The City of Durham Trust

Trust tells the Council “County Durham deserves better”

Our response to the latest County Durham Plan proposals

The City of Durham Trust has now responded to the County’s Local Plan Preferred Options. Trustees have trawled through the 350-page document, examined thousands of pages of background papers, and looked outside the Council’s own evidence to come up with a detailed and justified 59-page submission.

Trust Chairman Roger Cornwell said: “Borrowing the words of the Authority’s slogans, these proposals will not result in an ‘Altogether better County’ but, unfortunately, will be ‘Making a difference where you live.’ We say ‘County Durham deserves Better’.”

The Trust agrees with the Authority’s goal of improving the well-being of all those who live in County Durham through economic regeneration. But the present Plan will not achieve this. This page has a detailed exposition of the Trust’s responses.

The Trust argues that the strategy focuses on the City of Durham at the expense of the rest of the County and to the detriment of the City itself, showing scant notice of public opinion carefully expressed since the first draft proposals appeared in 2009. Although submitted primarily on behalf of its members, with the City’s district status abolished and with no town or parish council to represent the views of the City, the Trustees feel that these comments will be endorsed by many of the disenfranchised citizens of Durham.

The main points made by the Trust are:

These proposals are all contrary to central government’s recently introduced National Planning Policy Framework and are inconsistent with the findings of the government-appointed inquiry inspector in 2002.

Further, the development is to be progressed, or financed, by charging developers a Community Infrastructure Levy which is excessively high compared, not only with the rest of the county, but in the country as a whole. There is no guarantee that developers will pay the high figure of around £25,000 per house – or that the Levy will last for the length of the Plan, as the last Conservative manifesto proposed its abolition. The County’s domestic council tax payers are therefore at risk of ending up paying for the County Council’s unwanted and unsustainable ambitions, while developers reap profits at their expense.

The City of Durham Trust therefore urges the County Council to change its Preferred Options, since in our opinion there is a real risk that the inspector at the Examination in Public will deem the Plan unacceptable.