growth in the area.
The problem is that the scale of the Government’s house-building target for
Rossendale was such the council felt it had no choice but to open up a lot of countryside for development. It insisted it was doing so only because of the Government targets, which, bluntly, don’t exist any more.
So lets reopen the Local Plan and decide what level of house building is right for Rossendale and what sort of house-building it should be.
The proposals for Edenfield, for example, see hundreds of new houses being added to a small village which doesn’t have schooling or medical services to support such a population growth.
It’s a hard village to drive around or through at the best of times. Surely the council now has the chance to look at what it signed off and say: “Do we really need to do that?”
A greater focus - or insistence - that developers make the most of brownfield sites, of which we have many, such as the burnt-out mill at the foot of the Grane Road in Haslingden where a developer does actually want to build homes but the council said no, due to the local plan saying that land should be for industrial purposes, would be a great start.
Sir Keir Starmer vowed to bring back house building targets if he becomes PM next year, which smells like a potential vote loser for Labour in parts for Rossendale.
Therefore, has a small window of opportunity to get a Local Plan which works for Rossendale up and running before we get bogged down in the run-up for the 2024 General Election.