Harborough District Council has finally published its proposed local plan, originally due out before Christmas. Councillors are voting on whether to put the Plan to public consultation tonight.
The plan will mean MASSIVE changes for our area. There is so much detail in this vast pile of documents that for now I will just give a summary:
Market Harborough will get sites allocated for a further 1,350 homes - on top of 2,009 that have already been allocated and not built, and the 959 that were built between 2020 and 2023. Lots are to be built in some huge sites on the right-hand side if you are driving north from Market Harborough towards the McDonalds Roundabout on the B6047 - they are just west of Great Bowden, and north of the estates that run off Alvington Way. There will be another giant site wrapping around the new Wellington Place estate, filling up the open fields between there and the prison. There is also a proposal to build on the Commons car park in the town centre, with obvious implications for parking.
Great Glen and Stretton Hall will have a new town wrapped around them, which will effectively connect them to Leicester. There will also be a massive development nearby around Scraptoft. There will also be a large development in Glen village, north of Furrow Way and west of Bridgewater Drive. Between them these developments will contain 2,850 new homes - with more to come in the next planning period.
Kibworth is to get 475 further houses south of the railway line and north of Warwick Road (I'm aware of residents' concerns about the queues at the bridge with the traffic lights).
Great Bowden gets a further 100 houses between Dingley Road and the A6, and up to Nether Green (as well as the large development to the west).
Although I have focused on things in our constituency, we will also be affected when travelling by developments in villages like Fleckney, and by the large amount of development around Scraptoft/Thurnby/Bushby/Houghton. These will affect the already bad traffic in and out of the city.
The process that has led to these life-changing proposals has been a very bad one. It has been hopelessly untransparent all the way. Ordinary Councillors have had no input into which sites were chosen. The leadership of the council has drawn up the plans and sought to avoid public discussion about choices between different sites. The process started with a bad decision to take on extra overspill houses from Leicester, and has seen every deadline missed. This has been part of a deliberate strategy to minimise public discussion about these controversial choices.
You might think that this will really change the character of our community, and you would be right. You might also feel like we have done our bit in recent years. In the Harborough District there are over a third more houses than there were in 2001. That’s a much faster rate of growth than the national average, and twice the rate of neighbouring Leicester. But despite all this, the Labour government has decided to increase our housing target by 42% - even as it cuts the target for London by 11%, and cuts the target for Leicester by 36%. This means when our plan is revised in a couple of years, the council will have to find even *more* sites to allocate for housing. Normally as soon as a plan is agreed, council officials start work on the next plan.
Where is all this demand coming from? According to the most recent population projections from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), *all* of the increase in our population in the coming decades is expected to come from immigration. The population would otherwise be stable. There are pros and cons of migration, but a big unavoidable downside is the huge pressure it puts on housing. The ONS project that migration is to remain at unprecedented levels under this government – that is something I am campaigning to change.
A lot of people will have views on the choices the council have made here, and on particular sites.
We will not see any major improvements to our infrastructure as part of this plan: all this new housing won't come with the GP surgeries, roads or leisure facilities we already need for existing residents.
Why? Partly because the huge sums that are to be raised from developers under this plan are to be spent by the council on a new pledge (on page 100 of the plan) to make 40% of all new homes in these new estates council housing ('affordable housing' in today's jargon).
While we need some of this housing, the balance is all wrong. Rather than so much of the money raised going on homes for people who may not currently live here, more of the money needs to be going on services for existing residents, who have already seen our infrastructure strained by explosive growth - and seen nothing in return.
Please do have your say – when the consultation opens I will post the link here. I am happy to meet groups of residents to talk about the plan.
Visit to Helping Hands in Wigston
