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 If the Councillors had agreed that Reason 1 was no longer valid, that would have meant there was no defence put forward at the appeal by the Council as Reason 1 was at the heart of the rejection.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 4thof 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 17thof 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
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