Housing masterplan described as “deeply flawed” and “unfixable” scrapped after seven years of work

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By Eddie Bisknell – Local Democracy Reporting Service

A Derbyshire council’s “deeply flawed” and “unfixable” 7,000-home masterplan has been scrapped after seven years of work.

At an Erewash Borough Council meeting on Thursday (January 22nd), councillors voted to withdraw the authority’s plan to earmark land for more than 7,000 homes by 2040.

This followed a direct “ultimatum” from a Government planning inspector that the council either choose to scrap its plan or face it being judged “unsound” and rejected.

Council papers reveal that the cost of continuing to have the plan judged by an inspector, regardless of the warning, would be £20,000 and would be paid for by the authority.

The council, led by Labour since 2023, has been without an up-to-date housing blueprint since 2019 and legally must either have a plan or be working towards one, the meeting was told.

Councillors have reiterated over the seven years in which the plan has been in the works – in full force for around four years – that the council not having a blueprint leaves it open for attacks from housing developers with speculative planning applications, without any basis to reject them or direct them to preferable plots.

Cllr Curtis Howard, Labour’s lead member for town centres, regeneration and planning, told the meeting: “We need to deliver new homes, we have a legal and moral duty to do so. We need to have a Local Plan and we have been without one for seven years.

“We continue to have never ever met our housing targets which have now gone up.”

He said a Government inspector had formally found what he and the Labour administration “knew all along”, that the blueprint was “fundamentally not good enough”.

Cllr Howard said the Labour administration had attempted to withdraw the plan in late 2023 but was blocked by the then-Conservative Government from doing so.

He said that move has now led to “two years spent going round and round in circles, and it is the people of Erewash who have lost out”.

Cllr Howard said areas where houses were being built had far shorter housing waiting lists.

He had previously said there are 5,000 people on the borough’s social housing waiting list and that 2,000 of those are children.

Cllr Howard said it was time to “end the delay and not waste any more time dithering and not waste any more money”.

He said: “It is time to withdraw this strategy that doesn’t work and has been criticised to death.

“There is not a single person in this room, myself included, who has not found something wrong with this plan. Let it be put out of its misery.”

Cllr Becca Everett, Labour’s deputy leader, said the plan was “unfixable” and said the delay was avoidable if not for “the Conservative’s insatiable need to be right, when everything they touch they destroy, like a reverse Midas touch”.

Cllr Joel Bryan, Labour, said: “This plan is so deeply flawed it cannot be made to work. It was drawn up by the Conservatives, then the Conservative Government stopped us from withdrawing it and we have wasted three years.”

Cllr Wayne Major, Conservative opposition leader, said the Labour administration had tried to make too many changes to the plan which they had not been asked to do and that this had been highlighted by the inspector.

He claimed this included earmarking safeguarded land and allocating new housing sites around villages, without a sufficient evidence base to support it.

Cllr Major said: “This included proposing housing developments that housing developers were telling us were not possible.”

He said: “However, I am pleased you did all this because it got it rejected.”

Cllr James Dawson, Labour leader of the council, said: “We need to have a plan or be working on a plan by law and we are not going to be breaking the law. We can all now continue to pick over the carcass of this plan but it is time to withdraw it. We knew it was flawed.”

In the years since the plan has been underway the council has seen its annual housing target, set by Government, increase from 376 to 523 per year.

The plan had contained 7,044 homes to be delivered by 2040 and was initially supposed to last until 2037.

Since the plan was inspected, a site for 259 houses in the Green Belt between Spondon and Spondon Wood has been earmarked, with plans submitted by a developer and approved in February last year.

Efforts to help meet the rising housing targets had seen 11th-hour additions of plots in the Green Belt around Sandiacre, Breadsall Hilltop, Borrowash, Breaston, Draycott and West Hallam.

Developments bordering Derby were heavily criticised, including by Derby City Council officials, for placing the borough’s housing, education and infrastructure pressure onto the city.

The plan was also heavily criticised for using Green Belt plots instead of brownfield industrial land, with officials saying all possible avenues had been exhausted without success.