Parish council urges South Warwickshire MPs to help with local plan challenge
Hatton Parish Council has contacted South Warwickshire MPs asking them to help their constituents in their challenge against the Local Plan for the area.
The South Warwickshire Local Plan, being formed by Warwick District Council (WDC) and Stratford-on-Avon District Council, includes 12 potential new settlement sites for housing including land in Hatton as one of its ‘preferred options’.
At a meeting of the parish council in January, which had an “unprecedented public attendance”, residents expressed their concerns about the inclusion of the land in the plan.
Parish council chairman Councillor Martin Le Tocq then sent an email to WDC’s chief executive Chris Elliott in which he said: “If this were to progress to the adopted plan it would mean the complete urbanisation of our parish.”
Councillor Le Tocq has now written to MPs Matt Western (Labour, Warwick and Leamington), Sir Jeremy Wright (Conservative, Kenilworth and Southam) and Manuela Perteghella (Liberal Democrat, Stratford-upon-Avon) to raise the issue with them.
In the letter, Cllr Le Tocq has raised concerns about the method used to calculate the allocation of new houses to the area, which would increase the current number of households in South Warwickshire from 121,629 by 54,450 or 44.7 per cent.
He has said: “I understand that this figure has been reached by a fairly crude method of calculation based largely on current house prices, and it is not surprising therefore that it should result in anomalies such as this.
"As our elected representatives, may I request that you transcend your political differences and collectively
address the following request to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government?
"The revised Standard method of Calculation has resulted in the imposition of 54,450 houses (plus employment land and infrastructure) on the districts of South Warwickshire.
“This represents an increase of 44.7 per cent on its present housing stock.
"It appears that the method has no process by which anomalous outcomes such as this are capped.
“This is clearly disproportionate and unreasonable.
"Such over-development would have a profoundly detrimental and irreversible effect on our constituencies.
“We therefore ask that this allocation be re-examined and revised.”