Opinion: Labour’s plans for mass housebuilding will be challenging
To those who read these weekly columns you have my kind thoughts. I imagine it can’t always be easy to empathise with current and past holders of local office putting figurative pens to paper to share their thoughts and opinions, write’s Peterborough First’s Peter Hiller.
Some are negative, bitter and predictably pompous; others seeming to genuinely care about the future of our great city, using this public platform to communicate messages of hope and positivity. We Peterborough First members strive to place ourselves firmly in the latter contingent when we individually contribute; looking for an improving prosperity and quality of life of the residents within our wards and the City generally.
As experienced, long-standing councillors Peterborough First members recently felt able to spend 6 months as an effective temporary administration, set to repair the previously broken but essential partnership with Mayor Dr Nik Johnson’s Combined Authority, return our political relationships to one that works well for the cross-party membership in Peterborough and to present to full council a balanced budget – achieving a unanimously-approved adoption for the first time in well over 20 years!
Time has since proven that we actually did a pretty good job of steering the council ship through politically turbulent waters, endorsed recently by the council’s Improvement Panel of appointed experts.
Moving forward we now have a minority Labour group cabinet, which we will work with whilst it works to benefit the residents of this City and elected members of the council. It’s our job as the new shadow cabinet, and others in the opposition groups, to challenge the new administration, hold them to account and, as we’ve done already, call out decisions we feel have not represented the best interests of the City’s taxpayers.
As the council’s Shadow Cabinet member for Regeneration and Growth I naturally have particular interest in the new Labour government’s announced changes to our planning system, the National Planning Policy Framework (the overarching planning policy) and newly pledged commitment to building one-and-a-half million new homes nationally within their first five years. There’s no silver bullet to solve the national housing crisis and return the country to long-term sustainable economic growth. The government will need to deploy a range of tools to do this.
The announced changes to national policy are an important first step to put us back on the path to growth, combining targeted approach to Green Belt release (of which Peterborough has none), while reaffirming the presumption in favour of brownfield development, enabling viable development across a mix of tenures, and giving greater weight to critical infrastructure delivery in strategically important sectors, such as science and technology and renewables.
That said, like many I’ve spoken with, I’m concerned how this might possibly affect not just Peterborough’s existing well-populated urban areas and infrastructure but also the villages and rural services I and other Peterborough First councillors are elected to protect against inappropriate development schemes which potentially impact on existing communities, traffic levels, schools and health provision. We rural wards’ councillors aren’t against new development per-se but any proposals should be Local and Neighbourhood Plan compliant, sympathetic to our rural environment, acceptable to our Parish Councils and, most importantly, supported by our communities’ residents.
The government’s house building ambition is undoubtedly challenging, with industry experts already suggesting the improbability of the task, citing the lurch back to top- down housing targets imposed on local communities as riding roughshod over the wishes of local communities. That said, my insider friend in Westminster tells me that, as Peterborough currently overperforms in the numbers of annually completed houses, the imposed targets here will most likely be manageable within our existing framework. In addition, we are well underway in the involving process of creating a replacement Local Plan for Peterborough and its surrounding villages, which is very much a positive for our City in planning terms.
I sit on our Local Plan members’ Working Group, helping to advise our strategic planners in the development of it. I think it’s fair to say the Labour national and local new administrations are well past their respective honeymoon periods and for the sake of our country and certainly our great City I hope sensible minds prevail.
The new Labour MP Andrew Pakes is proving to be an effective ambassador for the Peterborough constituency and also taking a keen and active interest in our rural and farming communities. We independent members of Peterborough First hope this continues.