Vale of Glamorgan LDP- Overdevelopment and the Needless Destruction of our Countryside

You dear reader, have probably become aware by now that there appears to be a lot of house building happening within the rural Vale of Glamorgan as of late. For example, Cowbridge, St Athan, Sully, Llantwit Major and Flemingston have all begun to sport a number of new housing developments. A particularly pertinent example is the village of Rhoose which has within the last decade or so been saturated by a number of new housing estates with yet further developments mooted, including the controversial development of Model Farm into a business park. Many Rhoose residents consider the sheer amount of newbuilds to be excessive and indicative of overdevelopment. The same can also be said of Coity in Bridgend. Once wholly rural. Now almost literally unrecognisable.

But why is this spate of rural housebuilding happening at all? And what-if anything, can be done to counter these schemes?

(London Going Out of Town by Cruikshank 1829, reflects the perianal concern and anxiety many have felt in regard to the destruction of the countryside and overdevelopment)

WAG LDP

This wave of house building was initially prompted by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) who decreed that all councils in Wales must create a Local Development Plan (LDP) in order to set out land use policies. Population growth projections and a dearth of ‘affordable’ homes are what is driving the efforts of the Vale of Glamorgan Council (VOG) to build thousands of new houses on greenfield land throughout the Vale of Glamorgan.

Policies MG1 and SP3 of the Vale of Glamorgan’s LDP ‘identifies a housing requirement of 9460 new dwellings’. This requirement figure is based upon the Welsh Assembly Government’s population projections for the Vale of Glamorgan up to 2026 (LDP, Written Statement 2017, pp 56).

At the time that the LDP was adopted by the Vale of Glamorgan Council in 2017, housing projections by the WAG were projected to be at around 5000 which was increased to 9460 by the Vale of Glamorgan Council. Despite the efforts of a number of Plaid councillors to get the number 9460 reduced to something approaching a sensible and pragmatic figure, their amendment was defeated by the Labour run Vale Council. 

Population Growth

The population figures, and thus the housing numbers poised within the VOG’s LDP can be challenged as according to figures released by the National Office of Statistics in 2019, fewer than 30,000 babies were born in Wales, the lowest number in the last one-hundred years. 2020 figures show a further decline to 28,661 births, twenty percent less than 2010 (www.ons.gov.uk). With falling birth-rates in Wales and indeed Britain, this population growth appears to be in a large part driven by migration and predicted migration. The housing numbers to accommodate population growth would appear to be little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if the houses are built, then people will surely come, many of whom will likely be out of town buy-to-let investors rather than local people.

Many who are concerned by this grossly exaggerated housing number including Plaid, Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors, as well as a good number of independent councillors and a great number of Vale residents, such as the five thousand people who signed a petition against the Upper Cosmeston Farm development, have called for houses to be built according to local need and for the Vale Council to protect greenfield sites. All pleas have seemingly been dismissed as the LDP has been doggedly and dogmatically pursued by various planning departments within South Wales.

Housing Crisis Myth

A term we hear often now days, thrown around in particular by those with vested interests in housebuilding,  is ‘housing crisis’. This alarmist term refers to the apparent dearth of housing, in particular that of what are called ‘affordable’ or ‘first time buyer homes’, available to people wishing to take their first steps on the property ladder. This chronic dearth is purported to be because supply cannot keep up with demand-the idea that homes in Britain are expensive simply because there are not enough homes to go around. As we have seen above the population growth in Wales, and indeed Britain, is declining. This reasoning plays a large role in the formation of the current LDP housing figures.

Research by Bank of England researchers John Lewis and Fergus Cumming in ‘Houses are assets not goods-taking the theory to the UK data’, however has thoroughly dismantled the widely held falsehood of supply and demand being the cause of a ‘housing crisis’ and has shown that high house prices have actually been driven by finance. Low interest rates are the real cause of all real house price rises since the early 2000’s. Housing stock levels have constantly risen at a higher rate than population growth since at least the 1990’s when the average house price was only 3.6 more than the average salary. Now the average house price is around eight times the average national salary (Positivmoney,org).

Discussion-or lack of

There is a very important discussion to be had regarding the causes of first time buyers being unable to get on the property ladder, which includes as shown above, the role of finance, but also in direct relation to this is the ‘buy to let’ market, which has removed a great number of lower priced homes from the reach of first-time buyers. The so-called ‘rent trap’, triggered in part due to intense competition amongst tenants also plays its part, which essentially keeps young people off the housing ladder by the high rents that private landlords often charge for accommodation, which in turn leaves very little money left to save up for a mortgage deposit.

Add to this the fact that many people who are stuck in the rant-trap earn below the national average wage, but especially those who struggle on minimum wage with part time contracts, or worse, on zero-hour contracts, have virtually no-chance of becoming home owners, even if a slew of so-called ‘affordable homes’ were built next to every town and village throughout the Vale of Glamorgan. It therefore seems to the authors of this article wholly simplistic and erroneous to believe that we as a nation can simply build our way out of this problem, as unless we address the root causes of the dearth of ‘affordable housing’, the symptoms will assuredly persist in perpetuity until the underlying issues are addressed. In short, the supply and demand explanation for the phantom ‘housing crisis’, is essentially one giant, stinky red-herring, and one that favours housing developer’s ambition to access green belt land.

Affordable pretext

It is interesting to note that a great number of the newbuilds, over fifty percent, that have been constructed within the Vale of Glamorgan since the LDP was first adopted are not ‘affordable’ and represent the higher end of the market. The affordable houses angle played a large part of the justification for the current LDP. If houses are to be built, it is affordable houses, preferably on brownfield land that should be a priority to address local need rather than luxury/executive homes to provide developers with profits. Developers though as we know, do not like building these types of ‘affordable’ homes, as there is far more profit in executive style homes.

Houses are more important?

We often hear a plethora of mantras and platitudes thrown around by proponents of controversial housing development proposals in an attempt to claim the moral imperative such as ‘this is progress’, ‘we are doing this for your children’, ‘we need houses’, ‘only two percent of Britain is built upon’ ‘if you want green-fields, go down Porthkerry’ etc. Such reductive red-herring arguments are of course easily dismantled but the gist is the same, and that is ultimately reflected in the concluding statement of any planning documents, which paraphrased goes something like, ‘weighed up against the needs of the development, houses are more important’.

This final assertion is a very existential issue, and indeed a personal one, for one needs to ask, more important to whom? The housing developers-who although often feel the need to lament falling gains, make a great deal of money constructing often deficient, ugly, badly built and tightly packed in homes. Indeed, hard-nosed profits, dividends and bonuses are the primary concern of any housing development company. Barratt's for example saw a boost in annual profits by nearly two thirds in 2020-2021 with chief executive David Thomas reporting "excellent progress". Persimmon CEO Jeff Fairburn in 2018 was the recipient of a much criticised 110 million pound bonus. The local authority and councillors, who often seem misguided and ignorant in their decisions to give assent to develop land, or the local residents who are almost always subject to appeal to authority, dismissed with red-herring and ad-hominem arguments, fobbed-off or just ignored altogether.

Lack of Community input in the planning process

In the words of Plaid councillor Chris Franks, ‘Plaid considers that the (VOG LDP) consultation process to have been a cynical exercise. Ordinary people were encouraged to spend time and effort making submissions only to be dismissed out of hand’. Indeed, this is what appears to happen during each and every planning meeting, notably that of Model Farm Rhoose, whereby resident’s concerns were essentially dismissed in favour of the aprioristic beliefs of certain councillors and officers, and the partisan nature of the many reports with their technical sophistry (with the exception of the deliberately hidden viability report). In fact, the authors of this article are struggling to think of a single precedent whereby the public’s written objections were actually taken onboard and acted upon. Not one. This tells us everything we need to know about how local resident’s concerns are imputed during the planning process. Not at all. The whole process appears to be nothing more than a sop. This lack of meaningful input, in our opinion, has to change.

The assertion that ‘houses are more important’ is more often than not, not shared by those who ultimately have to bear the brunt and fallout of the new housing estate, viz increased traffic and congestion and the character of their communities irrevocably changed, most often in rural settings, and always for the worse with habitat, biodiversity and flora and fauna bulldozed away. Retaining a few trees and hedgerows as mitigation or ‘softening’ is a very poor trade.

Climate and nature emergencies-a new material consideration?

Both the Welsh Assembly Government and the Vale of Glamorgan Council in 2019 declared a ‘climate emergency’ and in 2021 a ‘nature emergency’. It is interesting to note that the preservation of valuable agricultural land and precious green spaces it seems does not form a pressing part of action regarding these emergencies, although this would appear to be by far in a way the most pragmatic course of action to take, especially considering that the UK is heavily reliant upon importing food from abroad. Up to two thirds of the land needed to produce Britain’s food lies abroad meaning that we cannot grow enough produce to feed ourselves (populationmatters.org).

A good chance for the WAG to show that they are serous with their climate and nature emergency policies would be to call-in the proposed development of Lower Cosmeston Farm. But no. The WAG Climate Change Minister Julie James has stated that this development is required to meet ‘new and demanding net zero carbon living standards’. It is challenging to think how a likely additional five hundred cars would meet this new net zero carbon standard. And in a cringing non-sequitur, this development was said to be helping to create a ‘greener Wales’. Go figure.

Conclusion

Do we still need new houses built? Certainly, it would be desirable to increase the stock of social housing on brownfield land yes, and in exceptional circumstances greenfield land. Houses are of course important, but as the research has shown, the so-called housing crisis is little more than a myth, perpetuated in particular by the development lobby. There is no real shortage of houses. House price inflation, and its causes, is the real culprit behind the inability of many aspiring property owners to get on the property ladder not so much supply and demand.

In view of the burgeoning overpopulation of Britain and its environmental ramifications, the dearth of land needed to grow our own food and addressing the root causes of the chronic shortage of affordable homes, i.e., house price inflation, buy-to-let, the rent trap and a massively increasing population, sensible and pragmatic thinking is needed now in the twenty first century rather than the simplistic, and quite frankly-wicked, developer orientated ‘development over all’ approach we have seen time and time again. Make no mistake. Their covetous gaze is fixed directly on our precious greenbelt land, and they are coming.

What we need is the right houses in the right places-i.e., preferably brownfield sites, and ultimately to address the underlying causes of the lack of affordable houses. Sweden provides a good example of how to do this with effective legislature regarding housing as the rents private landlords can charge are capped and buy-to-let bank-business loans for individual apartments and houses are not permitted. There is no so called ‘housing crisis’ in Sweden.

These would seem to be pragmatic measures by which to help address the root causes of young people’s difficulty of owning a home. And until such time as our government and local authorities begin to address the root causes of the dearth of affordable housing and to understand what real progress is in regard to the preservation of the natural environment, the destruction of our precious green spaces will seemingly continue unabated.