Reed Parish Council has submitted its response to North Hertfordshire Council’s first consultation on a new Local Plan for the District.
This is known as the Scoping Stage. It is not about deciding where new housing will be built or considering specific development sites. Instead, it is the first step in preparing a new Local Plan, inviting residents, parish councils and other organisations to identify the issues and priorities that the new plan should address over the coming years. These include housing, transport, climate change, infrastructure, the countryside and the future of towns and villages.
For villages such as Reed, the new Local Plan is particularly important because it will determine how much future housing growth villages should accommodate, how villages are classified within the District’s settlement hierarchy, and where settlement boundaries should be drawn. Those decisions have a major influence on what development is likely to be acceptable during the life of the new plan.
In its response, Reed Parish Council supports the principle that villages should make a fair and proportionate contribution to meeting housing need. At the same time, the Council argues that once this has been established through the Local Plan process, villages should be protected from speculative, unplanned development. The response also emphasises that villages differ greatly in their size, facilities and character, and that settlement boundaries should continue to reflect local heritage, geography and sustainability rather than relying solely on broad settlement categories.
The Parish Council’s full response is reproduced below.
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Reed Parish Council offers the following comment in response to the Scoping Document’s request for comment on the challenges in planning for Housing growth and development in the new local plan:
1. A significant challenge in formulation of the New Local Plan is to establish that villages in the District make a proportionate level of contribution towards area housing need. This means that once that contribution has been defined for individual communities – through consultation a due process – villages must be consistently protected from ad hoc, speculative development. It cannot be acceptable to have a situation continuing into the future where a deficiency in 5 year housing land supply permits un-planned extra development which is damaging to village heritage and sustainability; and where defence of sustainability and heritage has to be fought messily on a case-by-case basis. This is inefficient and saps public confidence in the planning system.
2. We note and affirm the salience and importance of Policy SP2 in the current Local Plan in planning how to meet housing need in rural areas in the District. In this respect, we specifically note the importance of settlement hierarchy. The definition of settlement categories requires care and sensitivity. Reed is currently classified as a Category A village in the adopted local plan. As such it has seen a more than 10% growth in housing in the village since 2011, on allocated sites and through infill. Assuming the planning application which has now been submitted for the RD1 allocated site in Reed goes through, the village will see a 25% growth in housing in the period of the adopted Local Plan. In formulating the new local plan, it is essential that settlement boundaries in villages like Reed be defined with sensitive attention (as at present in Reed) to considerations of heritage, geography and sustainability. An individualised approach to settlement boundary definition is essential because settlement hierarchy categories are currently drawn broadly. In our case, Reed shares Category A status with Ashwell. Ashwell, of course, has a much larger population. It also has three public houses, shops and a pharmacy. Reed, as a parish, currently boasts none of these amenities. If categories are to be thus broadly drawn in the new plan it is essential that the settlement boundary in a village like Reed continues to be drawn with sensitive attention, as at present, to the nature and needs of the particular settlement.