LPCS IDP for Here for Hereford 12 May 2013
The Infrastructure Delivery Plan and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) Charging Schedule – Here for Hereford’s response to the recent consultation
Here for Hereford submitted extensive comments on the Council’s draft Local Plan Core Strategy . We also submitted a response to the Consultation on the CIL Charging Schedule. The following is a summary of our approach to this.
At the public meeting held on 23rd March 2013 in Breinton Village Hall, people were asked to complete a simple Infrastructure Delivery Plan Questionnaire, in addition to our Local Plan Core Strategy questionnaire, both of which were available on the Here for Hereford website. The questionnaire listed eight infrastructure projects involving: hospital provision, water capacity, sustainable transport measures, a Western Relief Road, high speed broadband, affordable housing, education in rural areas and county-wide library services.
People were asked to include up to two more projects and then rank them in importance, on a scale of 1-10. It was noted that, according to the Council’s Infrastructure Delivery Plan, members of the Cabinet had had their own preferences recorded (‘fundamental’, ‘critical’, ‘essential’ and so on) but, oddly, ‘fundamental’ was described as meaning it was thought to be needed immediately, including the proposed Western Relief Road which, not even the most blinkered optimist, could pretend would be built, if at all, much before 2031. The overwhelming favourite for funding as an infrastructure project amongst those completing the questionnaire was extra hospital capacity. The least important candidate for funding was the Western Relief Road. Additional proposals included the Eastern Spur / Rotherwas river crossing, and prioritising maintenance of the existing road infrastructure.
In the Council’s Infrastructure Delivery Plan, the total costings for all the infrastructure proposals amount to around a quarter of a billion pounds of expenditure, although nowhere is this spelt out in detail. Twelve infrastructure projects in Appendix 1 to this document have sums of money attached to them, but the balance (seventy-eight projects) have none. Only two of the costed projects (Destination Hereford and Broadband) benefit from public funding; the rest are dependent on unspecified amounts of ‘developer funding / CIL’. We have pointed out to the Council that the draft Local Plan Core Strategy risks being found to be unsound if the Plan continues to claim that the Western Relief Road is ‘fundamental’, and worthy of expenditure of between £120 mn and £140 mn in advance of spending money on other infrastructure projects. It is difficult to imagine where such large sums of money could be raised, particularly at the cost of other more socially useful projects. Local Plans need to be economically viable and, judging by the CIL Charging Schedule documents, this one for Herefordshire is not.
The Ward councillors present at the public meeting urged people to press for alterations to the draft Plan so that it would be acceptable to the Planning Inspectorate when submitted in the autumn of 2013. Here for Hereford noted in their response to the CIL Charging Schedule that Councillor Hamilton had promised to listen and learn from this 2013 final round of consultation and they hoped that he would do so.
