Frequently Asked Questions?
On 20 Feb 2024, Epsom and Ewell Borough Council published a new FRP section on its website (‘Frequently Repeated Propaganda’), mistitled ‘FAQs’.
In an article to the Epsom and Ewell Times, Cllr McCormick introduced the new FRPs (FAQs) stating:
“We want to make sure that all those who live in, work in and visit the borough have access to the latest information about the Local Plan, to ensure that they are informed and to dispel rumours and myths about the Plan.”
Let’s dispel some rumours and myths with some real Frequently Asked Questions.
Is the Local Plan important?
Yes. It is the singlemost important decision-making document the council will issue for the next 15
years. It sets out everything from where commercial, industrial and residential
buildings can be constructed, to how the environment will be protected, from
what roads and schools are needed, to the policies against which all
development will be assessed. It maps out the future of the borough and
therefore will have a fundamental impact on the lives of all residents. It is critical that the right
decisions are made now as, once the plan is issued it can’t be undone.
Where can I find more information on the changes to the Local Plan?Sorry, a year after the consultation on the draft Local Plan, and despite analysis of feedback continuing during the ‘pause’ in 2023, there remains no information on what changes are being considered (or have been made) as a result of the consultation.
The latest information was published in January 2023. Either the council has been
doing nothing for a year, or there is something they’re not sharing. There are currently no plans to share information with the public until 2025.
Why have consultation responses not been analysed and responses published?
On 22 March 2023, the council voted to ‘pause’ the Local Plan. This pause was ‘other than for the purpose of analysing the responses of the public consultation to capture residents’ views and any new information.’ That work therefore continued.
The Local Plan process was ‘unpaused’ on 24 October 2023. After almost a year nothing has been published. For 7 months of this time, council officers working on the local plan could focus only on analysing responses due to the ‘pause’. Still nothing.
It is the absence of official and reliable communication residents are left with only conjecture and rumours. In the absence of information, it can be assumed that officers have found that public opinion doesn’t align with their plans, so they are keeping it under wraps. Time will tell.
Are there Local Plan decisions still pending?
Presumably. The Licensing and Planning Policy Committee (‘LPPC’) is responsible for ‘influencing and controlling development and use of land … including preparation, adoption and review of the statutory Development Plan’ on behalf of the Council.
Lots of decisions should have been taken by now on the direction the Local Plan should take. So far, the LPPC appears not to have taken any decisions on the content of the Local Plan. According to the council’s FAQs, the LPPC is not going to receive recommendations until November 2024.
How can the LPPC fulfil its responsibility for preparation of the Local Plan if the first they see of it is the proposed answer? They are only scheduled to see the recommendations just before the plan needs to be published, so with no time to change it. That sounds like rubber stamping decisions already made.
If the Council committee responsible for the Local Plan (the LPPC) doesn’t know what’s happening, how is the plan progressing?
Attempts to give direction to officers not to build on Green Belt, proposed by Cllr Howells (RA) at a full council meeting held in October 2023, were voted down by her fellow Residents Association councillors and Labour.
Unelected officers are continuing to make decisions with no accountability.
What is a Spatial Strategy and has it been decided yet?
The Spatial Strategy sets out what each area of the Borough can be used for, whether than be commercial, industrial, residential or the environment. The draft Spatial Strategy included development of almost 57 hectares of Green Belt land (140 football pitches). Of this, 5 hectares is at West Park Hospital and is classified as ‘previously developed land’ (as it already has buildings on), which should be prioritised for development in line with Government guidance.
Over 50 hectares allocated for development in the draft local plan is protected, ‘high-performing’ (i.e. good quality) Green Belt land. The council FRPs (FAQs) state that the Spatial Strategy remains uncertain. Interpreting what they have stated, they tried to get councillors to agree on what land should be developed in private briefings. They didn’t want residents to know the briefings were happening or what was being discussed – this secrecy was confirmed by the council’s legal officer in a public meeting of the Strategy and Resources Committee on 25 Jan 2024.
Why did they not want residents to know? Because officers were pushing for development of Green Belt land which 87% of residents had rejected in the Feb 2023 consultation and they didn’t want to deal with the push back? Despite the fact that ‘the council has been unable to solidify the strategy’, the proposals were sent to Surrey County Council in January 2024 to develop infrastructure plans.
No consensus, no decisions, ignoring residents’ concerns and ploughing on regardless.
What is the timeline for Local Plan Decisions?
The council has only published the vaguest and highest-level timetable. It states we are in ‘Stage 3’, which lasts for two years from March 2023 to Feb 2025. A normal project plan would include multiple ‘milestones’ (short term actions and decisions) to ensure the project runs to timetable and meets objectives. This hasn’t been published, so the public are left in the dark.
The valid concern, in the absence of any information, is that decisions are being made that don’t align with the clear evidence for saving the Green Belt. Or perhaps worse, that no decisions are being made at all, councillors are not controlling the process, and an unacceptable mess will be presented to the LPPC in November for their recommendation.
The timetable is?… there is no timetable.
What happens if the LPPC or Full Council don’t agree with the officers’ recommendations in November 2024 – January 2025?
There is no published plan for what would happen should the un-steered, officer-drafted plans fail to meet with the approval of councillors.
Based on the videos of previous meetings, councillors will be pushed into approving what is presented. This is likely to be on the basis that rejecting the proposals would result in missing the timetable for getting the local plan accepted, and waste £millions. In short, the plans are likely to be approved under duress.
Open, transparent and timely decision-making on the direction and content of the Local Plan, is likely to be required by March/April 2024, to avoid this unacceptable outcome. The decisions, whether explicit or implicit, are being made now.
How will the next consultation work in Feb/March 2025?
Despite the thousands of detailed responses to the last ‘Regulation 18’ consultation on the Local plan, held in Q1 2023, a year later no information has been published on how this is expected to impact the direction or content of the plan. The FRPs (FAQs) state that this analysis will be published in 2025, together with the next consultation.
The results of the next ‘consultation’ (in 2025) do not get assessed by the council to feed into the Local Plan. The responses are sent to the Planning Inspector, the person responsible for reviewing the draft plan to see if it is acceptable. The focus of that review is likely to be on whether there are technical errors in the plan, not on the nature or scale of public opinion.
If nothing useful resulted from the 2023 consultation, the 2025 consultation is unlikely to be better. Councillors need to take control of the Local Plan process now and make the strategic and policy decisions they were elected for.
What does the ‘Data informing the Local Plan preparation’ (evidence) show and is it being followed?
The Council has procured a wide array of information to inform the Local Plan preparation. This was published in Jan 2023 to support the consultation. Further information and analysis has been prepared since but not published. At a very high level, the existing evidence showed:
- Housing: That the council has not calculated housing requirements as required by the National Planning Policy Framework (‘NPPF’) para 61. Instead they have relied only on the ‘advisory starting point’ of the universally-criticised and vastly inflated ‘Standard Method’ figure. This figure hasn’t actually been used to determine how many houses to build, but has been blamed for building on Green Belt.
- Green Belt: The Green Belt report states that the overwhelming majority of the Borough’s protected Green Belt is ‘high performing’, i.e. excellent quality and doing exactly what it was intended to do. Despite it being protected, excellent quality and highly valued by residents, officers are choosing to build on it when they are explicitly permitted by NPPF para 145 not to do so. They are then arguing that there are exceptional circumstances to build on it. They are choosing to make this argument, even though it is tenuous at best.
- Transport assessment: This assessment highlights that the Green Belt sites selected for development are generally not advised for housing due to the poor links to important services, transport and infrastructure.
- Flood risk assessment: This highlights that a significant proportion of the Green Belt sites selected for development are subject to critical drainage (flooding) risks. The Local Plan stated that development would be ‘Located away from areas of flood risk’, but has then specifically chosen flood risk sites for development.
The council appears to be ignoring the evidence base and choosing to build on the Green Belt. They have not explained why.
What is the current housing need in the borough today?
Rather concerningly, the council’s FRPs (FAQs) have misrepresented their own data.
Firstly it quotes a target of 575 homes / year. There is no such target either locally or set by central government.
The figure quoted is the output of the specifically inflated, unconstrained ‘advisory starting point’ for ‘informing’ housing requirements, the ‘Standard Method’. This includes the use of 2014 data, that has been proven to have significantly inflated population growth, and adds a 40% uplift. It is required to use this information as an input to determining housing requirements. It is then necessary to identify and analyse other pertinent inputs to derive an appropriate housing requirement for the area. This has not been done.
Using 2018 government ‘ONS’ data indicates households growing from 31,694 households in 2022 to 34,117 households in 2040, an increase of 2,423 households, or 135 homes/year.
The existing, brought forward housing need from the homeless register of 850 (HEDNA para 13.12) equates to an additional 47 homes/year. This totals 3,273 homes or 182 homes / year.
Compare this to the available brownfield (and previously developed) sites, identified by the council, for 3,864 homes, nearly 600 homes more than needed. There is no need to build on Green Belt land to meet this need.
Secondly, it bizarrely misquotes the ‘Housing and Economic Development Needs Assessment (‘HEDNA’), as requiring 652 affordable housing units per year. The HEDNA indicates that this figure ‘includes a proportion of households that are already in housing (i.e. they do not generate a net additional need for housing).’ The HEDNA states that ‘the current annualised estimate of households in affordable need, based on the Housing Needs Register, is therefore 47 households per year.’
According to the council’s data, the borough delivered 67 affordable homes in 2022/23.
Embarrassingly, the FRPs go on to state that the council is currently spending £2m of taxpayers’ money, each year, on emergency accommodation. At the same time it is not forcing developers to meet their obligations to build affordable housing (under planning approvals) and is not using developers’ financial contributions to procure the affordable housing they pay towards. Instead the Council is holding onto these funds and redirecting the interest to pay for other services rather than resolving the housing needs.
The solution is not to build inflated numbers of large houses on Green Belt land, it is to :-
- build the right number of social and affordable apartments on the available brownfield sites,
- hold developers accountable for delivering the affordable housing included in planning approvals
- use the funds provided to procure (or develop) affordable housing rather than appropriating the income for other uses
Can our housing and economic needs be met on just brownfield sites?
Yes! As shown above, the borough’s housing requirements can be fully met by building on the already-identified brownfield sites.
Can Longmead and Kiln Lane industrial estates be developed for housing?
These estates include significant areas of under-utilised land. The fact that the council has stated that there is no scope to optimise these estates to deliver any housing shows an embarrassing lack of understanding of land development options.
It is possible to retain, enhance, and even expand the level of commercial, light-industrial and other uses of the site, whilst delivering significant levels of additional homes. Existing leases are not a barrier to development. Frequently lease-holders are keen to renegotiate and to move to newer, better-serviced premises. Similar estates in other boroughs have been developed creatively to significantly enhance their use, attractiveness and value.
The council has refused to engage with developers, however the Green Belt Group has spoken to developers who are very interested in designing and developing a thriving mixed-use site. The council owns a significant proportion of the site but has not submitted it for consideration. As a result it is hampering its own delivery ambitions.
Must Green Belt Land be developed?
No. The recent updates to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) state that
‘once established, there is no requirement for Green Belt boundaries to be reviewed or changed when plans are being prepared or updated.’
The council has a choice. It should choose to protect the Green Belt.
The council correctly states:
‘The NPPF makes clear that it is at the discretion of Local Authorities as to whether Green Belt boundary is amended through the Local Plan process. Any changes need to demonstrate exceptional circumstances, and before concluding that exceptional circumstances exist, local authorities will need to demonstrate that the Local Plan:
- makes as much use as possible of suitable brownfield sites and underutilised land
- optimises the density of development in the urban area
- has been informed by discussions with neighbouring authorities about whether they could accommodate some of the identified need for development – these conversations with neighbouring authorities will continue to take place as the plan develops.
This flexibility remains within the NPPF to reflect that Green Belt authorities all have their own unique characteristics, challenges and requirements, and that Local Plans must still address competing and conflicting demands for land.’
The council hasn’t complied with any of these requirements. Nevertheless, despite stating that it has the ‘discretion’ and ‘flexibility’ as to whether to approve building on the Green Belt, and despite the overwhelming level of public support to protect it, the council continues to forge ahead with undesirable, unethical and unnecessary plans to build on greenfield Green Belt sites.
The FRPs (FAQs) from the council state that the Clarendon Park, Livingstone Park and Manor Park estates were developed on Green Belt Land because they were shown to meet very special circumstances. In reality, the estates were built on ‘previously developed land’, not the undeveloped Green Belt land currently being proposed.
It remains fully acceptable to develop previously developed land such as West Park Hospital. It is not appropriate to build on Horton Farm, Priest Hill, etc.
What happened at Langley Vale?
A development proposed in Langley Vale, in the Green Belt, was rejected by EEBC. This decision was overturned by the planning inspector because Epsom & Ewell does not have an up-to-date Local Plan setting out where development is to be permitted.
The responsibility for the lack of a local plan lies entirely with the Residents Association controlled local council. Epsom & Ewell has one of the oldest Local Plans in the country but has failed to produce a new one, leaving the borough’s precious Green Belt at the mercy of speculative development.
The answer? Prepare a local plan that allocates housing on brownfield and previously developed sites and excludes Green Belt. If this had been in place already, Langley Vale would not be developed.
What further official opportunities will there be for local residents to feed back?
There is only one and it will probably be too late by then for residents’ opinions to make a difference.
The next public consultation on the Local Plan (Regulation 19) is expected to be in early 2025. By then the version of the plan to be submitted to the inspector will already have been produced.
Councillors need to be taking control of the local plan and making decisions now. Waiting is not an option.
What are the choices?
The council, and the councillors, have several choices to make.
- Choose whether or not to show leadership and responsible ambition, for the borough and for the planet.
- Choose whether to be open and transparent or to be secretive to avoid challenge and scrutiny.
- Choose whether or not to follow the evidence produced and protect the Green Belt.
- Choose whether or not voluntarily to argue that there are exceptional circumstances to build on Green Belt.
- Choose whether or not to follow advice that it is completely legal for the council not to include development of Green Belt land in the Local Plan. Officers are choosing to ignore that option.
The Local Plan process is being run by people who are unaccountable for their choices. Officers like Vicky Potts and Justin Turvey are making the decisions. Elected councillors are kept in the dark, misinformed and prevented from making the decisions that are necessary.
It is time for councillors to take control of the local plan and make the strategic and policy decisions they were elected to make. These decisions should not be misled by officers, but should be based on unbiased facts, policy options set out by government, and the needs and directions of the borough’s residents. Time has nearly run out. They need to do this now.
Epsom Green Belt
24th February 2024
Keep Epsom & Ewell Green Belt 
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