Anna Bailey: ‘Government’s decisions on Sunnica and housing are damaging for East Cambridgeshire’

Opinion | Anna Bailey, the Conservative leader of East Cambridgeshire District Council, delivers her verdict on the Labour governments early announcements.

Residents are grappling with the decisions of the new government, which have come thick and fast, including the scrapping of the winter fuel allowance for almost 10 million pensioners across the country, which will no doubt help fund the 22 per cent pay increase for the junior doctors, assuming they accept the proposal.

East Cambs District Council is also dealing with the fallout of two announcements by the new Labour government. Secretary of State Ed Miliband, just eight days into his new job, went against the recommendation for refusal by the independent inspector and granted planning permission for the massive 2,500-acre Sunnica solar farm near Burwell, Isleham, Chippenham, Fordham, Kennett and Snailwell.

The district council is supportive of renewable energy, which is borne out by our approval of renewable energy schemes outside of Burwell and Soham over the past few years, but it is imperative that such schemes are in the right place and are right for the communities in which they are located.

The Sunnica application, which is designated as a national infrastructure project and is therefore determined by the government rather than the local planning authority, is on a scale that is hard to imagine and has loomed over local people for some five years.

The district council has fought against it alongside residents and others, evidencing sound arguments at the planning examination which the inspector agreed with. It is therefore galling for local people that the new Secretary of State went against the Inspector’s recommendation and granted it permission, without setting foot in the area!

This cynical proposal, to be built in the countryside on large swathes of high grade food production land, includes vast battery storage warehousing which will allow Sunnica to draw power from the national grid at non-peak hours when it is cheaper and sell it back to the grid during peak hours at a more expensive rate.

The development includes 3m high solar panels and compounds protected by razor wire fencing in the fields of rural East Cambridgeshire.

East Cambs District Council has taken legal advice and all four councils involved are now considering next steps to see what action can be taken.

And in another rushed announcement, Labour has broken its manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new houses per year, increasing that to 370,000 - incidentally the same level of building proposed by the Liberal Democrats.

For us in East Cambridgeshire, where we have been hitting an almost unprecedented rate of almost two per cent growth in new homes for the last two years, the housing target for our district will increase by 12 per cent to 655 new homes every year. This is a massive increase, coming on top of an already high rate of delivery, and the real frustration is that the government is proposing absolutely nothing to give powers to the council to make the developers build the thousands of homes that have already been granted permission but not yet delivered.

Sadly, Labour’s planning reforms are highly likely to see councils all over the country losing control of their five-year housing land supply, which will result in unplanned development outside the development envelopes in unsustainable locations in the countryside with no accompanying infrastructure.

Deleting references to “beauty” in the National Planning Policy Framework is also a hugely retrograde step.

The government’s eight-week consultation on its planning reforms begins just as the country sets off for its summer holidays!