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The new government needs to take a “sensible” approach to how many houses should be built in places like Chorley, the borough’s council leader says.
Alistair Bradley told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) he is hoping for a reset of his authority’s relationship with housing ministers after its planning department was sanctioned by the previous Conservative administration for “poor quality decision-making”.
The Labour politician last year locked horns with the then Housing Secretary Michael Gove when Chorley Council was put into a form of special measures known as “designation”. The move was based on what the government considered was the excessive number of appeals in which developers succeeded in overturning the authority’s refusal of permission for new homes.
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Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million properties over the next five years by bringing back the kind of housebuilding targets which had caused problems for Chorley in their previous form before the Tories scrapped them just months before the general election.
Chancellor Rachel Reaves said in a speech within days of coming to power that while it will be “up to local communities to decide where the housing is built…it has to be built”, adding “the answer cannot always be ‘no’.”
Nevertheless, Cllr Bradley says he is “hopeful that more consistent, sensible policies” will be pursued by the new government, which will “recognise those areas that both have delivered large amounts of housing in the past and have a limited ability to keep doing those large [volumes] of housing in future”.
That was a reference to what he regards as the reason the council has found itself on the wrong side of a series of appeals in recent years – namely, a failure of the planning system to acknowledge that Chorley had over-delivered on new housing with the development of Buckshaw Village more than a decade ago and so should have been afforded reduced housebuilding targets in subsequent years. Seventy percent of the 4,000 dwellings in the village are within Chorley’s borders, while the remainder sit in South Ribble.
The LDRS asked the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government whether it would be reinstating the so-called “standard method” for calculating housebuilding targets – with which Chorley had struggled to comply – and was told that the exact details would be confirmed in a forthcoming update to national planning policy.
Meanwhile, Chorley Council last week published an action plan – demanded by Whitehall – outlining how it intends to be freed from its “designated” status.
When the authority was first hit with the sanction in December last year, it was feared it would enable developers to bypass the council’s planning process altogether and go straight to an independent national planning inspector for a decision on where houses could be built in Chorley. However, the government later issued guidance which meant that, in most cases, planning applications still had to go through the local authority.
Speaking during the meeting at which the council approved its action plan, cabinet member for planning Alistair Morwood said the authority had “good reasons” for refusing those housebuilding bids which had later been successfully challenged.
“We don’t actually think we did anything wrong,” Cllr Morwood said.
Alex Hilton, deputy chair of Chorley’s planning committee of councillors which decides whether to permit housing applications, added: “We, as elected members, represented our residents and felt that we made the correct decisions at that time.
“I think we need to ask what [designation] has actually achieved…[other than] a great deal of [council] officer stress, increasing workload, poor morale and damag[ing] the reputation [of] this council,” Cllr Hilton said.
However, he added that committee members would undertake additional training as part of the de-designation action plan “with good grace”.
Other elements of the nine-point action document include pledges to complete the delayed Central Lancashire Local Plan – the long-term blueprint for how many new homes should be built in each of Chorley, South Ribble and Preston – and to involve councillors earlier in the planning process for the most significant housing proposals.
Chorley Council’s designation arose after it exceeded the government’s 10 percent threshold for the proportion of major planning appeals ministers expect to be successful within a two-year period.
In the two years to March 2022 – the timeframe under consideration by Michael Gove when he designated Chorley in December 2023 – 17.9 percent of the 39 applications which had either been refused, or on which a decision had not been reached within the required time limit, were overturned by the Planning Inspectorate.
That figure had fallen to 14.6 percent for the 24 months to March 2023 and, according to as-yet-unpublished figures, stood at 7.9 percent for the two-year period to March 2024, which would bring the borough back beneath the government threshold. A decision on Chorley’s designation is expected later in the year.
‘No-one likes new houses being built’
Cllr Bradley told the LDRS that the new local plan for Central Lancashire – which will reinstate pooled housebuilding targets across Chorley, South Ribble and Preston, an arrangement that unravelled in the face of various planning appeal decisions over the last five years – was an example of the “local knowledge” he hoped the new government would value on planning issues.
“We’re doing enough to keep our communities growing and economically viable. In my view, we had too much interference from the previous regime…but, obviously, if we are not doing something we should be doing, [we will] take action.
“Nobody likes housing right next to where they live if they haven’t already got it. But most communities accept that there has to be the places for their families and their children to live – and that needs a sensible, grown-up conversation,” Cllr Bradley said.
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