Today’s announcement that the National Planning Inspectorate has approved the outline planning permission for up to 144 homes on the green fields on the outskirts of Dorking near the Priory School shows where it can go very wrong when local council politicians do not come up with a clear plan. It is not good to sit and wait when we have an urgent need to protect the Green Belt but also to provide homes for families in Dorking.
I am against Green Belt development unless there are some extremely strong circumstances around it being previously developed and we should certainly not be touching green fields like this. The problem is Mole Valley Liberal Democrats put this site in their draft local plan and I believe the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Candidate, voted for that draft plan. Realising the unpopularity of that plan, they then changed their minds when Government announced its intention to remove the need for housing numbers but have not come up with a plan as they state they are waiting for national legislation to change. This leaves the door wide open for developers to try their luck and submit applications on Green Belt like this which are worth a lot of money. This decision by the Inspectorate has been bolstered by the Mole Valley District Council decision to put the site in the draft Local Plan in the first place and then not to actually have a final Local Plan with the right sites set out within it.
A key role in being an elected politician at whatever level is to make the right, and sometimes hard, decisions and to aim to get the balance right between the different demands of residents. Providing well thought out housing plans is a piece of work that does involves careful thought for the implications for those who may experience development around them and the implications for those who want to buy a home and live and work in the area.
In my view regardless of what happens to national planning policy we need to provide housing because we are seeing the workers including social workers, NHS staff, teachers and carers moving out of the area and we have growing skills gaps in the constituency. We want to see young families living here and so that means we have to set a plan to provide homes for them in the right place. It does not mean sitting back and not doing anything. In my view there is still a lot of scope around previously developed land, urban regeneration and town centre development where we can build homes faster and make them more affordable. This decision is really bad for our area and does not bode well for other applications on our Green Belt and I think local people have been let down. I really hope we won't see lots more of these green Belt applications coming through as Mole Valley District Council will continue to struggle to defend them.
