For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to Mid Suffolk, where the population of the ancient village of Bacton is set to boom…
Where this week? The ancient East Anglian village of Bacton.
The Norfolk seaside village? Terminus of a gas pipeline connecting England to the Netherlands? Whose amenities include a village shop, a hotel, Chinese restaurant, kebab house and two cafes? No, not that one, no. This one’s 50 miles to the south west in Mid Suffolk, a few miles outside Stowmarket. It’s been the site of ‘many interesting finds on the locally organised annual metal-detecting days’, and is, in fact, even smaller than its Norfolk namesake. For now.
For now? It is – so Ben Schofield of BBC Suffolk tells us in a story headlined, ‘The village almost doubling after developer “free-for-all” – booming. In the decade to 2021, census records showed, the village gained just 13 new households. ‘But over recent years, planning permission has been granted for 396 new homes’.
And that’s enough to double the population, is it? Well, the population in 2021 was only 1,200, so it’s at least possible.
I’m guessing the locals have greeted this with open arms. Okay, that was sarcasm, but you’re more right than you probably think. The co-owner of The Bull, the village’s 16th-century pub, which used to face fields but now faces a new-build Taylor Wimpey estate, says, ‘The people are lovely. It’s happened very quickly, I must admit, but it’s a nice change’.
Well, a pub probably benefits from an increase in population. Very possibly. But one of the new arrivals also told the BBC that ‘the welcome is brilliant’, and she’s ‘really fallen on [her] feet’. It is, and I don’t say this lightly, not the usual Nimby charter, but a comparatively thoughtful and balanced piece about the challenges of growth.
‘Comparatively’. I mean the story does also quote a local survey in which 85% of the villagers want no more housing. And asked her views on further growth, the new arrival – who lives in a new build, and has been in the village for all of a year and a half – agrees that that ‘would be really pushing it on poor old Bacton’.
To be fair, she’s already got a house. The pub landlord meanwhile says, ‘I don’t think there’s much space’. Here’s a map of the village.
Image: Google Maps.
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Yes, I can see the problem. Some actually existing problems, to be fair, are set out in the story. The village has two buses a week – to Bury St Edmunds on Wednesdays, and to Stowmarket on Thursday – and no station, despite lying next to the mainline between Norwich and Ipswich. Others complain of flood risk, while one local complains that ‘The jobs aren’t here, so everyone will be commuting, or they’re going to be retired’. He’s… 77.
LOL, etc. If we are being uncharacteristically fair, for once, a village doubling in a decade does sound like kind of a big deal. I don’t think ‘growth is good, but we haven’t in any way planned for this’ is an entirely unreasonable position.
So why is it happening so fast? There are a couple of different answers to this. One is that, well, the council messed up. Under current rules, local authorities are meant to have a rolling five year land supply to meet their housing need. Mid Suffolk didn’t. In 2015, the district said it did not have sufficient sites for new homes – an obvious lie; it’s mostly empty – and that means the system ’tilts’ in favour of approvals. If the council had done its job, it would have been able to say ‘sorry, developers, these new estates are not in our local plan, build over there instead’. But it didn’t, so it couldn’t, and a load of housing was approved very quickly.
Oh, so the council is in the ‘find out’ phase of the meme. Right. But in some ways that’s a bit unfair because Mid Suffolk is a huge area, of which the population of Bacton make up perhaps 1%. If we wanted to be generous, we could perhaps draw parallels with terrible decisions visited upon us all by underperforming national governments over the years.
Why Bacton specifically is getting all this housing that could be in other villages, or on the outskirts of Stowmarket or Ipswich, which borders the district, is not so clear: there’s no green belt in Suffolk to prevent urban extensions. Some combination of land availability and market demand, with a touch of ‘less than 400 homes isn’t actually that much, really’ probably explains it.
Then again, it’s also possible that it’s happening all over the area, and it’s just that this village is the one that found a BBC reporter to whinge to, of course. ‘Hundreds of homes are currently being built or have planning consent,’ the story notes, ‘in the nearby villages of Thurston, Stowupland, Elmswell and Woolpit.’
Incidentally, you know how the report also quotes the new arrival saying (I paraphrase) ‘that’s enough new homes now’?
Yep? The retiree complaining about retirees moving to the village has only lived there nine years.
Classic. Incidentally, do you think I started by listing a bunch of facts about a completely different village because you researched the wrong one? They’ll never know for sure.
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