WHAT ARE OUR CHANCES OF WINNING?

WHAT ARE OUR CHANCES OF WINNING?

This was one of the first questions we asked our specialist planning Barrister KC, when we met him earlier this month. His answer was "You have strong arguments against the draft Local Plan’s proposal for building 2,300 new houses in Tring but, what I can say with certainty, is that without fighting, you stand no chance at all!"

The Meeting with our Planning KC gave us the chance to refine our key arguments and it’s worth reminding ourselves of them and how strong they are:

• The draft Local Plan highlights the Settlement Hierarchy within Dacorum. The biggest Towns are ranked by size – Hemel Hempstead, then Berkhamsted and lastly, Tring.  The larger Towns invariably have the greater social resources, everything from more Schools, Doctors, and road and utility networks.  You would expect therefore that there would be equal proportionate allocations of the Government’s housing quotas when clearly the 46% provisionally allocated to Tring is dis-proportionate compared to Hemel or Berkhamsted.

• The Developer is claiming that the high-grade agricultural land on the Marshcroft site, that is also in the setting of the Chilterns National Landscape, is not Green Belt but Grey Belt! Our KC told us that this ‘loophole’ is currently being used by Developers Nationally but he has not yet seen such a blatant use of this stratagem for such a large development.

• Then there are all the other issues we and the Members have highlighted – everything from the flawed Transport study commissioned by Dacorum that claims there will be no significant additional pressures on the local roads and the A41 from the additional 4000 cars associated with the developments; the lack of hard promises from the Developers on the extra social amenities needed, the high pressure jet fuel line crossing the Marshcroft site; the complete lack of extra capacity from Thames Water on fresh water and sewage to service the new sites and we even have video footage of otters - a protected species - on the site boundary.

What are we going to do next on your behalf ?

Our KC, agreed that, in the short term we need to shift our focus from Stage 3 of the Government Inspectors’ ‘Examination in Public’ (EiP) (where currently we have no date scheduled) to fighting the renewed Marshcroft Planning Application to Dacorum from Barratt Redrow.  This is largely the same Application that the GFRA fought against at the Developer’s Appeal hearing and then, when that went against us, it was ‘called-in’ by the Secretary of State who supported our position that the harm done to the Green Belt and the setting for the Chiltern landscape was not outweighed by the Developer’s grudging promises of community facilities and unaffordable ‘affordable new homes’ for the new Residents.

On your behalf we will be issuing letters to the Officers and Councillors on the Planning  / Development Management Committee at Dacorum both reminding them of these arguments and saying that it is completely inappropriate for the Planning Committee to consider this renewed Marshcroft application at their January meeting while the EiP is in progress.

Have we the funding to continue this fight?

You, our Members, have been incredibly generous with your donations.  But we are fighting on 2 fronts – with the well-funded Developers and (sadly) with our own elected Hemel-centric Dacorum Councillors.  We have sufficient funds to pay for the KC and Planning Consultant fees to date.  Our Treasurer, Bob Winter, estimates we will need another £7,000 to pay for the Planning Consultant’s work on Stage 3 of the EiP  (the meeting that will discuss the Tring site allocations). We hope that we will be able to cover that with further Member donations.

If we want our KC to prepare and attend that meeting, it will cost about another £30,000.  Big Money - and realistically we will need to access donors prepared to make sizeable individual donations to stand a chance of funding that.

As always, we finish with a reminder of the Association’s bank details for Members who feel able to contribute to the £7,000 shortfall and, of course, we welcome any of your questions.

HOW TO GIVE

The GFRA Bank Account details are:

Grove Fields Residents Association

Sort code: 23-05-80

Account number: 24937695

Yours sincerely,

The GFRA Committee.

Graham Bright (Chair) , Bob Winter (Treasurer), Steve Ballantyne, Keith Baker, Rachel Moore, Phil Moore and Dimitri Patrikios.

Grove Fields Residents Association

E: grovefields@virginmedia.com

W: grovefieldsresidents.com

LATEST: Developers re-submit Marshcraft planning application

• ACTION: object before 27 August

Barratt/Redrow have re-submitted their planning application for a 1400 house development on Marshcroft Green Belt farmland. Their previous application was rejected by Dacorum and eventually by the Secretary of State at the time in 2024.

But Barratt/Redrow now know that Dacorum Borough Council have u-turned on Marshcroft and included it in Dacorum’s draft Local Plan, as a site to be developed.

So the developers are likely to be looking to get quick approval for their actual building plans under their belt, whatever the outcome of the EIP process for the draft Local Plan overall.

You can object to this application. To do so:

• the deadline is 30 September (we successfully lobbied for an extension from 27 August)

• TO OBJECT ONLINE: visit the Dacorum webpage: Click Here

  • If you have objected previously and have your login, you can re-log in.

  • If not, you can register quickly and simply on the portal.

  • You’ll see the case reference is 25/01880/MOA

• you can instead email planning@dacorum.gov.uk, including the case reference and the word “object” in your email. (But objecting online is better to allow for visibility and ease of collation.)

• you can also email the text of your objection from the online portal to your local Dacorum Councillor, to ensure that your voice is heard. These are:

Tring Central

Carole.weston@dacorum.gov.uk

Sheron.wilkie@dacorum.gov.uk

Tring East

Michela.capozzi@dacorum.gov.uk

Tring West & Rural

Brian.patterson@dacorum.gov.uk

Caroline.smith-wright@dacorum.gov.uk

Leader of the Council

Sally.symington@dacorum.gov.uk

GFRA will be objecting based on the following points, which you can draw on in your

objections:

• Substantial development in the Green Belt is unacceptable. The Developer must prove

“very special circumstances” when building on Green Belt land and demonstrate that the benefits clearly outweigh the harm.

• Dacorum in its original rejection of the Marshcroft scheme cited “very substantial harm to the Green Belt and the visual experience of the Chiltern’s Area of

  Outstanding Natural Beauty”. This clearly has not changed.

• DBC has not completed a sufficient review of the availability of brownfield sites in

  urban areas to minimise the need to build on the Green Belt.

• The Developer has not demonstrated there will be benefits to clearly offset the harm.

  • Two new schools are promised. The Primary school will only be big enough to service the new estate and will not alleviate Tring’s over-subscribed Primaries. No credibility should be given to the promise of a Secondary School as there is no clarity from Herts County Council on the substantial cost of building and running such a school.

  • A new Health Centre site and a £1.8m contribution towards building is promised. Again, there is no ongoing funding for it and it would only just meet the needs of the 3000 new Residents on the site.
    

• The scale and location of development is inappropriate for Tring. This development, on

its own will increase the population of Tring by around 28% which will 'break' the capacity of local infrastructure and change the character of this historic market town forever.

• The Transport modelling assumptions for the draft Local Plan are unrealistic as they assume that the new Residents of the Marshcroft site will walk or cycle into the Town Centre and Supermarket. We believe it is much more environmentally sustainable to build on more suitable locations e.g. Dunsley Farm – a site already in the draft Plan - and which is closer to the A41 and close enough for people to walk to the town centre.

Examination in Public (EIP) update

The EIP is where the government-appointed Inspector examines Dacorum’s draft Local Plan in its entirety, including all of the proposed sites for development.

The EIP process will start on 16th September for stage one. At this point it is not yet clear how many more stages there will be, or how long they will last.

The GFRA has been successful in gaining one of the very limited seats at the EIP table at this initial stage, based on the strength of our submissions in the consultation period before Christmas.

We are being guided throughout by Varsity Associates, the planning consultancy we have been able to hire through generous donations from GFRA members and residents of Tring.

Our strategy remains to argue that the draft Local Plan is “unsound”. If the Plan is found to be unsound, Dacorum will have to submit an amended plan which we hope will be much more acceptable to Tring.