The Conservative-Cabinet members of Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council has written to the new Prime Minister about Welwyn Hatfield’s Local Plan.
The Local Plan is the process for laying out a blueprint of housing developments to take place over the next couple of decades, which all councils must implement, and which Welwyn Hatfield is very keen to complete.
The Independent Housing Inspector, whose role is to set and uphold targets for how much housing each council area needs to build, has insisted for many years that Welwyn Hatfield must build far more than it considers its fair share of housing, and in many cases that development should encroach into Green Belt land across the borough to meet the unreasonably high targets he has set.
Conservatives in Welwyn Hatfield have repeatedly pushed back against these demands, instead seeking a solution which protects as much Green Belt land as possible while keeping development in urban parts of the borough at a sensible level. In fact, Conservatives recently voted to reduce the density of the planned development at Broadwater Road in Welwyn Garden City by 600 dwellings.
Following the Prime Minister’s announcement that the government will put more control in local authorities’’ hands, partly by “scrapping Soviet-style, Whitehall-imposed housing targets”, Conservative Group Leader Tony Kingsbury and his cabinet have written to Liz Truss and her Secretary of State for Housing to ask for clarification on how the government’s new mantra will affect the Independent Planning Inspector’s decision-making process.
Councillor Kingsbury says of the letters:
“My cabinet and I have written to the Prime Minister to push for a pragmatic solution to the Local Plan process that works for everyone in Welwyn Hatfield so that we may allow new house building to start as soon as possible on agreed sites.
“The process hasn’t been straightforward; we’ve had to focus on balancing the need for growth with protecting our communities, meanwhile doing our best to ignore the constant political distractions and spin the Lib Dems have peddled throughout the process. Time and again, they’ve demonstrated they’re interested more in manipulating this important process into a way of getting you to vote for them than they are in helping us make progress.
“On the other hand, the Conservative group I lead has worked hard to protect Green Belt land, keep development sensible in Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield, and prioritise progress over politics at all times.”