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Agenda item

Public Question Time

To receive any questions relating to items on the Agenda from members of the public and replies thereto.

 

Minutes:

Mr P Drew, referring to item 5 on the agenda, said I am a Chartered Town Planner and I live in a house on Turnpike, within the Grand Western Canal Conservation Area.

 

The NPPF says the significance of a heritage asset, such as a conservation area, can be harmed through development within its setting and that great weight should be given to an asset’s conservation.

 

Policy SP2 refers to conservation area, in the singular, which is a reference to Sampford Peverell Conservation Area at the top of the hill.  The reason it does not refer to areas, plural, is because the Council did not notice the Grand Western Canal Conservation Area.  One year ago when I asked the most senior officer representing the Council at a local plan consultation event in the village hall what the red line was around my property he wrongly identified it as the Sampford Peverell Conservation Area.  As the Council did not identify the Grand Western Canal Conservation Area in its SA it has not assessed the impact of the proposal upon it.  This was not addressed in the Historic Environment Appraisal.  The Council has refused to apologise for this elementary error, which means the evidence base is not only unsound but leaves the Council in breach of its statutory duty.

 

I naively assumed that the Council would take this opportunity to correct this clear and highly material error but, astonishingly, it has not.  The full appraisal on page 405 of the report pack still envisages access being derived from Turnpike.  That led the company, Place Land LLP, which was formed within a week of the Cabinet meeting on 15 September 2016, to propose a gash in the hillside opposite my driveway, comprising a 100 foot wide cutting, and housing on the opposite side of Turnpike on land that is around 9 m above the level of my house.  Since a 2-storey house is typically 9 m to the ridge that would mean built forms on even the lowest level of the site would be around 60 feet above the entrance to my house within the Grand Western Canal Conservation Area.  The new dwellings would define the skyline and destroy the open rural setting of the Conservation Area, for example when viewed from the towpath to the south-east.  However this form of development would fully accord with your unsound policy and the inadequate evidence base on which it is founded.

 

I am far from reassured this highly partisan additional work is fair or thorough.  It is a blatant attempt to justify an earlier decision that your QC had major concerns about.  Moreover if the Council seeks to draw any comfort from the consultant’s report, Appendix 1 sets out the various EU requirements and in almost every case it says: “It is assumed that this requirement was met in the earlier SA report for the proposed submission local plan”.  In other words, the scope of the consultant’s review did not extend to the very point that I say renders your SA, and hence the allocation at Higher Town, unsound.

 

So my question is, why has the Council not applied the approach in Historic England’s Advice Note 8 in its SA for Higher Town with regard to the Grand Western Canal Conservation Area?

 

Mrs Christine Holland, representing Sampford Peverell Parish Council and referring to agenda item 5, said in the event that J27 comes forward, the Sampford Peverell Parish Council is not opposed to 60 houses being brought forward in the village,   however we feel that the Council has identified the wrong site, in Higher Town, and would respectfully request that Councillors revisit that decision and, if a reasonable alternative site is not available elsewhere, consider allocating a site at the eastern edge of the village.  This would better relate to any development at J27, as well as the strategic transport network, including the railway station, the M5, and the approved improvement of Station Road with footpaths, street lighting, bus stops and a 30mph speed limit.

 

We note that in Table 5 (Page 92 of the public pack) that MDDC considers that several sites in the east of the village would be reasonable alternatives but that they are more extensive tracts of land. We ask you to consider restricting for development a smaller area of one of these other sites that have already been assessed within the SA process, just as you selected a smaller area of the Higher Town site for dwellings within the Higher Town site. 

 

My question is please can you reflect the views of most residents in the village and choose one of the reasonable alternative sites that have been identified to be available?

 

Mr J Byrom, referring to item 5 on the agenda said that this is an evidence based exercise into the SA update and I have studied all of the assessments for the Higher Town site in sustainability appraisals and updates since January 2014 to January 2018. None of these ever mentions any assessment of impact on the Grand Western Canal Conservation area, a heritage asset that lies only 50 meters away from the site at its closest point. What is assessed is impact on the Sampford Peverell village conservation area. For 4 years your SA’s have always talked of impact on the conservation area in the singular, so too does the SP policy itself and yet on page 476 of the packs a table in the executive summary of the 2018 SA update states that criteria have now been included in the policy to ensure landscaping and design respect the conservation areas, plural, we have suddenly gained a conservation area. By using the plural this council wrongly implies that it has formally assessed impact on a second conservation area that it has never once considered in any version of its Sustainability Appraisal of this site. Papers from Council meetings in late 2016 show that the canal conservation area was never mentioned in allocating SP 2 to the proposed Local Plan. The last minute historic environmental appraisal of December 2016 does mention the canal conservation area but that is not a Sustainability Appraisal. On pages 91, 241 and 406 of the packs correct wording from earlier SA’s is used. This just adds to the confusion. If the extra S on page 476 was just a slip of the pen then it is a slip that may betray assumptions being made by officers and experts in this evidence based exercise. So what now? If you cut the extra S on page 476 you will rightly show that you only ever assessed one conservation area in relation to the site at Higher Town. If you leave the extra S in place I will be sure to urge the inspector to ask to see evidence that your Sustainability Appraisal of this site did assess impact on the canal conservation area. He will find none. My question is what will you do about the extra S on page 476 and what will you do about the fact that appeared there at all. 

 

Dr C Chesney, referring to item 5 on the agenda said it is now 18 months since plans for the Higher Town, SP 2 and J27 were postponed for further studies. Having reviewed the subsequent report by your officer and all the relevant material in the public reports for this meeting, I do not believe the comment in paragraph 1.5 that a ‘fair and thorough assessment be undertaken’.

 

I am particularly struck by the almost complete omission of any reference to the light pollution which would inevitably be produced by development at both J27 and SP 2. The chief reference to lighting and all the documentation states that the overall strategy for Mid Devon area is for the dark night sky to be protected and that ‘lighting schemes which could affect these special qualities should be resisted’.

 

The night time lighting of the large area at J27 would be visible for literally miles around. Similarly, lighting the SP 2, the highest land in the village, would be a shining beacon on a hill, but in a most deleterious sense. Astonishingly official advice has been given that the residential areas should be well illuminated throughout the night. Not only would this lighting be a disturbance to residents but it would inevitably disrupt nocturnal wildlife, mammals, birds, insects and reptiles.  Will you now carry out an assessment of this pollution?

 

The papers state that the ‘development is proportional to the size of the existing village’. However Sampford Peverell is designated a village under policy SP 13 and is therefore considered appropriate only for a ‘limited level of development’ elsewhere Council documents describe limited development as being some 6 to 10 houses, not sixty. Why is this particular policy not being followed?

 

Finally on a question of costs. Through service for 16 years as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons Disciplinary Committee, I learnt something of the costs of QC’s and Inspectorates. The relevant statutory instrument states that the current daily rate of payment for an Inspector is £993. We can safely assume that the other consultants do not come cheaply either and then there is the cost of your own staff. It would appear that the Council will already have run up unnecessary bills of tens of thousands of pounds since meeting in September 2016. This can only be because the Council has not listened to what the residents have been saying. Having lived in Sampford Peverell for over 11 years and for the last 5 been Chairman of the Village Hall Committee I know that there is considerable dismay at the proposals. Villagers are united in saying the site at Higher Town is entirely unsuitable for housing.

 

Will you now please listen and act upon what I and other residents are saying?

 

Mr P Dumble, referring to item 5 on the agenda, said the brief given to LUC Consultants is narrow and was highly controlled by MDDC Planning Officers. As stated in section 1.4 of the LUC report, consultants did not reassess the February 2015 Sustainability Appraisal or SA report.  Consultants were not able to critically reappraise the SA process nor allowed to do an independent assessment of the SA for SP2 site nor to compare this allocation objectively to alternative sites within Sampford Peverell or elsewhere.

 

Any changes to the 2017 SA appraisal update have been made entirely by MDDC Planners. Any technical opinions and judgements are those of MDDC Planners, not independent consultants.

 

The full and unchanged SA appraisals are included as annex 3 within the new SA update January 2018 report for approval today. As it is these appraisals that lie at the heart of the questions raised for last years suspended hearings it seems to me that this exercise has been a complete waste of time and ratepayers money.

 

Planners have chosen to ignore the many well-argued and in some cases expert submissions from members of the public and seem determined to defend the indefensible allocation of SP2, even if this risks further delaying the adoption of the Local Plan.

 

I would like to remind Councillors of the 5 questions raised by the Planning Inspector about SP2 for the aborted hearings:

 

These are if a site for Sampford Peverell is necessary to cater for additional housing need resulting from J27 allocation, is this site the best performing? Does the proposed allocation have sufficient regard to the historic environment? Does the proposed allocation have sufficient regard to the character and appearance of the area? Is the proposed allocation of property accessible, for pedestrians in particular? Is the tie to J27 strong enough?  None of these have been considered within the LUC review.  But these issues have not gone away. The Councils failings in assessing the site will I am sure eventually lead the Inspector to find that Policy SP2 is unsound. I sadly predict that we will all be here again in a years’ time unless something changes.  Councillors, you are being led along a very high risk pathway.

 

My question is will councillors please grasp the nettle and take the opportunity today to dismiss these wasteful reports, avoid another year of delay and vote now to recommend the Full Council immediately cut Policy SP2 from the Draft Local Plan.

 

The Chairman read a letter from Mrs Bryony Byrom regarding item 5 on the agenda. The letter said that on 5 September 2016, after officers had spent at least 16 weeks preparing an implications report on the possible allocation of land for development at Junction 27, your Planning Policy Advisory Group sat down to consider allocations for extra housing caused by that J27 Policy. The papers that informed Cabinet of that group’s recommendations were to be sent out on 8 September. You therefore gave sixteen weeks on J27 and approximately three days on selecting and confirming additional housing allocations. 

 

In, or possibly just before, those three days, officers apparently received 'new information’ about the site at Higher Town that ‘access is achievable’.  In the light of this new information, they then changed the Sustainability Appraisal scoring so that Higher Town appeared to be more favourable than it was a day or two before. Higher Town was duly added as an allocation to the Local Plan as Policy SP2. 

 

The wording used about the ‘new information’ on Higher Town is that ‘there has been confirmation that access is achievable’. This strongly suggests that officers went looking for that confirmation.  I can find nothing in the Public Report Pack to suggest that you went looking for similar new information on sites other than Higher Town in response to Policy J27.

 

Since that time you have received new information from the public that you missed a listed building adjacent to the site when you assessed and scored Higher Town. You have not changed its scoring.

 

You have also received new information from the public that you failed to note the existence of a Conservation Area within 50 metres when you assessed and scored Higher Town. You have not changed its scoring.

 

You have also received new information that, should it be needed in conjunction with Policy J27, there is now a carefully-prepared alternative and suitably scaled-down site proposal at Mountain Oak. This has been ignored in this report.

 

My question is “Why did you change the scoring of Higher Town so swiftly when you went looking for new information in the three days when it suited you and why do you ignore other ‘new information’ of enormous significance when it comes from open consultation with the general public in the months that follow?"

 

The Chairman read a question from Hayley Keary, regarding item 5 on the agenda.

 

My question concerns Item 9 on Page 467 of the Public Reports Pack.

 

LUC advised in Paragraph 1.34 of its report that MDDC should satisfy itself that site options at Cullompton can definitely not be considered to be reasonable options.

 

In response, you have stated that ‘any additional development [at Cullompton] on top of the current Local Plan allocations would not be appropriate until longer-term strategic highways improvements have been delivered’.

 

You have just announced that Cullompton has been given £10m to improve its highways.

 

You have rightly imposed a condition on the SP2 site that the site must not be developed until slip roads have been added to the A361 at Sampford Peverell. This means that Policy SP2 is – exactly like Cullompton sites - dependant on highways improvements.

 

The difference between the two sets of highways improvements is that you have been told by Devon County Council that no funds will be available to do the required work on slip roads at Sampford Peverell for the foreseeable future. Cullompton, on the other hand, now has funding.

 

My question is:

 

£10 million has just been granted to develop highways at Cullompton.  Is MDDC still satisfied that the evidence shows that site options there are not reasonable alternative options to SP2?

 

The Chairman indicated that questions would be answered at the agenda item.