Westminster Report - Leigh-on-Sea

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Leigh On Sea News: Westminster Report – BY Mark Francois, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh & Wickford

Westminster Report - BY Mark Francois, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh & Wickford

LPLeigh On Sea News: Westminster Report – BY Mark Francois, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh & Wickford

BY Mark Francois, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh & Wickford

(This article was written before the Rochford District Council’s joint administration was established by the Conservatives, Rochford District Residents (RDR) and the Rochford and Foulness Wakering Independents (RFWI). Its new leader, Conservative Danielle Belton, said the three groups would work together on “shared priorities”)

Drop The Bonkers Lib Dem Plan to Build 17,000 Houses Across Rochford District

In the last few days, we have seen a major “leak” of Rochford District Council’s draft New Local Development Plan. Astonishingly, the new plan aims to build over 17,000 houses across the Rochford District—a scale of housebuilding we cannot possibly accommodate in a semi-rural district like ours, where infrastructure is already under serious pressure.

The plan envisages major construction across the district, much of it on our precious Green Belt, irrespective of our infrastructure’s inability to cope. Specifically, it includes some 10,000 houses in a “New Town” on the Rochford/Southend border, around Bournes Green.

Rochford’s share of this would be about half. Additionally, there would be some 2,000 houses at Dollymans Farm in Rawreth, threatening to almost join Rayleigh and Wickford via massive urban sprawl. I campaigned strongly against this idea (now promoted by Bloor Homes), during the General Election, and I believe I have a strong mandate from my constituents to fight it, which is exactly what I intend to do.

The leaked Lib Dem plan also envisages another 1,000 houses at Great Wakering and a further 1,000 at Wolsey Park, off Rawreth Lane, on the western edge of Rayleigh—more than doubling the size of the estate already half-built there by Vistry.

There are also multiple other developments of hundreds of houses spread across the district, as the summary diagram from the leaked plan, accompanying this article, clearly shows.

How on earth did we end up in this ridiculous and utterly unsustainable situation? Having made inquiries, I believe I now know.

It appears that when the Liberal Democrats took control of Rochford District Council two years ago, they inherited draft work to create a new Local Plan for the Rochford District to supersede the previous Local Development Plan, now some two decades old. The principal element of those proposals was to meet Rochford’s future housing need by creating a “Garden Village” of several thousand houses to the east of the town of Rochford itself.

In short, this meant “taking most of the pain in one place,” with only very limited development advocated elsewhere in the district.

However, following the General Election, the incoming Labour Government, committed to building “1.5 million homes within a Parliament,” rapidly reinstituted the highly unpopular system of “mandatory housing targets.” Under this system, local authorities are given a housebuilding target, partly based on a Whitehall-generated computer algorithm, and are left to decide where to place them.

For the record, I have always opposed this “top-down, Whitehall knows best” approach to development. Indeed, I was one of several backbench MPs who successfully persuaded the previous Conservative Government to drop these targets—only for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to reimpose this unpopular system after Labour’s election victory.

That would be bad enough, but our local council made it worse—much worse. Egged on, it seems, by some highly ambitious council officers (perhaps eager to curry favour with the incoming Labour Government), the Lib Dems abandoned the original Garden Village concept and signed up instead to proposals for a “New Town” straddling the Rochford/Southend border at Bournes Green.

Crucially—as I got Angela Rayner to confirm in the House of Commons—this New Town would be in addition to Rochford District’s Whitehall-imposed housing target, thus compounding the misery. Instead, the Lib Dems concluded that the target would now be met by several large-scale developments at Dollymans Farm, Great Wakering, and Rayleigh (see above), plus numerous smaller developments, some still in the hundreds, across the district. This is utter madness!

For the record, I fully accept that we need to build some new houses in our district—after all, young people cannot be expected to live with their parents forever. However, we must build them in the right place and in an environmentally sustainable way.

Simply allowing them to be rammed down our throats by a Labour Government—and then compounding the misery by exceeding Rayner’s already massive targets—is an act of gigantic self-harm for our district and my constituents.

Even worse, the local Lib Dems, who have led Rochford District Council for the past few years and came up with this mad idea, now appear to be falling apart. They are squabbling publicly, including online, and some have even formed a breakaway group on Rochford District Council. Meanwhile, they have formally surrendered leadership of the council—but not before devising this barmy scheme, which Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will no doubt now try to foist upon us, thanks to the utter naivety of the Lib Dems (or what’s left of them).

Whoever now takes over this chaotic mess of a council should immediately withdraw the draft plan, which, having been thankfully leaked, has never been formally approved by the council and therefore has not been officially submitted to the Government (at what is known as the “Regulation 18 Stage”).

The new administration—if one can even be formed (perhaps including the ten opposition Conservative councillors who still sit on the council and were not responsible for this absolute mess)—should go back to the drawing board. They must devise a different, more realistic, and environmentally sustainable plan that scraps the unsustainable major developments described above, significantly reduces the numbers, protects our Green Belt, and proposes new supporting infrastructure before additional houses are built.

In summary, there is such a thing as well-thought-out, positive development. However, in my 24 years as an MP, I have learned that the only way to achieve this is to work with people, not against them. This bonkers Lib Dem plan is clearly the latter, not the former. My constituents do not want to see their precious district concreted over just to keep Angela Rayner happy—and neither do I!

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