In a letter to a STAG member, Peter Chowney made the folowing observations about planning in Hastings:

I think one of the difficulties is contained in what you say, and gets to the heart of the problem.  You say:

 ‘It would seem to me that continuing to allow developers to take the easy (and of course lucrative) option of building or converting 1 and 2-bedroomed flats when there is absolutely no demand would be among the factors that give truth to the accusation already made that HBC always listens to the developers rather than the people who live in the Borough.’

Of course, if there was absolutely no demand for these flats, then it wouldn’t be lucrative to build them.  In the end, the way planning works is by developers putting applications in for what they want to build, which the council allows unless there is some very good planning reason not to.  So market forces prevail – if people don’t want small flats, then developers won’t build them.

Now, having said that, there does seem to be considerable evidence that developers are out-of-touch with what people want to buy.  The problem of over-supply of small flats isn’t by any means unique to Hastings – some city centres have dozens of unsold and abandoned developments of small flats.  Some developers do seem to have got the message – in the Millennium Communities development around Ore Station, the developer (Bellway Homes) has reduced the number of homes they think could be built from an initial 600, right down to less than 300.  In practice, they’ll be developing 51 new homes initially, almost all of which will be houses with gardens, and only half a dozen flats, above a food supermarket.  Their view was very clearly that they can’t sell flats anymore, and they want to build family-sized houses instead. 

However, we still see repeated planning applications to build high-density flatted developments, which evidence shows will be difficult to sell.  The letter from John Bray, who I reckon is a pretty experienced estate agent in Hastings, backs that up.  And yet, the developers don’t all seem to have got the message.  Frankly, I find this hard to understand.

Moving on to what the council can do about it, we can of course advise developers accordingly, and tell them to talk to local estate agents about what sells and what doesn’t.  It is true that the Regional Spatial Targets, which imposed home-building totals on local authorities, have now been scrapped.  As part of the development of the Local Development framework, we will be looking again at the totals we adopt locally, and whether they should be changed from those originally prescribed through the Regional Spatial targets.  Targets for minimum densities have also been scrapped, so we’ll be looking at whether we can have different prescribed densities for different parts of town.  I want to look at how far we can now go in prescribing the kind of development we want to see – what we’d like to see built is social and affordable housing, in reasonable sized houses with gardens.  At the moment, it’s not clear to what extent we can prescribe that, as the government hasn’t yet been clear about how they want planning to work in the future (beyond wanting it to be more ‘local’).  But in the end, of course, it’s down to developers to build the houses, and they won’t do it unless they can make a profit.  Unlike the council, they’re not there to provide for social needs, they’re there to make profits for their shareholders.  There would be no point in having a planning policy that said that developers can only build ‘affordable’ and social rented houses with gardens, because that would simply mean nothing would get built at all.  It has to be a compromise between their profits and the town’s needs.

So, to summarise, we do have an opportunity now to develop new policies as part of the Local Development Framework, particularly as the density and housing totals targets have been scrapped, and according to hints and whispers passed down to us by the government.  We’ll be consulting on these policies later in the year, and hopefully what we do will be supported by future government planning legislation.  We do of course still want houses built in Hastings, but on appropriate sites and of an appropriate size and density, and making sure that we protect open space.  The trick is to get planning policies that suit our town, while still allowing developers to build the kind of homes we need.  That’s never easy, but we’ll do all we can to achieve it.

Peter Chowney
Lead member, Planning & Regeneration