Radio Tees Interviews and the Local Plan

[marky]

CAB appears to be making it up as goes along. What's this about the consultation being about letting people identify where they don't want development. By the time this plan is finished all the controversial sites will be housing estates !

[pensionater]

I must admit i never read the original local plan,could it be that it was suspended rather than ditched too allow the Wynyard application to go through.Maybe someone on here can highlight the differences between the old plan and the new.(if there are any).

[DRiddle]

Personally, I anticipate the difference between the old local plan, and the new one being fairly minimal.

The elephant in the room is the events which will occur/have already occurred in the 18 months or so while there is no local plan in place.

The whole 'lets consult with residents and stake holders and see what they want in terms of a local plan', is tantamount to consulting stable owners on the design of a new door, as the horses have already long since bolted off into the distance.

[DRiddle]

Just listened to it again.

2 Hours 16 minutes 15 seconds.... bbbiiiigggggg Freudian slip.

[TSteels]

Not being technologically gifted, could someone summarise the main points of our dear leader?

[fred c]

Not being technologically gifted, could someone summarise the main points of our dear leader?

Going by his answers this morning on the radio..... I don't think "The Dear Leader" knows the main points of his decision....he has told blatant lies over both the cost to the ratepayers & the time scale of the new town plan.

His argument that the cost of the plan wasn't as high as was thought because officers costs of £800,000 was being paid to them anyway is completely dis- ingenuous...... The costs of officers time has to be added to the overall costing of any project they happen to be working on, otherwise how can any sensible budgeting take place ?

No wonder the town is neck deep in the financial mire when the council leader seeks to justify the actual costings of HBC major projects as he did this morning....... The way "The Mob" are going about running the town I can visualise that within 2 or 3 years Hartlepool Council will be a bankrupt organisation.

[94994]

This is just a thought for discussion:

Iain Wright has been very inactive in the whole Local Plan fiasco.

The aim of the scrapping of the Local Plan appears to be to remove planning barriers to the building of huge rafts of housing in areas previously prohibited.

The tactic used to scrap the plan was to create fear amongst those most likely to kick up a huge stink by proposing a traveller site in the most unsuitable place possible and providing a plausible reason to scrap the plan due to its flaws.

The benefits to land owners is the possibility of selling their land for decent sums of money.

The benefits to developers is to build huge rafts of houses with which they hope to turn a profit.

I've been struggling for awhile what the benefit to the council is of a few thousand extra houses in the town given that the population in Hartlepool isn't rising and we have actually lost major employers in the town so we can't reasonable expect and influx.

So thinking back to Mark Carneys statements that for our economy to improve house prices must decline and mortgages for first time buyers to become affordable/sustainable to drive some movement in the market and facilitate a recovery.

How do you do that?  Well you create a housing oversupply, with the market saturated you drive down prices.  Of course there'll be thousands of existing next time buyers stuck in a negative equity trap but all of a sudden you'll get a lot of first time buyers building a nice little housing bubble.

Of course you can't just create an oversupply overnight, it'll take a couple of years to get the houses built.

So here's what I think:  The Labour Party are banking on winning the next General Election and have told Iain Wright and other MP's to do whatever is necessary to assist in the creation of this over supply in their constituencies so that when the time comes they can claim credit for improving the economy.

Of course if this is the thinknig behind it, it's flawed on so many levels it's unbelievable but that only gives the theory a bit more plausiblity in my mind.

Thoughts?

[Land Phil]

Both sides cannot be telling the truth, with Brash and others that believe the plan was dropped for Wynyard or Akers-Belchers and those that believe the plan was dropped for the good of the town are too opposite to both be truthful.

So who is telling porkies ?


Plus have you noticed that the Labour group are always good at quoting public opinion without being specific enough to be factual, for example, the local plan doesn't chime with local residents, is that because we are not ding dong bells ....in reality how many people actually complained about the local plan ?  Then there is Ray Martin-Wells saying nobody complained to him about the cafe bar in the crem ...could that be because nobody likes or trusts him ?

[Land Phil]

In the news today, overcrowding a big increase, empty houses another big increase.

...good foundation to build your way out of a recession.

[Lord Elpus]

There is another more plausible explanation as to why the local plan got scrapped; some t*a* and his friends got a bung.  Of course this could never have happened in Hartlepool, but it is a plausible theory none the less.

[steveL]

No, you're giving people far too much credit for thinking ahead. The answers to all of this can be found in the time-line of events.

July 8th              CAB has his meeting with Wynyard Developments.

August 6th         CAB meets with Hart Ward residents in Hart Village Hall

August 27th       PHF Councillors try to get the decision to place the Travellers site in Hart called back to full council. Labour and Tories refuse to support the move.

September 25th Wynyard planning application goes before Planning Committee. It should have been a simple rejection as the application contravened the local plan but Council Officers, having heard of CAB's commitment to the Wynyard Developers to push the application through, call their own meeting with members of the Planning Committee to warn them that if they allow the application to go through it will 'drive a coach and horses' through the local plan. Wells, a mate of Chris Musgrave of Wynyard Developments, declares an interest but still gives a 20 minutes speech supporting the plan and asks for no delays. The application is deferred.

October 12th     3 weeks after Planning Officers had advised rejection of the Wynyard Application because it contravenes the local plan,  Labour announces their intention to scrap the whole local plan. The Press Release doesn't mention Wynyard but CAB sees the opportunity to dig himself out of the s**t on the Travellers issue and uses that as a smoke screen and tells a load of porkies about the time a new plan would take and how much it would cost.

October 15th-17th  The Tories let it be known that they won't support anything that doesn't allow the Wynyard development to go ahead violating rules on pre-determination.

April 1st           Despite council officers still recommending rejection of the Wynyard application and despite the developers lowering their contribution on 'affordable housing' money, the application goes through.

KERCHING . . . !

Mark Carney's comment, only recently made, has nothing to do with any of it.

[admin]

For those that missed it.

BBC Tees interviews with Cllr Jonathan Brash and Christopher Akers-Belcher about the decision to scrap the £1.5m Hartlepool Local Plan and the town's current vulnerability to a planning free-for-all.

http://youtu.be/ScOQcHQQTVU

http://youtu.be/y6UWGXoruok

[for fawkes sake]

I see CAB's spitefulness towards Brash is still evident to all.

[steveL]

The 'excellent team' CAB speaks of in planning seems to be well demoralised and is seriously wobbling. It looks like Chris Pipe, one of the leading lights of the department and someone who was heavily involved in the original local plan, has had enough. Apparently she's off to pastures new - and who can blame her.

[clav 73]

What an idiot CAB is one minute it's okay to ignore the council officers when they tell him bot to scrap the plan then he states the six months time was given by the very offices he chose to ignore I am glad I don't work for him