Preparedness for when

NewShadow

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I'm going to wait and actually see what happens if and when a planning application for that many homes goes in. The local authority planners surely couldn't just say yes without consulting the people who live here now, not with a build that will almost double the size of the village in one fell swoop.

Long message warming.

Consultations can be tricky things on both sides.

When your local Council receives a planning application they are supposed to notify those neighbours who they think could be affected by it, but not everyone who thinks they ought to have been informed gets a letter.

You can object to any planning application, whether or not you get a letter - so you need to keep an eye out for when the posted notices go up, then check the website.

On the website you see what planning applications have been received, which ones have been previously approved and rejected (and sometimes why - which is useful) and you can sometimes see what other people have already said about the application.

Volume of objections is important (sometimes the number of objections being low is the only reason given for approval), but petitions are a waste of time, as are ‘template’ letters, as they are not considered individual objections. Anyone with an issue (individually, not as a household) should use their own words and write their letter or email themselves.

There is no restriction on what you can say about a planning application, but anything considered libellous, racist or offensive will be disregarded - this will likely include anything that uses the words 'migrant' or 'refugee'.

There are specific grounds for objection and the planing officers/council are not allowed to be influenced by other considerations. This means a long rambling email talking about property values just makes it more likely your legitimate concerns will be missed in summary. I've included a link at the bottom to a good letter layout.

The most common grounds for objection are are visual impact, effect on the character of a neighbourhood, possible noise and disturbance, overlooking, and loss of privacy. You have three areas for objection - the impact of the whole development (Internally and on the area), the impact of specific houses (eg. if you will be overlooked by the development), and the design of specific houses (Layout and materials)

Meaning the effect of the development on the amenities of neighbours will be considered, but a possible future impact on property values wouldn't be.

Design (including materials) is important. If you think the estate or specific properties will look ugly, then you should say so, especially if they will be over-bearing, out-of-scale or out of character in compared with existing properties.

You can also express concerns with regards the proposed layout of the individual properties with relation to the future health and wellbeing of the residents (I know one successful objection was made based on the lack of space for a kitchen table to allow family meals).

You need to be careful if you're arguing a pressure on highways, as the council will have surveyors carrying out an independent assessment and will only give weight to objections if they also report concerns.

Obviously, mention if its a conservation or listed area, and (if you wanted to) you could submit an FOI request asking for info on the capacity of schools and public services to submit as evidence - bear in mind, you normally only have 21 or 28 days to submit your objection, so would need to submit the FOI's now to have them in time.

That's far too long, and you likely knew most of it, but it's far too easy to lose because you 'don't play the game' well enough.

HTH.

http://planninghelp.cpre.org.uk/improve-where-you-live/how-to-comment-on-a-planning-application/letter-of-objection

Cappella

I apologise for posting twice, so quickly but this issue affected me very deeply in the past.

Originally posted by ThriftWizard.

Our kids, and most of the kids whose roots here go back for generations, can't even begin to hope to afford to buy a home here, and would struggle even to rent. We're not the first & we won't be the last to be Left Behind; it happened to GQ's family, closer to London (or so I suspect) a generation ago, and probably has happened to families all over the world,

My own roots in Lincolnshire go back a very long way - we can trace our family back at least as far as the fourteenth century. Forty years ago I moved with my husband and baby daughter to Manchester, because we simply couldn't afford to buy property there, and rented houses at that time were as rare as hens teeth. He was offered a teaching job here and we could just scrape together the deposit for a terraced house to live in here, as prices here in the north were so much lower than in my own county.
Lincolnshire villages were turning into middle class ghettos even then. How very sad that nothing much has changed. I'd have given my right arm to have been able to have stayed, and for my children to be able to pop round to their grands and Aunts and Uncles but it wasn't to be.
I am still bitter about this, and feel that I was wrenched away from my roots in order to make way for the wealthy elite.
Ironically we could afford to move back now, but have good friends and our immediate family around us here, and here we will stay.
Goodness I feel sad though, for all who are having to leave friends and family just to be able to afford to live.
Apologies to you all. Think I must be overtired:(

GreyQueen

The two-bedroom cottage which my parents rented for £2 a week in the 1960s was recently sold for £300,000.

Those of my family who are of working age are now all townies and city dwellers elsewhere in the region. Only the pensioners are left in the villages. This is because we were too poor to own our own homes. Since the agricultural depressions of the early 20th century forced us off the last of the very small, poor quality family farms and smallholdings, we were living in 'tied' cottages which went with farm work, and then in council housing.

My generation in our family (the forty and fifty somethings) couldn't get council housing because there wasn't very much to be had, and because the rich people who'd moved into our ancestral villages to enjoy the good life lobbied hard to stop more social housing being built. You don't need peasants in the countryside in an era of mechanisation; we just clutter the place up and drag down property values.

So, not being able to afford to buy, and not being able to get an affordable rent, and the work being in the towns and cities, and the cost of running a car on a low income to commute to the work being unaffordable, meant we all left. No choices - economic apartheid.

About 15 years ago, I was at the village fete. I'd taken the opportunity to climb up inside the church tower, something only accessible by ladders and done as an irregular fundraiser.

I stood on the top of the squarish Norman church tower looking across the rolling green countryside of southern England. I could see villages dotted about, villages who were already established by the time of the Norman Conquest. It was all very picturesque.

A very pleasant gentleman whom I'd never seen before, an incomer, asked if I was local? I just looked at him. Where would I start?

Should I point out that the churchwarden who'd taken our money for the access to the tower is my grandmother? That the organisers of the fete include great aunts, aunts, cousins, second cousins? That the church was cleaned by my aunt? That the victorian church school just nearby educated several generations of my family including my Dad?

That we can see my grandmother's present home mere yards away, and her parental home a mile across the fields from this tower? That the field just over there has land drains in it put in by my Dad in the 1950s? That most of the indigenous population for ten plus miles about are related to me? That my people have been here since the early 1600s as a matter of record, and probably twice that pre record keeping for commoners like us.

Where the flip do you start?! This very pleasant incomer didn't know who I was because my parents had to move for housing and work in 1970 and we only go back to the villages to visit family. Native villagers know perfectly well whose grand-daughter, daughter, great-neice and cousin and second cousin I am, although he'd no clue that I was local because he'd never seen me before.

I simply pointed down into the churchyard and asked him if he could see that row of graves (all of 30 yards away)? He acknowledged that he could. I told him that he was looking at my great-grandparents, my grandfather and my great-uncle. Plenty more of us underground there, too. I think he might just have got the message that I wasn't best pleased at the question.

mrs-moneypenny

Capella I'm from Lincs, all my family are still down there, I've dabbled with family history and they have been there a while.

lobbyludd

my brother is seen as an "incomer" in the small village where he lives because he was born 200 miles away, albeit still within England.

After living in various places where our parents took us as children, to follow jobs, he has lived a nomadic life as a traveller and settled down to live 20 miles away from where my mum eventually settled in her dotage in order to allow his children to have stability during their secondary education. Despite now being there for 10 years, he is the closest thing to a migrant that this village has ever seen in living memory and they are deeply suspicious of his open views about !!!!!exuality, religion and race.

However, the village where he now lives, by accident, happens to be where our paternal grandmother's family was from, she worked in the village's only shop as a girl, there are pigs in the small-holdings there who probably descend from the pigs that our forebears bred, we have family buried in the local grave-yard and can trace family back within parish records as far as we've looked: at least 200 years.

What does that mean? is he more local than people whose families moved there 100 years ago or less because his family moved away? do I have any more call on that locality (having never lived there) than the people who live there now because my ancestors came from thereabouts before theirs did?

we live on a small rock hurtling through space and we are all related. I fervently hope that at some point we stop looking across to those who are very slightly different to us and blaming them for our lack of opportunities and start looking UP to those who have power and wealth and opportunity aplenty and ask what the F*** they have done to deserve such privilege.

GreyQueen

Unfortunately, we live in a world where it is utterly unacceptable to say to a group of people; you can't live here because of creed or colour. But it's extremely acceptable to exclude people from their home areas on economic grounds by manipulating housing law, tenancy law and planning law to make their life impossible.

My family are scattered across several counties now. I am personally 20 miles from my birthplace, my brother is 30 miles away, my cousins anything from 40-50 miles away. We're shut out of our own area because of the actions of people who came to live in our part of the country and decided that they wanted to preserve it in aspic. Hell, I can't even go visit my Nan in the home village because I haven't got a car and it would take two days and an overnight stay to get there on public transport - I can just about hack across the county by public transport to the hometown and then get taken to see her by my parents.

The issue I, and I supsect others, were raising, isn't about who has been there longest, it's about being forced out of your home area, against your will, to the detriment of your family life, because of rich incomers making the place too bliddy expensive for anyone else to live in.

Hell, as one of my second cousins notes, being as she and her hubs and children are The Last Working Class Family in the Village, no one else living there does their own work; housework, garden work, ironing. The wimmin-who-do bicycle in from the council estate in the bigger, uglier village three miles away.

Rural England has a lot of pain and injustice behind the chocolate-boxey quaintnesses

lobbyludd

I completely agree with you that lack of affordable housing is a massive problem, particularly in rural and semi-rural areas where the rich want to live out a weekend bucolic fantasy whilst commuting into areas of high income employment, pricing anyone else out of the market: renting or buying (and honestly if I could afford that I would probably do that too, so I'm not blaming anyone for their individual decisions).

It is extremely damaging to communities and forces young people and families out of the areas they have grown up in to where?: the inner cities where the jobs are, are unaffordable to the normal working person also.

I think where we may? differ, is that I think the root cause of that is the historic conservative move to sell off social housing, embargo on councils building new social housing, their encouragement of an upward pressure on rents through tax brakes to the buy to let hobby landlord and bolstering therefore of a home-ownership bubble through scarcity coupled with a refusal to impose ceilings on reasonable rents.

I think migration from outside of the UK (or in my example of my brother inside) is a red herring used by those in power to pretend that they are pro-countryside communities and pro-working people whilst they stitch us all up for their own ends.

but I am derailing this thread, which is one that I very much enjoy and has taught me loads of things whilst I quietly lurk reading along. I don't want to argue with anyone here because I very much respect each and every one of the thread's posters and value the combined wisdom of this community.

Sorry! sometimes I run away with myself on a tangent.

GreyQueen

If anyone's derailing, it's me. Sorry. It's just something I feel passionately about. And I work for one of the local authorities who do still own their council housing directly, and am thus aware of how much has been sold and how much of it is in the hands of recent economic migrants from EU countires. Some of whom, incidentally, are most annoyed to be told they have to wait a few years to buy it, as they're trying to do so within the first month of their tenancy.

It saddens me that, when there was never enough council housing to go around in this part of the country, and so much of that has been sold, that we've got people literally coming into our council offices straight off the airport bus declaring I want a council house.

Accessing public housing and then buying it if you can is pretty obviously something which plenty of EU migrants have discussed and decided upon long before arriving in this country.

lillibet_dripping

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I think disaster comes in many forms and today I discovered that yet another farm, quite a considerable sized plot overall, is being put forward for outline planning permission for a big housing estate within the perimeter of the village. It 's a bigger area than all the other potential sites put together and would be thousands of houses very close to where we live and would close off one of the best walks in the area that's been used as a way through to the centre with the shops a couple of miles away and is going to be a massive impact on us IF it goes ahead. There will be no green spaces at all if the building and applications carry on at the rate they have this spring and will be a disaster for the community here. The existing school, doctors surgeries, dentists etc. are at stretch to serve us all at the moment, how it will be with thousands more people trying to access and use those services if they don't provide more is unthinkable and there wasn't, on the plan I was shown at least, anything of that nature proposed, just hundreds of houses, Disaster!!!!!

Lyn - I feel your pain. My cottage is one field away from a proposed new 'garden suburb' - 3500 houses with an ancient woodland at the heart of it:eek: Existing houses around the proposed site are flooding onto the market daily from home owners trying to get away but none are selling.

Cappella

Originally posted by GreyQueen
The issue I, and I supsect others, were raising, isn't about who has been there longest, it's about being forced out of your home area, against your will, to the detriment of your family life, because of rich incomers making the place too bliddy expensive for anyone else to live in.

This is certainly the point I was trying to make. I apologise if it came over as otherwise. Although I'm still sometimes saddened that we had to become economic migrants 40 years ago I can honestly say that I don't blame any individual, or group of individuals, for our move, I blame the economic and political ethos of the time. I think it would also be true to say that we did make the best use of our opportunities then, and have made full, rich lives for ourselves and our nuclear famiy here despite the areas drawbacks. Isn't 'preparedness, partly, all about doing the best you can with the hand you've been dealt? I've always believed so. In the 1970s there still WERE jobs in the inner cities though, and we had to move 156 miles away from my family in order to do that.

I don't want to derail this thread either. I have really enjoyed it. However I will try not to respond emotively in future, and won't post when I'm tired. It's too easy to phrase things badly, as I did yesterday.
Apologies to all.