For this week’s edition of ‘Nimby Watch’, we’re off to Shropshire, where plans are afoot for new homes near Telford…
Where are we looking this time, then? We’re over in Lawley, which depending who you ask is either a suburb of Telford or a village a few miles away from it.
And what’s being built? A developer has just submitted plans for 250 new homes, a combination of 2-bed, 3-bed and 4-bed properties that are either detached or semi-detached. There’s enough new parking for more than 500 cars, and 25% of the homes are designated as affordable.
This all sounds suspiciously routine. There’s some kind of catch somewhere, isn’t there? Not at all! The site is not technically greenfield, as it’s part of a former mine, but it is currently… fields. It’s in the Local Plan for homes, already in the middle of an existing village, opposite a school and is only a few minutes from the M54 motorway.
You’re leaving something out, aren’t you? Out with it. Okay, fine. The housing site is an… unusual… shape.
An… unusual… shape? There isn’t really any way to put it delicately: as pretty much everyone who’s looked at any of the housing plans has immediately noticed, the shape of the proposed development looks an awful lot like male genitalia.
Ah. I’m sure everyone is reacting very maturely to this. Of course they aren’t – the story has been reported everywhere. As one local resident told the BBC: ‘I can’t believe somebody didn’t look at that [design] and snigger, because we’ve all cottoned on.’
Is this really the developer’s fault? Honestly, it probably isn’t. The land available is the land available and the site is… just that shape, really. When you factor in the maturity of the average British adult, and our ability to see rude images in almost anything, this was probably inevitable.
There’s more, isn’t there? Of course there is. The developer probably didn’t need to put a little pond in the plans exactly where, y’know, the tip would be. That doesn’t seem to have helped anything.
.
So, are the Nimbys kicking off because the plans for housing look a bit rude? They really are ridiculous, aren’t they? I really wish they had been, because it would let us score some great cheap points about how once homes are built we tend to see them from ground level, rather than the air, and we could just do a piece sniggering at the rude looking pictures.
What’s the actual problem then? The row over the site has been going on for at least a year, but the actual plans were only submitted this January. Within a week, it had received 26 comments from local residents, 24 of which were objecting to the plans. Lots of the usual gripes were there, but time and again the comments from residents complained that the local doctors and dentist’s surgery were overloaded already, and it was impossible to get an appointment. Given that, they don’t want to see 250 more families move to the area.
That sounds… annoyingly reasonable, actually. Yes. It’s particularly annoying because some of the objectors even acknowledge that the area needs more houses and that building more will help prices. But what makes it more frustrating is that it’s not really the developer’s fault, either.
You’re playing the sympathy with the developer card here? In theory, new housing could actually help local services: if developers aren’t building the new amenities or services their homes would require, they make a contribution to local budgets – funding social services, or whatever else the council and local area decides it needs.
That ‘in theory’ is doing some heavy lifting. It is. Most people don’t know about these contributions at all. But even if they do, they’re generally unconvinced – probably rightly – that a one-off contribution from a housebuilder will fix their local services.
Where does that leave us, then? Essentially it means yet another thing that makes new housing even more difficult to build without actually increasing support for it. For a plan to build 250 homes in an area the council agrees needs more homes, on a site deemed suitable for them. Even before the financial contribution, they’ve had to pay £40,000 to submit the plan, which also had to include a topological survey, a location plan, a site constraints plan, an access and circulation plan, a tree protection plan, a reptile report, a great crested newt habitat suitability index report, a climate change checklist, a biodiversity net gain assessment and several dozen other documents.
That actually does sound like quite a lot. It does! And crucially, none of it will do anything to stop the locals objecting to more housing. They can’t get a doctor’s appointment now, and they worry that more people will make that worse. The problem is the state of the NHS, and unless the services are working well now – before anything is built – people will object. And the NHS isn’t working that well across most of the UK right now.
So our chances of getting new homes built are being hurt by our ongoing inability to get the NHS working properly? Seems that way, doesn’t it?
That seems a pretty depressing note to end on. It does, but it feels worth bearing in mind. And there’s one thing that nothing can take away from us: the development site truly is shaped like a penis.
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