A BATTLE WON BUT THE WAR GOES ON!

Three Members of the GFRA, Graham, Bob and Steve attended Dacorum’s Development Management Committee (DMC) last Thursday evening (10th September 2026).

The Planners had produced a 45 page report which suggested that because the recently published National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has been amended to give more weight to community assets such as schools, sports and leisure facilities, the Councillors should consider whether they continue to fight the Developer’s appeal against their previous rejection of the second planning application for the 1,400 house Marshcroft site.

Graham and Bob were given just 2 minutes each to make the counter arguments that Herts. C.C. had not committed to a new Senior School and were unlikely to do so on that site and that the leisure and sports facilities were only barely sufficient for the new 5000 or so Residents and wouldn’t be of any wider benefit for the Town.  They also repeated the point that this application and appeal were premature as the Local Plan is close to being finalised and the Government Inspectors have continued to raise severe doubts about Dacorum’s site section methodology that promoted Marshcroft.

Despite there being, unusually, no recommendation attached to the Planners’ report, once the debate had finished, the Planners just happened to have a motion ready to be voted upon that –

“Special Circumstances now exist to justify the inappropriate development in the Green Belt and therefore agrees that the Council should no longer contest Reason for Refusal 1 at the appeal.”

We just managed to get the motion defeated (6-5: 4 Conservatives, 1 Independent and 1 LibDem against the motion with 3 LibDems, 1 Labour and 1 Independent voting for). If the Councillors had agreed that Reason 1 was no longer valid, that would have meant there was no defence put forward at the appeal by the Council as Reason 1 was at the heart of the rejection. It confirmed Marshcroft was Green Belt not Grey Belt; that it would result in spatial and visual harm to the Green Belt and that it conflicts with two of the five purposes of the Green Belt - to check unrestricted sprawl and to safeguard it from encroachment. The rejection by the DMC confirmed that the newly altered weightings of the social benefits within the scheme still do not clearly outweigh the harm to the Green Belt and therefore very special circumstances have still not been demonstrated that would allow such an inappropriate development. The failure of the Planners’ motion to pass now means that Dacorum are committed to fully defending the decision to reject the application at the Appeal.

One last thing - we told you that the Dacorum Planners had committed to provide further material to the Government Inspectors by the 4^thof September in an attempt to justify the inclusion of Marshcroft in their draft Local Plan.  Dacorum have now written to the Inspectors requesting an extension until the 17^thof September because –

“The scope of the additional landscape material for Marshcroft commissioned to inform the Council’s response has been extended to allow a series of different scenarios to be modelled.”

We don’t know exactly what that means but we believe Dacorum are commissioning a new or modifying their existing landscape study.  Tring Town Council have already delivered just such a study which, unsurprisingly, demonstrated that the harm to the Green Belt and the setting of the Chilterns National Landscape was substantial. We will be reminding the Government Inspectors of our request to allow us to fully comment on such a further study from Dacorum.

You can imagine how lengthy and complex the documents are that we have to master. Yes, your volunteer GFRA committee are getting better and more knowledgeable at this but without our Planning Consultant, we would not have been able to achieve our recent successes.  The GFRA Committee are all unpaid volunteers but our Planning Consultant does need to be paid and so all your donations go to paying for the expert help we need.  Thank you. 

HOW TO GIVE

The GFRA Bank Account details are:

Grove Fields Residents Association

Sort code: 23-05-80

Account number: 24937695

OR

Crowdfunding For Good From JustGiving

GFRA on Three Counties Radio!

Following Tring's momentous victory at Dacorum Borough Council on 16 April 2026, where the Development Management Committee rejected the most recent predatory Marshcroft planning application, GFRA Chair Graham Bright was invited on the radio to discuss the situation with host Andy Collins.

Listen below!

Final opportunity to stop 46% growth - donations please!

As a Committee of Tring Locals who give our own time freely and also personally donate to this cause, we are more than aware of the generosity of Members who have already contributed money to fight the proposed over-development of our cherished Town.  The end is however in sight and to do less than our very best would be to give up, which we won’t do so we need to ask you again to contribute to fund our Professional’s presence at the crucial forthcoming EiP hearings.

In the first two weeks of March, the third and final stage of the Government appointed Inspectors ‘Examination in Public’ (EiP) of Dacorum’s Draft Local Plan takes place. There are 3 sessions which are highly relevant to our fight to reduce the number of new houses currently proposed for Tring to a more reasonable level.

As a reminder, the currently proposed 2,300 new houses would represent around a 46% increase in the size of Tring.  We believe, if the Marshcroft and New Mill Green Belt sites were taken out of the draft Plan, leaving the Dunsley Farm site in, then the growth in the Town would be a much more reasonable 15% and the commensurate impact on Tring’s Community, Services and Transport structure would be more manageable.

The EiP Stage 3 Timetable:

• On March the 3rd, there is the general site selection hearing for the Local Plan

• On March the 5th, there is the crucial Tring Site Selection hearing.

• On March the 10th, there is a Transport Hearing. A reminder here - Dacorum’s Transport Plan suggested there would be a very limited impact on our local roads and connecting roads, like the A41, from the extra 4000+ cars that would result from the new house build. The Transport Study, we have commissioned, begs to differ - there will be significant congestion!

We have already made a number of submissions on your behalf particularly on the loss of irreplaceable Green Belt and the part it plays as the setting for the protected Chiltern National Landscape.  BUT, and it is a big BUT, these reports will not be enough to get our objections fully across in these forthcoming hearings.  The opposition, which not only includes the well-resourced House Builders, but also, sadly, our own elected Dacorum Borough Council, will be fielding their reports, their Experts and, most importantly, their Planning Barrister KCs.

Returning to the analogy we used previously, we don’t want to go into this fight with only our fists when the opposition has guns!  The advice given to us is that we need to have our Planning Consultant (Varsity) and our Planning Barrister, to represent us for as many of these three sessions as we can afford.

Our Treasurer, Bob Winter, confirms we currently have £8,000 in the bank account after meeting all current invoices.  Our estimate is that it will cost us £30,800 for each EiP session that our KC and our Planning Consultant prepare for and attend.  So, if we wish to be fully represented on all 3 days of the EiP, we will need to raise around a further £85,000 to finish this fight. We continue to negotiate with the Planning Consultant and KC to try to bring their fees down.

One other strand to this story that we must include is that, as many of you know, Barratt/Redrow has re-submitted their virtually unchanged application to develop the Marshcroft site.  Unbelievably, the Developers are claiming that this area of countryside, that so many of us in Tring know from walking and running, is ‘Grey Belt’ ! And equally unbelievably, the Dacorum Planners and Councillors seem minded to schedule this application at a Planning Committee before the EiP result is determined and also are likely to approve it! See attached the letter our Planning Consultant and Planning Barrister sent to Dacorum before Christmas in an attempt to delay the specific Marshcroft application.

If they do approve this re-application, we believe the development of the New Mill site will also be inevitable, and that the draft Local Plan will be realised by stealth rather than through the EiP process.  We have made strenuous efforts to point out to the Legal Officers at Dacorum that any consideration of this application before the EiP’s final report would be premature and we will continue to keep the pressure on here. It is worth noting, in what we can only describe as the arrogance of Dacorum’s Councillors, that a large Planning application in Berkhamsted near to Ashlyn’s School was recently approved by the Planning Committee, again despite the site being included in the EiP process and a strong local opposition based on the existing traffic problems around the Berkhamsted bypass junction.

Please do give as generously as you can - it really will be the last opportunity we have as Local Residents to ensure a reasonable level of growth for our Town rather than have it imposed by Central Government and Hemel Hempstead-oriented Dacorum Borough Council.

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

Letter to DBC (Marshcroft) 151225.pdf

Download PDF • 159KB