Westminster Building Corp

The Executive Summary of the MK response to the Core Strategy:

Cornwall Council’s Core Strategy has been produced within the wider context of irresponsible planning and unjust housing policies, devised and implemented by central government. These policies have lead to unsustainable growth within Cornwall, while inequality has grown and working people are increasingly denied access to housing that they can afford in their own communities.

Mebyon Kernow utterly reject the policies of the central government and we will continue to oppose them.

Within this context, our response to the consultation on Cornwall Council’s Core Strategy and includes the following points:

· Mebyon Kernow considers that the Core Strategy is not distinctly Cornish. It fails to understand what makes Cornwall culturally distinctive.

· Mebyon Kernow considers that the Core Strategy is not sustainable. Its claims to be “green” or “sustainable” are false and undermined by the promotion of unsustainable levels of housing growth.

· Mebyon Kernow objects to the proposal to set a twenty year target of 48,000 new properties for Cornwall.

· Mebyon Kernow considers that the projections used by Cornwall Council to justify their proposed levels of housing to be flawed.

· At this time of low economic performance and decreased levels of in-migration into Cornwall, Mebyon Kernow seeks a breathing space from the large-scale development of open market properties and, instead, the prioritisation of affordable local-needs housing.

· Mebyon Kernow members remain concerned at statements from the administration at Lys Kernow suggesting even greater growth than that outlined in the consultation document.

· Mebyon Kernow considers that the Spatial Strategy does not deliver a “dispersed” approach to development as claimed. MK objects to the centralisation of large degrees of housing around existing urban centres, as well as the eco-town and eco-communities proposals.

· Mebyon Kernow considers that the policy statements on employment, land and assets, historic and natural environment, etc, are poorly-defined and likely to be undermined by the level of growth proposed.

· Mebyon Kernow objects to Cornwall Council’s proposals on waste, which are still based around a single mass-burn incinerator for municipal waste.

We would respectfully call on Cornwall Council to rethink its attitude to both development and its planning policies. A good start would be to radically reduce the housing target set out in the present Core Strategy consultation document.

This is just the first page summary of a sixteen page document which argues for an entirely different approach to the 'build as many houses as possible' approach of the Conservative Cornwall Council.

The Core Strategy is a Conservative strategy. Before their electoral success in 2009 and 2010 they were keen to rubbish Labour's Regional Spatial Strategy, with George Eustice calling the RSS call for 68,000 houses to be built across Cornwall 'bonkers'.

Now the Conservatives openly want to build a MINIMUM of 48,000 houses and behind the scenes are looking at building 60,000 or more.

In response to this George Eustice wants to wait for 10 years before doing anything or wants to build on brownfield land (that is brown according to Cornwall Council planners but looks green when locals take thier dogs for a walk) before green.

The Lib Dems:

"have not submitted a 'corporate' response to the consultation as we took the view that our individual Councillors were free to respond as they saw fit depending on their individual views of the needs of their locality. As we are not the Tory party no responses have been vetted."

Clearly it's not an important enough issue to spend time on as a party wanting to get things right for Cornwall.

What was Labour's response to the Core Strategy? You might think, given their previous desire to cover Cornwall with 68,000 houses, that they would be critical and call for even more houses than the minimum 0f 48,000 that we have been promised.

In fact Labour, like the Lib Dems, have not taken the time to present any response to the CS at all. Instead the Labour Party say that:

"The Labour Party in Cornwall encouraged members to make their own submissions on local aspects of the Core Strategy and fed into the Community Network Area and local council responses via our town and parish representatives."

Labour go on to claim:

"this whole issue has become a political football, which has not been constructive in the development of a strategy that will serve the interests of people in Cornwall."

Well if it's a political football there's only one party kicking for Cornwall!

This whole consultation once again goes to prove that the only party with Cornwall's interests at heart is Mebyon Kernow.

All of the Westminster parties are clearly happy to support their London superiors in the pursuit of unsustatinable hyper-development.

Core Strategy Consultation - The Next Round

There will be a further eight week public consultation on the Core Strategy in September and October this year.

I was told by a planning officer that by this time the core strategy will be set in stone - not much point to a consultation then really?

Today I would like to issue a challenge.

A challenge to all the groups and individuals that are opposed to the very core of the core strategy.

A very simple challenge:

Use the time between now and September to come together and prepare a real Duchy-wide challenge to this awful process!

In particular I think we need to somehow address the way the consultation in the autumn takes place.

What is needed is an alternative view to be be presented to the public and for funding to be provided in order to present this alternative view.

More Information on Freedom of Information Requests

In January I visited the Cornwall Council 'roadshow' at the Pool Innovation Centre as part of the Core Strategy consultation process.

One of the more illuminating conversations that I had with a planning officer was that this latest consultation wasn't actually a statutory consultation. In other words it was one that the Council were conducting even though there were not required to by law.

Now you might think that this was jolly nice and considerate of a council that was determined to listen to people and seek views from the public.

In fact the planning officer rather spoiled that utopian image as he went on to explain that there would in fact be a further statutory consultation on the core strategy but by that time the whole plan would be set in stone and there would be no room to make any changes.

What is the point of a consultation if you can't act on the information received - clearly in this case the next consultation will, once again, not be a true consultation but simply a box ticking exercise - or so the council hopes!

If you look at the council's Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) it sets out the various stages at which consultation on 'Local Development Documents' (including the Core Strategy) will take place. The problem is that the SCI is less than specific about the exact format and timing of these consultations.

If there is, in fact, to be another round of consultation on the Core Strategy then I would be interested to know exactly when this will take place and what format will be adopted.

I emailed Cornwall Council and asked them these questions. After a week my questions had not even been acknowledged - let alone a full answer sent. I emailed the council again and still received no reply. Finally, I have asked for the answers to my questions as a FOI request.

We are told that FOIs cost £150 a time to answer. We are made to think that using FOI requests can be a waste of public money. The point is that without FOI legislation public bodies are free to ignore quite legitimate requests for information. It is not the FOI legislation that costs money to administer. What costs money is that fact that public bodies are forced to provide information that otherwise they might choose not to.

My questions will not take any longer than 10 minutes to answer by anyone who knows the answers - how does this cost £150?

Surely they are legitimate questions and a public bdy, supposedly there to serve the public should be looking to provide answers as part of its everyday service - especially when it claims to be open and transparent. Instead, two simple questions will take over a month to be answered.

Illogan Public Meeting

Last night Lawrence Molton and I hosted a public meeting at the Illogan Wellbeing Centre on the subject of development in Cornwall.

I was very heartened by the excellent turnout - I wasn't sure if people would turn up.

I was particularly encouraged because, amongst the people who attended, was the young lady in the photo. If Cornish politics is to be rescued from middle aged or retired men, like me, then we need to encourae as many young people to engage with the system as possible. MK has several young councillors leading the way in this field.

Also speaking at the meeting were Cllr Jean Charman, in her capacity as the chairman of the Trelawney Alliance, and Dr Bernard Deacon from CoSERG.

Our guest speakers were very well received and the residents of Illogan were unanimous in their condemnation of the Core Strategy proposal from Cornwall Council.

Just as it was at the Trelawney Alliance meeting a few weeks ago, it is clear that there is a groundswell of opinion that does not understand why we need to build a minimum of 48,000 houses in Cornwall.

In Park Bottom (part of Illogan Parish) there is a plan to build 300 houses - this will literally double the size of the village. What nobody can understand is just who all these houses are for. It is clear that doubling the size of a Cornish village is not necessary to house people from that village.

In fact it is clear from the evidence of ONS figures that Cornwall has a falling indigenous population so the extra housing must be for in-migrants and not for the people of Cornwall.

Even allowing for decreasing household size and a reasonable level of in-migration CoSERG have calculated that somewhere in the region of 12,000 - 13,000 houses would be required in the next twenty years. Even though it is easier to get blood from a stone than it is to get Cornwall Council planners to admit it, it is clear that a minimum of 35,000 houses will be built in order to encourage in-migration.

Where does madcap planning like this end?

Only Mebyon Kernow have a housing and planning policy that is tailored to the needs of Cornwall. We believe in building houses predominantly for local need - not developers' greed. MK also advocates commencing a programme of building proper council houses again - rather than following the Westminster ideology of selling as many as possible.

The Jobs Black Hole at the Rotten Core of the Council's Strategy for Cornwall

It seems the only plan that the Cornwall Council cabinet and planning officers can come up with for economic regeneration in Cornwall is to build more houses.

It's bad enough that the figure that is being bandied around is 48,000, in fact it is likely to end up a lot more.

Why? Well let's look at what Cornwall Council says.

First of all the 'target' is a MINIMUM of 48,000. If this figure is simply a target why not just say 48,000 - why do you have to say a minimum of 48,000. It seems to me that this is the sort of hidden agenda language that is used when there are secret plans to do something different - such as 'we have no plans to raise VAT' in a an election campaign and then do just that within 6 months.

Perhaps I am being paranoid or overly cynical? If I am why did the council publish the 'Can Do Cornwall' strategy which claimed that Cornwall could build 30,000 houses in just 10 years.

I would be willing to bet a pretty hefty sum that if the people of Cornwall don't stand up and tell the council to 'bin the core strategy' then we will be looking at more than 60,000 houses being built in Cornwall over the next 20 years - back to the bonkers 68,000 target of the last Labour government. Does anyone want to bet against me?

The Can Do Cornwall document proudly claims that Cornwall can build 30,000 houses and create 15,000 jobs. Is it not obvious that 30,000 houses will be occupied by around 65,000 people how is creating 15,000 jobs for 65,000 people a good thing, or something to be proud of?

Last Friday, at the Trelawney Alliance public meeting, George Eustice (Tory MP for Camborne, Redruth and Hayle) proudly declared that there were "three whole pages of the Core Strategy document devoted to job creation". So three pages of the Tory plan about jobs and 25 about housing - about right for this nonsense approach to Cornwall's future.

Even allowing for this pitiful lack of joined up thinking between increasing population without making adequate provision for job creation, the way that the council calculates it's new jobs is laughable.

Take the East-West road about to be imposed on Pool and Camborne to provide the infrastructure for new houses.

It is claimed by planning officers that the provision of a certain amount of hectares of commercial/industrial land space will mean that a certain number of jobs will be created.

This is utter nonsense. Merely providing the infrastructure and capacity for places for people to work does not create jobs - it takes more than simply building industrial units and 'innovation centres' to create jobs.

The planners point us to the recently completed Pool Innovation Centre as a beacon of what can be achieved.

Now don't get me wrong. I think that the Pool Innovation Centre is a good thing for Pool and for Cornwall. It provides Cornish businesses with state of the art facilities to ensure that they can compete with the rest of the world. This is crucial for a modern, forward-looking Cornwall. However, I would say that it has not created any more than a few jobs, mainly needed to administer the centre. We are told that the centre is over 80% full and that 300 jobs have been created by the businesses working there. My question is - how many businesses already existed before the centre was built and simply transferred there? Or - how many businesses actually set up just because there was the facility available to occupy? Is it really 100% as we would be asked to believe.

Basically the Council's plan and strategy for job creation is to build lots of places for businesses to occupy and then count anyone that transfers their business place to the new premises as creating new jobs.

You only have to drive around some of the half empty industrial estates in Cornwall to see that this isn't going to work.

But never mind we will have lots of shiny new units that are just as empty as the old rusty ones - and to look on the bright side we will have lots of new houses with higher unemployment to help disguise the black hole at the centre of the plan.

Of course the only solution in twenty tears time will undoubtedly be to build more houses to stimulate growth .......

Core Strategy Focus Groups

Hidden away on page 75 of this week's West Briton, I discovered a small piece on the Council's upcoming Focus Groups on the Core Strategy.

Apparently the Council would like to hold four discussions with a dozen people at each who normally don't have anything to do with planning.

There will be two groups at New County Hall on Wednesday 15th February and two groups held at the Camborne One Stop Shop on Friday 17th. On both days the groups will be held between 2pm and 4m and 5:30pm and 7:30pm.

I wonder if there will be alternative views presented at these focus groups or whether this will just be another manufactured opportunity for council planning officers to use their glossy presentations and gobbledygook jargon to bamboozle ordinary folk into believing that hyper-development is the only way forward for Cornwall?

I also wonder how much weight will be given to the outcome of these sessions - or might that depend on the results?

If you want to volunteer for a focus group, contact the council on 01872 224293 or at cornwalldf@cornwall.gov.uk by noon on the day before.

.... 20,000 Cornishmen will know the reason why

Last night I attended a public meeting organised by the Trelawney Alliance. A panel including George Eustice, Mark Kaczmarek and Council planning officers faced the wrath of local residents over the content of Cornwall Council's Core Strategy.

Despite much obfuscation and many statements designed to hide the truth it was clear that the residents were not in the mood to be bamboozled by jargon and planning-speak.

The same old, same old tired arguments as to why it was vital for the future of Cornwall to build 48,000 houses were trotted out. How building an East-West road was crucial to providing jobs (not at all about providing the opportunity to build more housing). How we had to build unaffordable houses so that our children might have a shot at getting on the housing ladder at some point in the future. How it was stale projections and old, out of date statistics that controlled levels of housing demand - and not policies set by the people that we elect.

Even though Cllr Stuart Cullimore asked the question several times there was no answer to one of the conundrums posed by the 'Can Do Cornwall'. It is Cornwall Council's desire to build 30,000 houses in 10 years but only create 15,000 new jobs - how does that work on any basic economic platform?

Cllr John Rowe also summed up the Council's approach very well. Reminiscent of fast-food chain hustling it seems our planners are obliged to ask "Do you want housing with that?" whenever there is any real opportunity for economic regeneration.

George Eustice did what he does best - talked at great length about nothing. He handed out copies of his answer to the Tory Core Strategy which basically boil down to do nothing for 10 years (when he will probably not be requiring votes anymore) and 'Lets build on Brownfield sites before Greenfield'. The problem here is that he doesn't define what he means by brownfield and as CoSERG have pointed out many times many of the technically defined 'brownfield' sites around Camborne are actually green fields.

The person next to me said that she was even more depressed on leaving the meeting than when she went in. She felt it was clear that there was no intention on behalf of the powers that be to listen to anyone - just to go through the motions and tick the boxes.

This sentiment is probably accurate but if we allow ourselves to think in this way it will be self-perpetuating. It is essential for the future of Cornwall that ordinary people and groups get together and force the planners to listen - silence just indicates acceptance.

There are a few weeks left of this round of 'consultation' if you care about how Cornwall will look in twenty years then get out there and do something now!

Consultation or Indoctrination

Yesterday I visited the indoctrination consultation roadshow for Cornwall Council's Core Strategy at Pool Innovation Centre. There was a nice set of display boards with various key pieces of information and several planning officers available to answer questions.

One of my concerns about this whole process is the nature of this whole 'consultation' exercise.

The fact is that there is no consultation on the main concepts of the strategy (such as whether we need a minimum [see the PS below] of 48,000 new houses). This was quite openly admitted by the planning officer that I spoke to when I asked whether there was any real point to the consultation.

Then again, what is the point of consultation if it is ignored? During last year's round of consultation, CoSERG submitted detailed proposals with a strategy that indicates that much less housing is needed (14,000 houses at the time). This had apparently been ignored because it 'was not backed up with evidence'.

I asked what weight would my opinion carry if the council weren't prepared to listen to the advisory panel specifically set up to advise the council and who used the 'evidence' that planning officers themselves had provided. The reply was that the councillors on the panel had not acted in line with the evidence presented to them and that the figure of 48,000 was the correct one from the evidence base.

However, when I questioned whether the 'evidence' of the last few years of low numbers of new house building warranted 48,0000 houses I was told that this evidence wasn't accurate because the planners expected demand to pick up in the long term. It all seems a bit selective to me?

We should also remember that last year one of the options that we were 'consulted' on was a growth figure of some 30,000 odd houses. What 'evidence' were the planners using when they thought that this was a viable figure to use in the core strategy and why isn't it applicable now?

Another problem that I have with the current consultation is that the documents provided are couched in planning jargon and full of meaningless or ubsubstantiated assumptions. For example, I had to ask what 'Transformational Regeneration" was. As far as I could follow (even the planner had difficulty in providing an explanation) it is regeneration focussed on providing regeneration rather than simply as part of other aims and objectives - a kind of regeneration plus - or, to a cynic llike me, development max.

The document is also littered with vacuous phrases such as 'We are part of it, not apart from it.' Most worrying is the totally uninspiring and vapid 'achieve a leading position in sustainable living' - most worrying because this is the Council's 'vision' that is supposed to be the bedrock on which the whole strategy is based. Apart from this gobbledygook much of the document is simply a long wish list of nice things - it might be a perfect portfolio for a contestant in a beauty show (who wished for world peace and an end to hunger everywhere) but it doesn't really cut the mustard as a document which is supposed to tackle issues of deprivation and social injustice and shape the way that Cornwall will meet the future.

If you ignore the question of whether there is a point to this consultation or if any evidence that is provided will be the 'right kind of evidence' there is still the problem of indoctrination rather than consultation.

The current round of roadshows are happening across Cornwall. At each roadshow are great looking display boards with bright colourful graphics depicting 'key facts'. There are several professional planners available to answer questions and assure the public that the council knows best.

But where is the alternative view?

Now I'm no expert on planning technicalities but I have been learning to question some (or most) of the information and 'facts' that the council puts into the public domain. Most of the 'key facts' that were being presented were simply opinion or not as important or relevent as they were being made out to be - they just sounded impressive.

What is needed for this to be a true exercise in consultation (as opposed to indoctrination) is for an alternative point of view to be available alongside the council's slick propaganda. Opposition groups should be given the opportunity (and funded) to attend alongside the professional planners (who are paid for their time as part of their job). This would give ordinary people who attend the roadshows, and know nothing of planning or local government, a chance to have a balanced picture of what they are being consulted on - instead of the loaded messages and selectively presented facts that are being used to encourage the particular synthesis that is the Core Strategy.

Finally, the planning process should be about policy shaping the future rather than the past shaping policy. We need politicians who will put Cornwall first and are prepared to put the interests of the people of Cornwall ahead of being seen to be getting something done.

What I mean by this (my very own bit of vacuous gobbledygook) is that politicians need to be brave enough to say that Cornwall should be planning to meet the needs of the people of Cornwall rather than those elsewhere. We need to end the situation where public funding is dependent on gleaning the scraps falling from the developers' banquet. Instead of encouraging hyper-development so that politicians in the council cabinet can be remembered for getting things done, we need to have faith in, and listen to, our communities who are screaming out for a respite from growth and a chance to recover.

PS the word 'minimum' has appeared in the core strategy document as a direct result of the gung-ho, 'presumption-in-favour-of-development' Tory led (with Lib Dem whipping boys trailing behind) coalition's Loclism Act. You see it is no longer possible for the council to plan for 'just' 48,0000 houses because the Cornish public could always call for more if they so wished!