Planning matters blog | Lichfields

Planning matters

Our award winning blog gives a fresh perspective on the latest trends in planning and development.

The big squeeze: Reading Local Plan partial update

The big squeeze: Reading Local Plan partial update

Florence Leung & Sarah Moorhouse 28 Nov 2023
Reading Borough Council strategic environment, planning and transport committee resolved to approve the ‘Local Plan partial update consultation on scope and content’ for consultation on November 15. The consultation process has commenced and will run until January 2024. 
Although not (yet) a city, Reading has been named one of the best places to live in the South East and over the past decade has experienced population growth of nearly 12 per cent – much higher than the average for the South East (7.5 per cent) and England (6.6 per cent).
Reading Borough Council (RBC) adopted its current Local Plan in 2019 and is currently undertaking a partial update to address future growth.  This includes reviewing policies on housing and employment as well as current -and potential future- site allocations.
Reading is one of the 20 largest urban centres in England where a 35 per cent uplift to the housing need figure calculated using standard method is applied.  This uplift, dating back to the aftermath of the 2020 White Paper is a uniform percentage increase based solely on the identified housing needs of the 20 largest towns and cities, rather than their abilities to meet such needs.
RBC states that, based on most recent figures, there is therefore a need for 877 homes per year in Reading up to 2041, a substantial increase from the existing plan figure of 689 per year.
RBC has commissioned its own evidence to understand what the need for homes would be using an alternative methodology, rooted in local need, so this matter may be revisited further down the line.
Where shall we live?
As set out in our ‘Your Official Top 20’ blog, Reading has already built up to its boundaries with some other development needs already being met on adjacent land in neighbouring authorities.
RBC acknowledges this in the consultation document, recognising that future development proposals will rely almost wholly on previously developed land and that the spatial strategy is to a large extent dictated by where sites are available.
Further to this, RBC also acknowledges that there is a general expectation that figures for housing provision are likely to increase whilst needs for commercial forms of development are not expected to significantly increase. Therefore, they anticipate that housing needs will become more dominant than employment needs in the borough over the coming years.
How shall we live?
In addition to overall levels of housing need, RBC is also looking at the different types of housing need, including affordable and family-sized housing, and the needs of other specific groups.
Existing policy places an emphasis on delivering family housing of three or more bedrooms but, as noted in the consultation document, this is difficult due to the emphasis on high density town centre sites and therefore current family housing needs are not being met.
Notwithstanding this recognition of the current constraints, changes to policy being explored include an increase in the policy requirement for three or more bedroom dwellings in town centre proposals from five to 10 or even 15 per cent.
This is alongside the suggestion that policy should explicitly state that in the event of conflict between meeting minimum densities and delivery of family housing, family housing will take priority. On sites outside centres RBC is proposing increasing the requirement for family housing from 50 per cent to 67 per cent.
The consultation document highlights that Build to Rent (BtR) will continue to have a role to play in housing development in Reading and proposes no change to the policy guiding the provision of student housing.
It also introduces the option of a new policy on co-living. As set out in our co-living blog, this is a type of community housing in which residents share facilities such as kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms which has emerged in recent years – primarily to date within Greater London.
RBC notes that ‘we have not yet dealt with any applications for co-living in Reading but . . . we expect to see proposals in Reading within the plan period’.
The council goes on to note a number of matters they anticipate will need to be addressed with this new form of housing including differentiating co-living from more traditional HMOs and student accommodation, such proposals competing with general residential schemes for sites and the relationship between them and affordable housing provision.
The big squeeze?   
So, how does RBC intend to deal with its rising housing need, given the spatial constraints and widening range of housing needs?
The consultation document states that RBC proposes to place ‘an even stronger focus on Central Reading’ with the proportion of new homes to be delivered in the town centre anticipated to increase from around 50 per cent to 60 per cent through the Local Plan review.    There are two elements outlined in the document to achieve this:
 
  • Higher density in the town centre – including setting a minimum density for development in the town centre at 200 dwellings per hectare (dph) – doubling from the indicative density of above 100 dph in the adopted Local Plan; and
     
  • Assessing a number of potential sites in Central Reading for consideration as additional housing/mixed use allocations.
But will this be enough to meet the required housing provision for the plan period?
A number of options are set out in the consultation document for each of the potential additional site allocations including the density and use of each site (the analysis for which is at an early stage).
Higher density development is often associated with taller buildings and to achieve the highest housing density options on the additional allocations, in many instances, there will be a need to build tall buildings on the sites.
However, the adopted Local Plan restricts the construction of tall buildings to three specific cluster areas in Central Reading and only one of the potential additional site allocations is within one of these clusters.
The consultation document states that the adopted tall buildings policy is up-to-date and it is not currently part of the partial review.
The council meeting on November 15 is the next step in a long road towards the adoption of the Local Plan partial update, with further evidence still to be prepared, responses to the consultation process to be reviewed, possible changes to Central Government policy to address and ultimately a key role for the Local Plan inspector.
Can this partial review of the Local Plan address Reading’s housing requirements, meet the needs of a widening range of housing types and achieve higher density in the town centre without placing an increased reliance on tall buildings?
The emerging Local Plan process will be the forum for this debate.
 

CONTINUE READING

Article originally featured in Thames Tap (UK Property Forums)
Living near Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat farm, Dan Lampard, senior director and head of Thames Valley for Lichfields, found the complex planning issues around it a compelling subject for family discussion. Here, he explains in detail the merits of one of the most well-publicised planning wrangles.
Vociferous debates around television viewing in the Lampard household usually revolve around which channel to watch – or when anyone taunts me by supporting a football team other than Arsenal.
Over the Spring, for the first time, the whole family debated the merits of town planning as we all watched Jeremy Clarkson’s highly entertaining efforts to run Diddly Squat farm.  We live near the farm, know some of the suppliers benefitting from the incredible success of the farm shop, and one of my children’s teachers made a cameo appearance as a member of the planning committee  – so we were all entrenched in our positions.
The majority view was that during hard times, for farmers in particular, the council should be celebrating the success that Clarkson’s regeneration of the farm was bringing about.  Conversely, being something of a Clarkson-sceptic and having been stuck in traffic jams caused by visitors to his farm shop I felt some professional sympathy with my town planning brethren in resisting this.
Many of the issues our family argued about were expanded upon in a recent appeal hearing in West Oxfordshire and the decision – something of a score draw – was released last week.  Having read in the Witney Gazette that extra security measures were in place at the appeal, given the controversy – including death threats – that had arisen, I’m glad that our family disagreements were more controlled
The appeal decision, one of the most prominent in recent years, warrants analysis as to how such an extraordinary level of interest was generated and how planning can work through such divergent views. 

In the beginning . . .

Clarkson owned the farm for a number of years before his collaboration with Amazon but generated little controversy.  The whole farm is within the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – forming a significant constraint in planning policy terms.
The current story begins when West Oxfordshire District Council (WODC) granted permission in 2019 for ‘a lambing shed and farm shop, including car parking and associated access’.
The application (submitted anonymously – ‘c/o agent’) raised few concerns (and none around the 10-space car park) with WODC officers concluding these works ‘would not have a significant harmful impact [on the AONB]’.
Their economic team concluded the proposals offered ‘important investments to allow the farm business to diversify as its reliance on subsidies inevitably reduces’.
Perhaps the only clue to future controversies was that the planning permission also encompassed ‘potential for occasional film-making’.
Fast forward a few months and the farm shop opened.  The series records Clarkson eschewing traditional advertising and instead, tweeting his followers – with traffic Armageddon following.  One of our friends made her TV debut in the inaugural traffic jam – telling Clarkson she was visiting the farm shop with her sick husband having just collected him from hospital – as you do.
The following couple of years, despite much of it being in Covid lockdown, led to further attempts by Clarkson to expand the economic base of his farm (sometimes without planning permission – as the subsequent enforcement action attests) with further traffic chaos resulting   Clarkson himself, observing the traffic chaos and fast dissolving highway verges despaired to the camera: “I just didn’t think this through.”

The decider

These ongoing tensions culminated (for now) in a two day appeal hearing in Witney in March – with the appeal decision being released recently.
Unlike the rest of the series, the appeal hearing may not make compulsive viewing outside the town planning and transport planning fraternity, since there are likely to be too many references to planning units, primary uses and functional and physical relationships to boost the ratings.
In his decision, the inspector grappled with four main considerations.  All of these arose from his observation that many of the issues stemmed from ‘the popularity of the appellant, Mr Clarkson, who is a well-known journalist and presenter’ and that, as a result, ‘Diddly Squat has become a destination for visitors from all over the world’. 
Specifically, he considered:
  • Appropriate uses other than agriculture : The inspector commented on the farm’s incredible popularity with visitors, including the trend for them to take ‘selfies’ – surely the first reference to these in an appeal decision. The uses present go far beyond the permitted agriculture, farm shop and lambing shed.  The latter, he commented, is not generally a place where ‘one would normally sit to eat food, selected from a more than basic bar menu . . . or drink beer pulled in the same way as your local pub’.  – not surprisingly he concluded it had ‘changed from the use for which it was given planning permission’.

  • Transport harm : The inspector concluded that ‘this is not an ordinary farm shop, given the occupation and high profile of the appellant’.  The 10-space car park was never going to be sufficient and unsurprisingly ‘parking has spilled onto the adjacent land’.  Somewhat mildly he referred to the car park as being ‘oversubscribed’ with knock-on effects including parking on (and damage to) verges resulting in a ‘huge inconvenience for those who live nearby’.

  • Harm to AONB : Planning policy is clear that the scale and extent of development within an AONB should be limited.  In his analysis, the inspector noted the volume of cars, signage, outdoor seating, catering vans and restaurant, which he concluded ‘has had a deleterious effect upon the character and appearance of the AONB and the tranquillity that planning policy seeks to protect’.

  • Economic benefits : Conversely, he went on to recognise that the ‘farm shop has been very successful’ and had ‘undergone a radical transformation in less than three years from a farm shop to a tourist destination’.Whilst some harm had arisen from these uses in a sensitive location he was in ‘no doubt that that the farm shop and other activities have contributed to the local economy’ and these ‘benefits are set against the background of any previous agricultural subsidies coming to an end’.

The result is in . . .

It fell to the inspector to adjudicate in a context where the sheer popularity of an enterprise had left the planning system struggling to assess and then control it.
As with all planning decisions the inspector weighed all policy and other matters in the round – specifically the clear harms which he had identified against the ‘benefits to the local economy, employment, farm diversification and agriculture’.
Clarkson fell short of getting all he was seeking although the inspector suggested some sympathy at his ability to reduce the attractiveness of the farm to visitors noting he ‘could not stop the volume of customers arriving lawfully at the site save for closing the enterprise altogether’.  He also sensed that, in future years the farm’s popularity may wane, noting there was ‘a lack of clarity over how long the successes of the farm shop will continue’.
Overall, and in the spirt of balance, he concluded that ‘a new car park would reduce the adverse effects of the current parking situation on the AONB and upon highways safety’ but would not see a complete end to parking off site and that a temporary solution would be appropriate to ‘limit the use to a period of three years and requiring restoration of the site following that period’.
In the same spirit of short-termism, he also permitted the use of the lambing barn as a café for three years but refused the other elements – most notably the restaurant.
The Lampards are looking forward to Series Three already.

CONTINUE READING