It’s another crisp January Nimby Watch, and we are once again going to spend it together a few miles outside the M25, this time in the village of Meppershall.
Alright then, so it’s Meppershall this week. What’s there to see here? Honestly, there’s not a great deal going on, and that’s pretty much the point. Meppershall is a small hilltop village in Bedfordshire, surrounded by farmland, and it’s got a population of about 2,000 people – many of whom seem to have moved here because it’s pretty quiet.
Inevitably that quiet’s not going to last, is it, so let’s get to it: what’s the development? It’s a pretty familiar story this time – there are proposals for up to 150 new houses on a site at the edge of the village, which is currently agricultural land (two farm fields, to be precise). The proposals are about as standard as they come: 35% of the homes will be affordable, the new homes would be in keeping with local character and architectural features, and there are plans for a children’s playground, landscaping, trees and the like.
Would I also be right in assuming that these features have done pretty much nothing to appease local opposition? You would! Meppershall might have a rural ‘feel’, but like most villages in the UK, it’s actually pretty close to a lot of larger settlements. It’s located directly between Luton, Stevenage and Beford, and has good transport links to any of them, and is a feasible commute into London.
It’s outside the green belt, and somewhere lots of people want to live. But, of course, the people who live there already don’t want the character of the area to change, and they’re fairly vocal about it.
Are they now? They are indeed, with a sometimes-impressive level of obliviousness as to how their comments might come across. Feedback on Central Bedfordshire’s local plan included hopes to buy up any land developers had tried to use, so that it couldn’t be built upon.
Others complained to ‘too much building in Meppershall’, or that ‘we don’t want to be so far from open countryside that we have to drive to it’. A particular highlight was a respondent who noted that ‘we moved to Meppershall as a small village with plenty of open spaces. These are to be filled in with 150 houses’.
Ah. So it’s housing for me but not for thee is it? British Nimbys do seem to love moving into a newbuild and then pulling the drawbridge up behind them. That one wasn’t even the highlight. The best, perhaps, was someone complaining that a proposal to build detached and semi-detached homes on the edge of a village must be opposed, so the village ‘do[es] not fill every plot of land thus constructing the slums of the future’.
I mean, it’s all quite frustrating, but this is all extremely bog-standard Nimbyism so far. Why are we paying this one special attention? I’m glad you asked! It’s all about who’s coordinating the local opposition. Many residents of Meppershall received a leaflet through their front door bearing the logo of their parish council, encouraging them to oppose the local development.
Well, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, aren’t they? Mostly, yes, but not entirely. Parish councils don’t make planning decisions, but they are allowed to formally weigh in to the process, and they’re allowed to communicate their reasons for interventions. But they are also public bodies, and they’re supposed to abide by the rules on fairness and impartiality.
What do those rules say? Well, they’re principles rather than strictly codified rules, but they include the idea that council communications about policy should be ‘as objective as possible’ and that ‘local authorities should not use public funds to mount publicity campaigns whose primary purpose is to persuade the public to hold a particular view on a question of policy’.
Well, maybe the leaflet does that – you said the council can object in its own right, so a leaflet trying to fairly explain the reasons for that would surely be okay? Here are some highlights from the leaflet, which I’ll leave you to judge for yourself. The banner headline of the leaflet is ‘ACTION NOW – LOCAL PLANNING ALERT’, immediately followed by ‘OUR VILLAGE IS UNDER THREAT – ACT NOW’. This measured tone is followed by a statement that ‘we need as many residents as possible to object to [the] planning application’.
That doesn’t seem all that impartial to me, if I’m honest. It does not! It does, however, suggest that the Government could make the job of hitting its housing targets easier by reminding councils of the existing rules that they are supposed to follow. Nimby groups should, at least, have to do their own organising, without public bodies doing it for them, no?
This week, Nimby Watch is in for a reckoning… Hey, you. Excuse me? Are you talking to me? Yes, you. I’ve got something you should read. Hang on a minute, shouldn’t you be asking me questions? Are you breaking the format? Damn right I am. Every fortnight, you take me somewhere in the UK, show […]
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This week, Nimby Watch is in Winstanley, in the historical county of Lancashire. But, like certain other people in Winstanley right now, we’ve got our eyes on Westminster… Okay then, why are we in Winstanley. Where exactly is Winstanley, anyway? Well, if you’re part of the southern Westminster elite, you might say that Winstanley is […]
