Councillors and MPs objecting to housing developments? Don't be the Grand Old Duke of York

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

The Duke of York in question is most commonly said to be Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany who wasn't a very successful military commander:

When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, York was put in charge of a military expedition to Flanders. He took control of the port of Dunkirk but was then pushed back in a battle at Hondschoote on 6 September. His troops – a mixture of British and Hanoverian forces – performed well but were outnumbered three to one, losing their siege guns during the retreat.

Over the following months, he marched his army back and forth between ineffective minor actions, inspiring the nursery rhyme. Meanwhile, Britain and her allies lost control of Flanders, and in July 1794 York and his troops were evacuated.

The futility of the action is what we remember hence the nursery rhyme. And, for me, the lesson for us all is not to offer a community great victories then march them up and down, backwards and forwards before admitting defeat. In this spirit, I'm offering some advice - based on 24 years experience - on responding to unpopular housing development proposals.

What happens in too many cases is that local politicians (and MPs - often the worst offenders), faced with opposition to a development from residents, do precisely what the Grand Old Duke did and march randomly from one possible objection to the next. And its wrong to march a community, banners waving, up to the top of the hill when you know you'll just march them back down, banners furled and defeated, in a week or so. Too many politicians, having got the votes nicely parcelled away, fall back on "well I tried but the planners and developers you know..."

So lets look at what you should do.

The first question you should ask is whether the site for the proposed housing is allocated for this purpose in the development plan (there are various iterations of these but these days we're mostly talking about the local plan). If the planning authority has allocated the site for housing, they have already accepted the principle that new houses will be built on the site. Trying to overturn this principle is futile and local politicians should be honest enough to tell concerned residents the truth - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

If it's not an allocated housing site, you need to look at whether it has some other designation - green belt*, employment land, flood plain or a variety of environmental, ecological and heritage protections. If it doesn't have any other designation and protection, it's just a piece of 'white land' on the local plan map, then, again, you tell the community - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

Where it does have protections or other designations then the principle of building housing isn't established allowing you to say that the designation or protection in the plan outweighs the need for housing. It's worth remembering that the only sustainable basis for a refusal is to demonstrate that the principle of housing is not established, any other basis for refusal can be mitigated by a developer (whether they want to afford this is a different issue).

Residents will raise a consistent set of objections to housing development, the more common being:

1. It will negatively affect house prices (or 'we already have too many houses')

2. The schools are full

3. You can't get an appointment at the doctors

4. It will remove our views of something

5. Bats or badgers or rare orchids or unusual amphibia inhabit the site

6. There are too many cars and this will make it worse - children will be killed

7. The site is crossed by ancient footpaths or bridleways

8. Seasonal flooding affects the site

9. There's all sorts of significant historical or archaeological stuff on the site

10. Trees

It's worth noting that some of these will never be used for a refusal. This includes school places, doctors, house prices or numbers, views and footpaths. We have a long established system through s106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy to mitigate impact on things like education, heath and community facilities, and house prices or your view are not the concern of the planning system. For flora and fauna there are very few circumstances under which, on a large site, these can't be mitigated, either through relocation or specific protections. It's great that you can get bats, trees and rare blue butterflies protected through the planning system but you're not going to get the housing stopped on this basis. The same goes for archaeology since, if the site is known to be important it will already be protected (see designations and protections above), and most developers are content to allow archaeological work given that they're going to dig up the site anyhow.

This leaves us with highways and flooding. And yes, you'll be pleased to know, developments on designated housing sites do get refused because of how they impact on road safety, congestion, drainage or flooding. But this only happens when the developer ignores highways advice and the expectations of water and environment authorities (whose responses to consultations will, in most cases, carry greater weight than what local residents say).

For highways the system as a whole has the capacity to accommodate the traffic generated by your development (I know you don't believe this but it is what the planning system assumes so you're stuck with it) so you have to focus on specific pinch points, junctions and stretches of road. Highways planners have standard measures for assessing junctions, the need for crossings and whether parking restrictions or other traffic controls are required. Remember that, if you're stood by the side of the road with traffic passing, 30mph is very fast meaning that, when residents tell you about the awful speeding, the chances are there's a lot less of it than you think. In the end, if a highways development control officer says a junction has the capacity and is safe, then the planning committee is likely to take this assessment as true even if your residents think it's a joke. In these circumstances you are better looking for mitigation - yellow lines, warning signs, pedestrian crossings - than trying to stop the development.

Fields (especially here in the glorious South Pennines with our topography and copious amount of boulder clay) suffer from seasonal floods. If you drive around during the winter months you'll see low lying parts of fields filled with water, often with ducks, too! It's standard for residents to point at a proposed development site and say; 'look it floods, you can't build on it'. Again it doesn't really work like this because, if it really is flood plain, then it's unlikely the principle of housing would be sustained (see designations and protections above). Your site probably isn't flood plan so the principle, in very simple terms, is that the development should not have a negative impact on drainage. This pretty much means that the flow of water through the site has to be the same (or better) after development as it was before development. There are a lot of rules about sustainable urban drainage (delightfully shortened to SUDS) and the developer will want to resolve the issues with areas subject to seasonal flooding but if the overall drainage through the site is unaffected then you've not really any grounds for refusal.


There are other things that might result in objections (from loss of agricultural land or lack of affordable homes through to arcane discussions of who owns the land) but these describe the majority of reasons local people will raise in objecting to new housing.

It's easy politics to oppose housing development and it's easy to whip up opposition, to march the community up to the top of the hill. But the honourable course is to look the community in the eye, as I did when we had an application for 250 new houses in Cullingworth, and say "these houses will get built, we should screw as much benefit for the village as we can from the development". We got a new village hall and pre-school.

*Following a suggestion on Twitter here's a note setting out the difference between 'green belt' and 'greenfield'. Green Belt is a planning designation designed to prevent what is perjoratively called 'urban sprawl' it doesn't mean that the land with this designation is actually green. Greenfield simply describes a site that has not been developed previously. A site being greenfield doesn't provide any protection at all. For completeness, 'brownfield' simply refers to a site that has been previously developed. There are lots of brownfield sites that are Green Belt.

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