Legal row breaks out as Wiltshire Council faces 'one of biggest decisions'
A planning blueprint whose failure created a ‘free-for-all’ for housebuilders has been binned
A planning blueprint whose failure created a ‘free-for-all’ for housebuilders has been binned, after councillors narrowly voted in favour of restarting a three-year process.
In March, Wiltshire Council was told by government inspectors that its Draft Local Plan, which aimed to deliver 37,000 houses across the county over the next 15 years, was “not fit for purpose.”
The Draft Local Plan 2020-2038, which was drawn up by the previous Conservative administration between 2017 and 2024, was supposed to offer a framework for housebuilding and 160 hectares of employment land across Wiltshire.
But following a series of hearings late last year, planning inspectors rejected the draft plan and gave the council a choice – to withdraw the plan from examination, or to request their report, which would recommend non-adoption and prolong the process.
At a meeting of the full council on Tuesday (19 May), opinion was split along political lines, with Liberal Democrats, Labour and independent councillors wanting to follow professional and legal advice and scrap a plan, and Conservatives and Reform councillors keen to fight the government.
Opening the debate, council leader Ian Thorn said: “With the exception of the budget debate in February and the debate on the setting of the council tax, this is the third most important decision that we are to make, or have made, over the course of the first year of this council.
“The queue of developers, landowners, and promoters grows daily to submit planning applications, potentially to see them rejected, but then taken to the Planning Inspectorate and passed.
“What happens if we don’t withdraw the Local Plan? There will be a damning report into our plan and the prospect of it ever succeeding.
“We would then have to go to the High Court. If we lost that judicial review, it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. And even if we won it, it would still be a substantial cost to the residents of Wiltshire.
He added: “What’s slightly ironic about this debate is that even had this local plan worked its way through examination, we would have started immediately on the new Local Plan.
“So if we went through that entire process, effectively nothing would change. We would find ourselves back at the beginning, with the need to produce a new Local Plan.”
Responding, the Conservative opposition demanded to see the legal advice that had been given council officers, and which had been shared with party leaders who were under strict instructions not to share its contents.
Conservative leader Richard Clewer said: “We’ve got advice from the planning inspector, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
“And to my great frustration we are, yet again, in a position where members have not had legal advice made available to them, to be able to make a balanced, informed decision on this topic.”
He went on: “If we were to simply withdraw the plan, we would end up with chaos, with three years of developers deciding where they want to build.
“Or we could fight this. We may well lose, but we could try to find something that will give us control over where development is going.
“My view is we all need the facts first, and we should be pushing ahead with this plan, and challenging the inspector.”
Reform group leader Ed Rimmer said he was “frustrated” that “as a group leader, I’ve had information shared with me, but I’m told I’m not allowed to reference it here, and I wasn’t allowed to share it with my group.
“So I suppose I’m expected to read it, make my decision, and then say to everyone in my group ‘I’ve read this, but you’re not allowed to see it.'”
“We’re having a debate with our hands tied behind our backs.”
And he added: “The best way of avoiding complete chaos is to is to not remove this Local Plan, and to try to resubmit it again.”
And Independent group leader Ernie Clarke, who chairs the council’s strategic planning authority, which determines the biggest planning applications, said: “If we withdraw this, we’ll have no plan, but we can quickly get on with doing a new one.
“It will be based on the government’s new (housing) figures, which are higher.
“If we don’t withdraw this, we’re still going to get applications from developers who are going to tell us our plan has not progressed, so little weight can be given to it.”
And he warned: “The developers are eyeing up every site. They’re all sniffing around, and none of the county is safe, at the moment, from housing development.”
At the end of a long debate, councillors voted by 50 to 46, with one abstention, to withdraw the Local Plan from the examination process.