Made-up housing numbers inexcusable excuse for Labour’s destruction of our green belt

Madness has taken hold of this Labour government and in tandem so has our Southend Labour administration who are carrying out their orders from on high.

In the very literal sense no blade of grass is safe. In this parallel universe, green is the new grey and as such the countryside - if Labour have their way - will be drowned in concrete.

A few weeks ago I unceremoniously coined the term ‘Concretors’ to describe those who wish to vandalise the green belt despite knowing there are already 1.4 million planning permissions granted on brownfield sites across the country. These same people would have you believe that we must accept the inevitable and bow to their ill-advised agenda because rules, once hardened, cannot be undone! Some Concretors have taken offence and on a personal level I am apologetic, however, feelings verses monumental and irreversible catastrophic destruction is not really a contest.

Whoever is truly pulling the strings to have enacted the changes to the National Planning Policy Framework is a criminal in my eyes. They know exactly what they are doing and who it benefits. Just because a small group of people know how to navigate the legal system to make something technically legal, doesn’t mean it should be.

Green Belters understand there are housing requirements, but not at the expense of irreplaceable countryside. And that is the point, if you could pierce the founding premise on which the countryside is being destroyed it is that of the well publicised but unproven “housing crisis” and the fabricated housing targets this Labour government has been influenced to introduce.

The housing numbers

I am at pains to state that no one in our country has any idea of what the exact housing requirement is because there is no one going door-to-door asking what we actually need.

Instead the government rely on a deeply flawed economic model whose calculations are dictated to by politicians’ desires rather than anything that resembles realistic housing requirement.

For instance, the 1.5 million housing target Labour have been so proudly promoting is nothing more than the String Puller(s) telling Labour that’s the target they want.

Have you ever wondered what they mean by a “housing crisis” where almost all of us have a roof over our heads? So what really is the demand?

Yes, homelessness is real and, yes, people do need homes. For those involuntarily homeless this must be solved. But if you add up all the homeless people in England and those on the council waiting lists it won’t be anywhere near 1.5 million people.

To illuminate this fact - when you walk about your daily lives can you see 1.5 million homeless people? Of course not. According to government figures there are around 8,000 people on the streets, which when you think about it, shouldn’t be that hard for a government to solve.

There are 130,000 families in temporary accommodation, but not homeless. Again, this should not be hard to solve - we are the 6th largest economy in the world!

Addressing homelessness is most certainly a crisis for the individual and it can happen to any one of us, however, to characterise housing demand itself as a “crisis” is evidentially wide of the mark.

The current birth rate of England is 1.4, which means our population is shrinking. So where are the people coming from?

Without free-falling into the immigration debate too much, we can train our own people to fulfil any role in our society, so that argument in time is moot. That is not to say I am anti-immigration, it is merely to point out the obvious that if we want more nurses in the NHS it is not hard to train from 70 million people!

In truth, we are being gaslit.

Thorpe Estates Development

And so I turn to Southend.

On almost every ‘material consideration’ it is impossible that officers could have passed the Thorpe Estate proposals for 2000 houses on the green belt, so how did they come to recommend the plans to be passed by the Planning Committee?

This was what Officers called a “Golden Rules” application because any harm to the greenbelt is by definition harmful. The question is whether other factors outweigh the harm.

In this circumstance, given how obvious the lack of existing infrastructure is and the chaos that would ensue with tens of thousands of extra people in Southend, it just couldn’t pass. However, it was specifically on the Labour government’s own made-up out of thin air housing targets that these officers weighed against the harm of the green belt.

The truth is there are no “special circumstances” that outweigh the damage the development would do because the housing numbers are a magic trick!

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Infrastructure

I happen to be a hardline Green Belter because no matter if you gave me all the infrastructure in the world, I would still never go concrete.

We’ve done enough and I do not believe that fake housing numbers should be enough to justify it.

When people ask for alternative solutions to house building, I simply return to the housing targets themselves. Until we develop a system that provides real housing demand, no one in our country can categorically tell us that we even need to build in the first place. I sound like Chat GPT when I say this, but facts and evidence should drive decision-making, not guesswork and propaganda. But if we do, let’s sort the laws on land banking and financial assessments of developers to have the 1.4 million brownfield sites developed on first.

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In terms of infrastructure, we know for certain we will never get what is needed because we do not have it already however much Bayo Alaba MP, DBS MP and Cllr Cowan wave the hypnotists pendulum to convince us we will get a brand new multi-billion pound hospital!

In the Thorpe proposals the 900 “affordable” houses will not affordable to most people because that only means 20% off market value and not forgetting all developers shrink that figure to as close to nothing as possible. Most importantly, zero houses will be social or council houses and zero will be prioritised for local people - that being the case, who is this development helping exactly?

The land is healthy, vibrant and capable of growing crops, not “dead land” as Southend Labour have described. It goes against any climate change ambitions with thousands more cars running about clogging up all the roads, which is in contradiction to Southend Labour calling for a “Climate Emergency” if anyone remembers.

What do we have left but to make heinous assumptions as to why this is happening. Nothing adds up aside from the String Pullers’ purses.

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What can be done?

Yet, there is so much we can do.

97% of residents said they were against this development. If that figure is extrapolated across the country it is likely that millions of voters - feel the same. The only mission left would be to galvanise and organise and then we go. Not easy and time is not on our side, but we are not alone.

There are more and more of us Green Belters becoming aware of what the Labour government is doing and it really is only a matter of time.

Fortunately, developers do not have as much free cash as they would hope (Thorpe Estates have barely any according to Peter Lovett, Chair of the Shoeburyness Residents Association) and the destruction can only move slowly. Plenty of time for a new government to reverse the Labour sell-out changes. And plenty of time to reverse Southend Labour’s (and the Lib Dems and Rochford and Southend Independents’) betrayal of the real wants and needs of those who gave them the very powers currently being abused against us.

Victory

With a stunning victory in defeating this scheme at the Planning Committee, it is now left to the Secretary of State to decide Southend’s fate. A Planning Inspector - a so-called “expert” - will make the final decision as to whether we are all wrong, but I cannot see how Angela Rayner’s team will not lay a heavy hand on this.

Unless the country is able to flip Andy Burnham and reverse the changes in the National Planning Policy Framework to protect the green belt properly, we must hope Labour are voted out at the next General Election. With a GE very likely very soon, we may get our chance!

The Green Belt Journey

I wanted to take the time to highlight those in the Save Bournes Green journey that made this local victory possible and what they did:

• Councillors James Moyies and Tony Cox shone a light on Labour leader of Southend City Council, Daniel Cowan, who sent a proposal to the New Towns Taskforce to build 10,000 houses on this land.

• Emma Wynn-Morgan (owner and editor of the Oracle), Kim Hall (Chair of the Thorpe Residents Association), Peter Lovett and myself met to discuss what can be done.

• Myself and the Confelicity Party asked councillors, residents and campaign groups to speak at the first protest on Maplin Way North.

  
  

• We held three further protests.

• The New Towns Taskforce proposal failed, but not weeks later the developers, Thorpe and Bellway came out with proposals to build 5,000 houses on this land, which was championed by Southend Labour and Cllr Cowan.

• The four of us invited others to join, which ended up with a new committee called the South East Essex Green Belters.

• Tricia Cowdrey and myself arranged a further protest and Tricia then took the lead in the other three. The third one having well over one hundred in attendance.

• Councillors James and Alex Moyies proposed a motion at an extraordinary council meeting in which the green belt was voted in favour of protecting. Cllr Moyies also highlighted that the ringleader, Cllr Daniel Cowan, did not even press the button to vote and therefore ludicrously abstained to abstain! Highly questionable, especially when his Labour colleague Cllr Matt Dent enthusiastically did so amongst his speech to gut the greenbelt. Cllr Sam Allen was the first Labour councillor to break away and vote with the Green Belters - a man with a conscience who put town above party.

  
  

• Cllr David Garne, who was immense in the planning meeting and formulated the proposal to not build on the land, managed to win councillors onside emphatically. The final motion was made by councillor O’Rourke and Corrigan and it was that the victory was based on. Including Cllr Longstaff, these were the heroes of the day. Surprisingly, Cllr Wakefield, who was formerly a Concretor voted to protect the green belt, and even more surprisingly, so did Labour’s Anne Jones.

• September 17th a public meeting will be held to protect Southend’s greenbelt to continue to spread the word.

This has been a great and historic team effort from so many people from so many parties and organisations and I don’t think we’ve even got started.

The Labour war against the green belt is just beginning to reach main stream news. Burnham has clumsily given the game away when he went public with their manifesto plans and it is only a matter of time before this gets defeated.

No matter how many times the Concretors say there is nothing that can be done and the rules won’t change, do not listen to a word of it. The country will get what the country wants and we want the countryside to exist for generations to come.

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