This week’s edition of Nimby Watch comes from the one-time spa town of Epsom – famous for its salts and for its clocktower.
So… where are we off to this week? We’re headed to the outskirts of Epsom, a town 14 miles to the south-west of London, not too far from Croydon. Building more houses in places like this – just inside the M25 and with good connections to London – is absolutely essential to tackling the UK’s most acute housing crisis, in and around the capital.
You don’t have to tell me. The only thing more expensive than pints in London pubs is rent for a London shoebox. It’s not just about London, either – towns and cities in the South East are doing better than elsewhere in the country. People have more disposable income, so there’s scope for high street businesses and other things to grow. That means more people want to live there for their own sake. Which also means we need more homes.
Okay, we’ve put it off for long enough: is this going to be a good news story, or our usual fare? Sadly, it’s our usual. A scheme to build 110 homes on farmland near the Epsom Downs Racecourse has been denied by councillors, for all sorts of reasons – not least that it received 364 written objections and a petition objecting to the scheme was signed by more than 2,000 people.
That’s some pretty serious opposition, I can see why councillors might take that seriously, to be fair to them. It’s an impressive number of signatures, certainly. It’s especially impressive if you take into account that Langley Vale – the village covering the area of the development – only has a population of around 1,500 people. That’s a pretty impressive turnout of 133%, which some people might find a little suspicious.
Hmm. I see what you mean. I’m sure they had some great reasons for objecting to the development, though? I suspect you’re being sarcastic here. And with good reason. Some of the opposition to the development centred around extra traffic – which for projects involving 1,000 or more homes might make some sense, but for 110 is just ridiculous.
But that was nowhere near the best complaint. Other objections flagged that 110 new homes might upset the horses, as the area is a popular one for horse riding. Horses, apparently, are completely fine with any homes that were built before, say, 1990 – but a new-build will naturally distress them intensely.
Okay, fine, that one is pretty silly. There must be a better reason for objection in there. The one that seems to have caught on best is that the site would have been built on ‘farmland’, and most people hearing that tend to have some reservations.
That seems reasonable. We’re a small island, we’re densely populated, and we already import huge amounts of food, and we live in a chaotic world. Surely it’s mad to be losing farmland? Well… to a point. The UK has six different grades of farmland, and only the top three of those are regarded as all that important for food production – and less than 25% of farmland is in one of those three grades.
This is better protected in the planning system, and it also generates more money for farmers, who don’t tend to want to lose it to housing, solar farms or other uses. Almost all the time you hear about development on ‘farmland’, it’s on that remaining 75% – which is often only used for grazing, if that.
Okay, but you don’t know that the land here wasn’t top-quality stuff, do you? Have you even been to Epsom? I’ve actually gone one better on this front – I’ve done some journalism and found a genuine insider source. ‘I lived in Epsom for 20-odd years,’ my source tells me, ‘so take it from me that the field they want to save is a mostly-fallow, non-publicly accessible non-anything field.’
Oh. Oh indeed. When UK councils seem so averse to saying ‘yes’ to development that they’ll turn down actual new homes for fear that they’ll quite literally spook the horses, ‘farmland’ feels like an insurmountable barrier.
That’s a challenge for the Yimbys that it feels like we’ve been trying to duck – we probably need to actually have the argument over farmland, instead of just pretending it’s not a problem. That doesn’t mean taking on actual farmers – they’re often the ones trying to sell their less valuable fields and keep their businesses going. By all means, let’s protect the best stuff, but do we really have to pretend every scrubland field is a national treasure? That feels like a winnable battle if ever there was one.
There is a standard response from any Chancellor or Prime Minister asked questions about government finances: ‘I am not going to write the Budget in front of you’. And neither should they. The Budget is a potentially market-moving financial event. The figures it contains have to add up, make sense. The measures have to be […]
Last week, I met my friend Becky for coffee in Buenos Aires. Becky lives on Las Malvinas and, unsurprisingly, calls them ‘the Falklands’. I never do, of course. After nearly ten years in Argentina, I have learned to discuss this particular subject in something closer to a stage whisper. Hearing the ‘F’ word spoken at […]
Margaret Thatcher is back in the news. But it is not her admirers on the Right who have put her there. It is our new Labour Prime Minister, whose diagnosis of our country’s ills seems to be that Britain was on the right path up until 1979, when the Conservatives got into power and precipitated […]
