Stokenchurch meeting and reflections on our planning system

I was in Stokenchurch on Friday afternoon to attend a public meeting called by Stokenchurch Parish Council to discuss plans by Wycombe District Council to locate two additional travellers’ sites in the village.  Longburrow Hall was packed.  I reckon that well over a hundred people were there, many of whom had taken time off work to be present.

It was clear that the overwhelming majority of people at the meeting had no animus against the long established gypsy and traveller families who already live in Stokenchurch.  What they fear was that the designation of the two sites, both of which are in the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and one of which is also in green belt land, and would open the way for significant numbers of outsiders with no previous connection to the local community.  People are understandably upset when their own planning applications for modest extensions or even for garden buildings have been turned down on the grounds that green belt must be protected but then find out is that an exception is being made to the rules when it comes to travellers’ sites.  Similarly, my judgement is that people are very willing to accept that their local district council must plan for the future housing needs of gypsies and travellers with connections to the Wycombe area, just as they need to plan for the needs of everybody else.  What irks is the fact that the proposals now on the table have been prompted not by the  local council’s own assessment of what is needed but by the need to meet a central government target. The government has not only made an assessment of Wycombe’s needs but then added an extra element to represent what it considers to be Wycombe’s share of the “regional” needs of South East England as a whole.

As I reflected on what was said at this meeting, it seemed to me that the implications of the debate went a lot wider than this particular argument about travellers’ sites. People don’t feel that they have ownership of the planning system and yet the planning system is supposed to operate to give local people a real say in striking a balance between development and conservation in the places where they live.  I am convinced that the planning system, like so much else in our society, has become far too centralised.  I think that governments of both parties have been guilty but there is no doubt that centralisation has accelerated during the last dozen years.

We need a different approach.  A good start would be to scrap altogether the cumbersome, remote and undemocratic tier of regional planning and return housing and planning powers to elected local authorities.  We should then aim to put in place a bottom-up system of planning in which district councils have to consult with people at parish and neighbourhood level.  The final local plan should represent the aspirations of local people.  It should be a policy in the framing of which local residents feel that they have been allowed a genuine say.

Of course there will be national infrastructure projects where it will have to be Parliament, rather than a host of different local authorities, which takes responsibility for the decision. But such cases are rare. We need to reform our planning system to make it much more responsive to local opinion and local need.

High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

Please find a link to both the Hansard and a video of my High Speed 2 debate on 23rd March 2010.

Hansard: High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

Video: High Speed 2 (Buckinghamshire) Debate

HS2 – Parliamentary Questions

Below are the answers that I received from the Minister regarding the Parliamentary Questions that I tabled about High Speed Rail. As you can see, one of the questions has not been answered yet but it does say the Minister will get back to me shortly. Sometimes this can take a couple of days but on other occasions it can be a few weeks. I will nevertheless post the response on my website as soon as I have received it.

HS2 – Letter from Lord Adonis

Below is the letter that I received from the Transport Secretary about HS2.

I note that although the Government has taken a decision on a preferred route through the A413 corridor, Lord Adonis does concede that the final decision “on either the strategic case for high speed rail or the specific routes any line may follow” will not be taken until after the consultation, which is due to be carried out in the autumn.

High Speed Rail and Buckinghamshire Hospitals

The decision a few years back to concentrate particular hospital services in either Stoke Mandeville or Wycombe, rather than at both sites, stirred up a huge row. In Aylesbury, we saw cardiac services go south. At Wycombe, which is the local hospital for a lot of my constituents in Stokenchurch, Naphill and other villages, maternity and children’s services were closed and concentrated at Stoke.

An awful lot hangs on having an effective ambulance service to get patients from one end of the county to a hospital at the other. Living in Risborough, I see and hear those ambulances a lot.

So what is going to happen if this rail route goes ahead and involves a viaduct across the A4010 at Stoke Mandeville? Is it really possible to do it without temporary road closures or, at the very best, traffic restrictions that are bound to add significantly to delays. I’ve been onto the Bucks Hospitals Trust today to flag this up as an issue. It’s just the latest illustration of the far-reaching impact that this scheme could have on  many aspects of life here.

High Speed rail (4)

Just left the Chamber after statement.  Said would be devastating news for many constituents and asked what were the environmental benefits that outweighed the costs people’s quality of life and to landscape.

Proposed route would mean tunnel under Old Amersham, line running near Gt Missenden church and South Heath and under or through Bacombe Lane in Wendover.

Government small-scale map seems to put route  very close to hundreds of homes in Aylesbury and Stoke Mandeville.

Minister promised serious consultation and mitigation measures. We’ll see. Next I need to immerse myself in the detail.

My exchange with the Minister (about two thirds of the way down the page)

The Minister’s Statement on High Speed Rail and the full Commons debate

High Speed Two (3)

Lord Adonis on his feet in the Lords. Government is plumping for A413 corridor: Amersham, Missenden, Wendover, west of Aylesbury.

Promise of public consultation and “mitigation measures” though no details.

To read Lord Adonis’ statement on High Speed Rail in full please click here.

High Speed Two (2)

There’s now a bit more news on timings. Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, is scheduled to make a statement in the Lords at 11.30 am. His Commons Minister, Sadiq Khan, has just twittered that he expects to be repeating that statement in the Commons at 12.15 pm. The actual White Paper, with all the small print detail, isn’t expected to be available until after the Commons statement, perhaps at 1.00 pm.

High Speed Two (1)

Today we’re due to get the Government’s announcement about plans for a new high-speed rail route from London to Birmingham. I’m expecting an oral statement in the Commons in either the late morning or very early afternoon.

A lot of countries are building high-speed rail lines to link major cities. A fair number of my constituents will have used the TGV in France and other countries in Europe and Asia are pushing ahead with similar schemes and they clearly have important economic benefits. If they succeed in diverting travellers from roads and aeroplanes, they could have environmental benefits for the country too.

The problem for our area is that any route from London to Birmingham seems likely to go through the Chilterns. We’d suffer the environmental damage but, because the trains would not stop locally, we’d get no direct benefit.

I’ve not been given any advance details of the route. Our local councils have been consulted at officer level but have all been sworn to secrecy. Press leaks from the Department of Transport suggest that the government is looking at three options, each involving existing transport corridors.

One would be to follow the M40 corridor, either tunnelling under or skirting High Wycombe, then running along the A4010 through the Bradenham valley, going around Risborough and off towards Haddenham.

A second option would be to follow the line of the A413 past Chafont, Great Missenden and Wendover, going round Aylesbury to the West and then over towards Quainton.

A third would be the A41 corridor past Hemel Hempsted, Tring and Aston Clinton then up along the Herts/Bucks/Beds border.

Whichever the government proposes, we’d be looking at a 100 metre swathe of land that would be in addition to rather than taking over existing railway lines.

I’ll blog more when I have some news.

Service Children and RAF issues

Last week was very much RAF week.  On the Monday morning I began the working week with a visit to Halton Primary School, just outside Wendover.  About three quarters of the children who go to Halton are from RAF families.  This causes a number of challenges for the school.  For a start, fathers (and in these days mothers too) can be posted at very short notice, meaning frequent family moves.  The headteacher told me that she had lost about 10 children in December 2009 as a result of postings.  She knew that, given the law of averages, they would probably be replaced by a similar number of children from RAF families newly posted into  Halton but the problem she faced was that the census date for schools, the date at which pupil numbers are used to calculate a school’s budget entitlement, fell in January while those school places were still vacant.  The school therefore faced an immediate budget shortfall and would soon have to take on new pupils without the funding being available to support them.

Not surprisingly, service children often end up passing through a number of different state schools in a very short space of time.  At Halton School, they can be taking in boys and girls who have perhaps attended three or four different primary schools in as many years.  You can imagine the dislocation which those moves cause to a child’s education.  Sometimes, a child might miss one part of the curriculum entirely because different schools teach it at a different point in a particular academic year.

For children with special educational needs, it is not always straightforward to ensure that an assessment and the resources to support particular forms of assistance are transferred from one education authority or one school to another.  It’s hard enough to make this happen within England.  When a child moves in to Bucks from Scotland, Northern Ireland or from an RAF station overseas, the problems can be worse.  I am going to take this point up with education ministers.

But it wasn’t all bad news.  The reason that the school invited me to visit them was to help celebrate their success in obtaining recognition of be special demands placed on them by the large number of service children at Halton. Bucks County Council has agreed to pay an additional sum of money per pupil to Halton School and to Walters Ash School ( which serves RAF High Wycombe). Musician, Paulton school has been able to secure funding from a number of different sources for a mobility officer to provide support to service children and ensure that information about their school records and their educational needs has been properly collated.  Academic standards at Halton School are on the up and be staff and governors seemed enthusiastic and very determined to improve the school’s reputation further.

Two days later, I was in Walters Ash.  Not to visit the school but to spend a couple of hours at RAF High Wycombe.  I first called on Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Moran, commander-in-chief of Air Command.  We chatted about the role of the RAF in our defence policy, Afghanistan and nuclear deterrence.  Whichever political party forms the government after the next general election will need to undertake an urgent and thorough review not just of Britain’s defence but of our broader national security strategy.  It seems to me to be essential that we do a great deal more to integrate our defence, diplomatic and development policies and so that once the government collectively has agreed on a particular policy, every minister knows what they are signed up to and what their department is expected to provide.  We should never make foreign policy commitments about the deployment of British forces unless we are willing to ensure that the service men and women concerned are properly equipped and kitted out for that task.

I then went down the road for a meeting with group Captain Tony Radcliffe, station commander of RAF High Wycombe.  I suspect that he has more very senior officers on his station then any other RAF local commander! We talked about the integration of civilian and contracted staff with uniformed personnel, about service housing and social and recreational facilities.  It was good to hear that some of the rather dilapidated service quarters have been done up but disappointing to learn that the station’s antiquated gym still hasn’t been replaced.  I remember this being raised with me as an issue by RAF personnel more than 10 years ago.  Of course they problem is that when money is tight all three services, quite naturally and rightly, give priority to the people in the front line ahead of those back home.

Despite all the budgetary pressures, what impresses me every time I talk to the RAF (and I am sure that this applies in the other two services as well) is their can do attitude.  Officers and other ranks are usually pretty straight with me over what’s going wrong but they then work on the basis that while they might want certain things to change they will also do their utmost to make the best of the circumstances in which they find themselves.  It’s a pretty good principle by which to live.