Council’s local plan can no longer be used to refuse planning applications

Published on Monday, 25th March 2019

In a surprise development, Portsmouth City Council’s Cabinet has reluctantly agreed that it does not have a five-year land supply. In other words, it cannot demonstrate a sufficient list of housing sites, whether with or without planning consent that will likely come forward for development by 2024, to meet its housing need. This has serious consequences.

For the last few years, national policy has been in such places, the ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ applies. That means in effect that local policies that restrict the supply of housing no longer apply and that in turn means the local plan has in effect gone.

This doesn't mean every undeveloped site is in the gun sights. Areas such as Farlington Marshes and Southsea Common are protected by national policies. It does, however, mean that rules stopping business land in Copnor, Farlington and elsewhere from being replaced with housing have probably gone out of the window. It also makes it harder to resist high-density schemes.

This is all bad news. In Fareham, which is in the same boat, the presumption has lead to unallocated, Greenfield land going for housing. Portsmouth effectively contains no countryside, but the effect will still be real.

The reason why this has happened now is the movement to using a nationally set housing needs formula. This has increased the target to 863, which is about double the level that has actually been achieved over recent decades. The revised local plan is now running late and won’t be adopted for another 18 months. It will, hopefully, be possible to reduce the target at that point, but it won’t be before then.

It is also interesting to note that about half of the housing completions over the last two years come from student rooms. Read more here.

Tags: Planning

Citywide parking petition

Published on Wednesday, 13th March 2019

Should residents' parking be dealt with once and for all? If you think it should, please consider signing my petition, available here. A thousand signatures means a council debate.

Tags: Parking

New emergency department for hospital

Published on Monday, 10th December 2018

Details are surprisingly sketchy, but it has to be good news that QA hospital has secured £58m of government money for a new emergency department. This is the third largest of the 75 schemes across England to receive funding this year.

The emergency department (ED) is generally reckoned to be the worst performing part of the hospital and hopefully this scheme will fix that. I was briefly a governor of the hospital and it was openly admitted that the current one is as it is because the cost of rebuilding the hospital was proving too high and something had to be removed to get it back into budget. That something was the ED and everyone recognises that scaling it back was a mistake. 

Tags: Hospital

Mixed news from Charlotte Street

Published on Monday, 10th December 2018

A planning application has been submitted to demolish one of the shops in Charlotte Street and replace it with a block of flats, with a commercial space on the ground floor. The proposal would see the two-storey Ponden Home store building replaced with a five storey building containing nine flats.

This is both good and bad news. The positive interpretation is that any investment is welcome and the new building looks better than the old; the negative that this is a piecemeal application and that looking at each site individually makes securing the comprehensive regeneration less likely; it also in all likelihood means the loss of a shop.

The application reference is 18/01927/OUT.

Tags: City Centre

Pub numbers bearing up

Published on Monday, 10th December 2018

It might not always seem like it, but the pub trade is bearing up better in Portsmouth than in most of the country. 

New figures from the Office of National Statistics document the decline in pub numbers, with numbers nationwide down by about a quarter since 2001. In Portsmouth, pub numbers have fallen from 210 to 150, although employment has remained stable at 1750 as new, larger premises have come on line and as kitchen jobs have been created as more pubs sell food.

These figures show Portsmouth has 7.0 pubs per 10,000 people. This is well above the national average of 5.8 and compares favourably to neighbouring districts: Gosport has 4.6, Fareham 4.3 and Havant just 3.6. Southampton also scores badly, with just 100 pubs, for a rate of about 4.

While a lot of premises have closed over the last decade, things are showing signs of levelling off, with numbers being broadly stable over the last five years.

A large student and young adult population, combined with comparatively low property prices and an inflow of people visiting the city at night and for events are part of the explanation for Portsmouth’s relative success. 

The report is online here

Tags: Pubs

Botched residents’-only schemes to bring new parking problems

Published on Monday, 29th October 2018

The LibDems that run the City Council have formally decided to reintroduce two residents parking schemes, both of which caused widespread problems when they were in place five years ago. Between them, the two areas cover most of the area between Albert Road and Goldsmith Avenue and out to Francis Avenue. These schemes were taken out by the Conservatives because of the knock-on problems they caused elsewhere, but now they are coming back and in essentially the same form as before. This is not a good idea. 

The inevitable consequence of this will be the gradual extension of residents’ restrictions across the whole of Southsea as people in area after area become irate at being made the dumping ground for surplus cars from miles around. The real choice is between leaving things as they are or bringing in restrictions across a wide area. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.

Instead the council is sticking to the line that somehow it is democratic to let people vote to move the student cars out of their streets and into someone else’s. It’s also expensive. First permits are £30, second ones £100 and third ones £590. There are however plenty of households containing three adults, each of whom needs a car for work.

I am asking for the council to look at a wide area scheme. As the existing parking problems in most of the area are less intense than in most of Southsea, punitive charging should not be used for second or third permits.

Tags : Parking