The City of Durham Trust

Figures show no need to build on Green Belt

Plans to build 3,550 new houses on the Green Belt around Durham City have been undermined – by a document on the County Council’s own web site which shows that no building is needed on Durham’s Green Belt.

In preparing the County Durham Plan the council has chosen to use population estimates prepared by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as its name implies a national body, over those prepared by its own staff, who have local knowledge and who have pointed out serious errors in the ONS assumptions.

The County Durham Plan Core Strategy will, when agreed, set out strategic policies to guide development and change in County Durham over the next 20 years. It is, or should be, evidence-based. A key figure going into the mix is the estimate of the population of the County in 2030. The County Durham Plan relies on figures produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which predict that by 2030, County Durham’s population will have increased by 56,700 and the number of households by 38,200.

But the County Council website contains a report on Population Trends in County Durham which predicts that the population rise will be only 12,100. This feeds through to a household increase of 8,157 – a figure which could all be accommodated in small and unallocated sites plus the reuse of vacant dwellings, and requires no building at all on the Green Belt.

The report’s author is Andy Palmer, the Head of Policy, Planning and Performance. His executive summary gives these figures:

• Current population estimate (2008): 498,706, comprising 243,946 males and 254,760 females
• If past trends continue, the population of the County is set to see a 0.9% increase by 2026 giving an end of period population of 501,600. By 2031 the population will have grown further to 510,814 compared to the corresponding projection by ONS of 552,900 by 2026 and 563,600 by 2031.

The report devotes an entire chapter to setting out why the ONS predictions are so much higher: basically they have inferred that the high level of immigration into the UK from the new accession states of the EU in recent years will continue, which is “unlikely to happen in the current political climate.” Also, the ONS projection assumes that more Durham University graduates will remain in the County than has in practice proved to be the case.

It is inconceivable that the County Council Planning Department would be unaware of this recent, cogently argued, report from a senior colleague in the Assistant Chief Executive’s Office. Indeed it was plain that the Council’s Chief Planning Officer was aware of it from the way he replied to a question at the Durham AAP Meeting on 6 July 2011. The absence of any reference to this alternative scenario is a serious and apparently deliberate omission from the Consultation Paper.

In the Trust’s view the Consultation paper needs to be reworked to take on board the arguments presented in the Council’s own report on population trends, which has been recently prepared by a senior officer with a long experience of the local conditions in County Durham.

The above is a summary of a submission from Trustee Roger Cornwell, which was subsequently adopted by the Trustees as representing their views. You can read the full submission here.

Revised Plan still puts too much development in Durham City

The City of Durham Trust, in its latest submission on the County Durham Plan, has maintained its opposition to plans to build houses on the City of Durham Green Belt and to focus development there. “There is but one precious city – a city for which we are but stewards” says Trust Secretary Dr Douglas Pocock. “Durham is such a special city that even well-intentioned development could easily undermine the very features that make it an attractive location.”

The officially preferred core strategy, although toned down slightly from the version we commented on in February, proposes to make Durham City a boom town by vastly increasing its population, in the hope — yet to be substantially supported by evidence — that this will attract new prestigious businesses to the City, with added prosperity then spilling over into the whole county. The Plan involves absorbing large areas of the recently established Green Belt around Durham in order to build 3,550 new houses there.

Much of money raised through the new Community Infrastructure Levy, exploiting the jump in land values that results from removing Green Belt protection, would then be used for two destructive road schemes in the same Green Belt, supporting the increased traffic. The Trust says that “…the onus of proof is very much on the Council to prove that its rezoning of large areas of Durham’s Green Belt meets genuine planning needs and is not primarily a revenue-raising scheme.” Given the over-estimate of the County’s population, this will be even more difficult.

Apart from the fact that Durham City remains already the one part of the county for which traffic congestion and now air-quality are already public concerns it remains hard to see how this level of focus of development on the City can benefit areas of the County still in need of direct local support. Indeed given that the population estimates used in preparing the plan are unrealistically high (see above) the consequence is likely to be that house builders will ignore other parts of the county to build on the outskirts of Durham.

The County is ploughing ahead even though responses to its earler consultation showed that 60% opted for Option B, which spread development throughout the County, or a further alternative strategy. (More about the Trust’s response to that consultation.)

Trustees are not alone in still being deeply concerned about key elements of the present draft County Plan, not only in relation to the heritage of Durham City but also in relation to County Durham as a whole. Our concern is that major changes are now being progressed that seem certain to damage Durham City and put the wider county at a disadvantage initially while taking a gamble on its long-term benefits.

Why is the Green Belt so important?

The Green Belt was established less than a decade ago. A major public inquiry in 2002, presided over by an independent inspector, led in 2004 to the formal adoption by the then City Council of the Green Belt as part of the City of Durham Local Plan. Government Planning Policy Guidance, set out in document PPG2, says that “the essential characteristic of Green Belts is their permanence”.

The independent inspector’s Report repeated the primacy of the Green Belt in his chapter on ‘Housing Strategy’. His words are highly relevant: “its [Durham’s] unique character and setting makes it physically and environmentally unable to absorb new housing at levels which market forces might indicate. It is largely for these reasons that the Green Belt has been proposed…… …..Housing development which extends either into the countryside surrounding the City, or into important open spaces or undeveloped areas within it, will be resisted” (paras 4.9, 4.10).

So if that is the case, where could houses be built? The Inspector considered this question in that part of his report dealing with the Green Belt: “…a boundary set tightly up to the existing edge of the main built-up area would be likely to limit severely the possibility of extensions to that area, not only in the Plan period but ‘as far as can be seen ahead’, or even ‘permanently’” Normally land would be left between the main urban area and the Green Belt to provide for longer term development needs. However, in the particular circumstances of Durham, the Green Belt was so narrow that “Development outside such a comparatively narrow Green Belt could still be located so as to minimise travel distances for work and leisure by being at existing or proposed public transport nodes and close to existing facilities in the larger settlements with better facilities beyond the Green Belt.” (Read the Inspector’s report on the Green Belt here.)