Memorandum by Ashford Rural Trust (SHC
35)
PURPOSE OF
THE MEMORANDUM
To consider in particular whether the proposals
contained in the Deputy Prime Minister's 18 July 2002 statement
on housing and planning are desirable and whether and how they
can be achieved.
ARE THE
PROPOSALS DESIRABLE?
An aim of this Trust is to protect the rural
approaches and the town of Ashford from planning excesses. The
Trust is not against the economic development and enlargement
of the town and supports the selection of Ashford as a Growth
Area, subject to the following conditions.
CONDITIONS
1. Growth in housing units must be restricted
to a scale expressly related to growth in local employment opportunities,
so ruling out speculative building and minimising the danger of
Ashford becoming merely a dormitory town.
2. If 1. above is achieved in a meaningful
manner, demand will sustain rather than reduce new house prices
and serve to protect equity values of recently constructed and
purchased properties.
3. We question the concentration of development
on Ashford town to the apparent exclusionof adjacent areas of
deprivation including Dover and Folkestone. Under circumstances
highlighted at 4. below, both areas could benefit economically,
as could Ashford, from operation of the CTRL to London and to
Northern Europe.
4. Significant numbers of East Kent home
owners and tenants resident in and around Ashford presently commute
to and from London in out-dated rail travel conditions. The Strategic
Rail Authority is yet to determine if national and international
fast track commuting will be available on the CTRL using Eurostar
or alternative designated rolling stock. We submit that this aspect
of prospects for Ashford as a Growth Area deserves much more serious,
urgent and imaginative consideration than is apparent at present.
5. Proposals appear to assume that financing
will be forthcoming to fund resolution of prerequisite issues
such as current infrastructural shortcomings (in particular roads,
but including power and water supplies and drainage), social infrastructural
needs, (schools, hospitals, public transport) and flood plain
constraints. Such financing is not presently, and cannot be, made
available by local government. Nor, of course, is financing locally
available to fund the perceived urban renewal needs and the brownfield
redevelopment of Ashford town. See 6. below.
6. Whilst until recently the Ashford Borough
Council seemed content to accept and plan for an Option 2 annual
accretion of a maximum of 700 housing units for the town (not
the borough) over a defined planning period, it would now appear
that in order to secure central government funding for associated
development needs, the Borough Council has had to agree to plan
for an imposed 1,000 plus units per year over the same period.
This feature alone seems to make a nonsense of the massive and
still on-going public consultative exercise undertaken by the
Borough Council amongst its tax-paying citizens.
7. The 18 July proposals pronounce merely
on the intention to enlarge Ashford as a Growth Area in the South
East, seeming to anticipate the predictably negatively viewed
social engineering aspects of the public response but resolving
to handle these aspects once they have been measured. Ashford
has previous, immediate post-World War II experience of social
engineering—in its Stanhope neighbourhood—and is still
living with the negative social outcome evidenced by the low educational,
aspirational, employment and earning achievement standards resulting.
In no way do these proposals by themselves "promote high
quality sustainable communities whilst avoiding poorly designed
urban sprawl". Admirable though such intentions are in themselves,
they are mere words promoting ideals.
8. We have no views to state in this Memorandum
on Millennium Villages.
9. The Trust recognises and supports the
need for a balance of social housing if we understand correctly
that by this, is meant low-cost, affordable starter homes, to
be provided in urban areas and in villages. Planning regulations
as currently implemented have resulted in a shortage in supply
of such housing especially in the borough's villages, in turn
contributing to unit price escalation in this sector. What we
do not support is the provision of social housing in this borough
expressly intended for occupation by low paid, principally social
services workers, employed in and having to commute to and from
London.
10. It is the view of the Trust that decisions
relating to housing (includingnumbers, tenure and density) should
be the sole responsibility of local government; such decisions
need to be taken in relation to relevant prevailing local market
forces; local government must be more familiar with these than
central government. Kent County Council through its current Structure
Plan and in accord with Ashford Borough Council through its Local
Plan have together adequately managed such responsibility over
recent years, especially since the former "predict and provide"
policy was replaced by today's more enlightened policy of "plan,
monitor and manage".
WHETHER THE
PROPOSALS CAN
BE ACHIEVED
We most seriously doubt that immediate and near
term job prospects in the Ashford area can be viewed as likely
to require a growth in housing units, especially of units in the
lower cost brackets, of the order of 1,000 plus per year. A salient
reason for this assertion is that until and unless standards of
secondary and tertiary education and vocational training available
locally improve dramatically, the area cannot expect to grow capital-intensive
industry requiring skills and aptitudes not presently locally
available in the quantity and of the quality that would be required.
This leaves resort in the centre of the Garden of England to the
most undesirable development of manufacturing-based, labour-intensive
industry requiring a relatively semi-skilled and low paid labour
force.
We caution against all endeavours to bring about,
virtually by gerrymandering means, demographic change as illustrated
by conditions of life in the community that additionally would
have the questionable advantage of justifying an unwanted and
unnecessary increase in the number of housing units for sale in
Ashford.
HOW THE
PROPOSALS CAN
BE ACHIEVED
In the Trust's opinion, the Deputy Prime Minister's
aspiration for the expansion of Ashford as a Growth Area is achievable
subject to the two provisos we outline below. These provisos would
doubtless restrict achievement to a limited but, we think, to
a nevertheless acceptable extent, effective and sustainable in
character and with minimal further damage to the environment and
ecology of this area of East Kent.
Limited achievement of the proposals is envisaged
provided that:
— decision taking reverts to local
government in matters of planning, design, implementation and
essentially on numbers of new sustainable housing and community
growth; and
— financing of major infrastructural,
social needs and urban renewal projects is supported incrementally
by central government.
CONCLUSION
Our views generally, and the provisos set out
in the paragraph above in particular, concern Ashford only. However
we guess that to a greater or lesser extent, at least our provisos
if not all our views are equally applicable to the other designated
Growth Areas of Milton Keynes, the Cambridge/Stansted Corridor
and the Thames Gateway.
Neville Green
Chairman
Ashford Rural Trust
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