The City of Durham Trust

Trust responds to County Durham Plan

In June 2010 the County Council invited comments on the County Durham Plan Core Strategy Issues and Options Paper. This is a major document in the process to produce the Plan, which will guide planning in the County over the next twenty years. At the same time comments were invited on two background papers: the County Durham Settlement Study and Green Belt Assessment Scoping Paper.

Trustees submitted 16 pages of reasoned comment for this second round, and these have now been put online on this site as PDFs: read our responses to the Core Issues paper, the Settlement Study, and the Green Belt Scoping Paper.

While hope springs eternal where ‘consultation’ is concerned, in this instance there is the added knowledge that the County’s final proposals will have to be put before an independent inspector at an Examination in Public – and that the Inspector (or Secretary of State) will have the final say. And in a refreshing change from the way the old City Council approached these matters, Trustees have now had two meetings with the County’s Head of Planning, Stuart Timmiss, where there have been frank but cordial exchanges of views, with both sides explaining and listening.

The envisaged Durham City would have another 5050 houses (which would require taking land from within the recently-designated and modest Green Belt), major office development (including ideally an international head-quarters at Aykley Heads), development of cultural facilities to achieve the status of a major international tourist destination, more retailing and two new roads (Northern- and Western- Relief Roads).

At our latest meeting, Stuart Timmiss highlighted the view that the City “needs a critical mass of population, employment and visitors....to maximise this potential for the benefit of the County.” In August the Durham Times reported him as saying that “The population is too small to attract many of the facilities we want. Population is really holding Durham back in many respects” In response, Trust Secretary Dr Douglas Pocock again likened this policy as subjecting the City to “steroidal growth”.

The Core Strategy calls this scenario “Option A – Promoting Economic Development.” In theory, therefore, there is an alternative. “Option B – Targeted Regeneration”, which would not concentrate so much of the development on Durham City. But although the document has 64 questions, each with “options for [us] to choose from”, there is no question to permit the key choice between Options A or B. The Trust finds this unsatisfactory in the extreme, since, apart from Housing and Development, the choice for many of the questions is based solely on the reasoning of Option A.

In Trustees’ view the Core Strategy has fundamental flaws:

1. The economic trough from which it is planned to lift the County is painted darker than actuality. – Certainly darker than other recent reports emanating from the Authority itself. Thus, for ‘decline’ one should often read ‘improvement’ – although, admittedly, not as fast as desired or other areas.
2. Housing predictions are based on a survey before the current economic recession took hold.
3. The County is treated as an island, isolated from the close ties and interaction with the large urban centres bordering it to the north, east and south. (The City of Sunderland, for instance, is not mentioned.)
4. Much of the scheme, including the two roads through the Green Belt, will be financed via a “Community Infrastructure Levy”, funded by the jump in land values that results from removing Green Belt protection. In effect the Green Belt is abolished to fund its own destruction. This ploy means that the projects could go ahead even at a time of cutbacks in public expenditure.

Perhaps the final word should be given to the Durham Times, which weekly continues to give a full and balanced view of happenings in and around the City. In its editorial for 6th August 2010 on the County’s strategy headed ‘There’s no Plan B’, it wrote: “But the City of Durham Trust is right. The price to be paid is a fundamental change in the nature of the city ... The future of Durham is at stake.”