New Hartley Planning Decision, Council That ‘Can’t Pay its Bills’ according to the Tory Leader wants
New Hartley Planning Decision, Council That ‘Can’t Pay its Bills’ Wants Council Tax Payers to Pick up the Pieces. On 24th May 2017 Councillor Peter Jackson announced to the tax payers of Northumberland that the County Council is “A Council struggling to pay its bills”. At its meeting on 5th July Northumberland County Council Conservative Group considered a motion and withdrew the Northumberland Local Plan Core Strategy from Government deciding instead to carry out a review of some aspects of the document. Labour Party Councillors objected to the withdrawal lodging their objections and linking the withdrawal to the opening of a housing free for all, noting that the Conservatives were quickly becoming the ‘agents of the developers’. Labour Group Leader Councillor Grant Davey said that “the loss of protection of the emerging core strategy will remove the protection from unwanted house building for towns and villages across the County.” Councillor Allan Hepple reminded the meeting how many years of consultation and meetings it had taken to get the strategy ready for inspection. The Tories won the vote and withdrew the strategy from Government inspection, hailing its withdrawal as a success. Since then the Tories have shown they are only interested in protecting Ponteland and Hexham from additional housing as they have accepted applications for thousands of new build homes on green spaces across the south east and rural coalfield areas of Northumberland, including hundreds in Bedlington and Ashington. A planning application that had been accepted for refusal at New Hartley was called in for appeal against its refusal to a planning inspector by a developer. Prior to making his decision to grant permission and load costs onto Northumberland’s taxpayers, the planning inspector wrote to Northumberland County Council and asked a number of questions to ensure that the Council were not relying on a withdrawn core strategy to argue that the village of New Hartley who’s residents and Councillor Susan Dungworth argued correctly should not be subject to a planning application which will increase the population of their village by 45% and put pressure on its very fragile infrastructure. A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Northumberland Conservatives have proven that the withdrawal of the core strategy from inspection by Government has been a costly mistake for residents of the County and the Tory Leaders manifesto promise that he would ‘halt the march of the developers’ is simply political rhetoric without substance”.
Embarrassing letter received from the Planning Inspectorate below.
