Secretary of State invited to Cotswolds for meeting on housing targets
Cotswold District Council have been calling for targets to be reconsidered
Cotswold District Council has renewed its call for the government to reconsider housing targets for the district and invited the new Secretary of State to visit the Cotswolds to see the challenges first-hand.
Ahead of a consultation next month, council leader Mike Evemy has written to Steve Reed MP, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.
It follows a letter sent in July to Angela Rayner, his predecessor, where Councillor Evemy explained the building constraints in the district with 80% of the land being within the national landscape.
It comes after the council set out development options to meet the government’s housing targets, which have more than doubled in the Cotswold district, to 1,036 new homes per year.
People living in the district will be asked to share their views on the options during a consultation starting on November 5th.
Mike Evemy said: “The response to our first letter from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said that every authority needs to play its part in delivering new homes, housing targets had been set based on affordability in each area, and that the council was doing the right thing in updating its Local Plan.
“Like the algorithm the government has used to calculate housing targets, that response failed to address the critical point around genuine development constraint.
“The Cotswold district is among the most challenged local planning authorities in the country when it comes to identifying appropriate and sustainable sites for large-scale development, particularly outside of those areas with National Park Authority designations.
“Up to now, this fact has been ignored by the government.”
Councillor Evemy says he hopes that personnel changes at the top of the department and the emerging evidence published by the council as part of the Local Plan update, will help convince the government to rethink.
He added: “There are two big issues here: one is the potential for developers to capitalise on the fact new housing targets weaken the council’s ability to refuse development that doesn’t bring with it the necessary supporting infrastructure.
“And the second is the enormous number of homes we’re expected to plan for, in small and concentrated parts of the district.
“Asking a local authority which has 80 per cent of its land within the strictly protected National Landscape, along with other significant infrastructure constraints, to plan for almost 19,000 new homes over the next 18 years is, by any measure, totally unrealistic.”