It is with mixed feelings (a mixture of joy and elation) that my wife and I contemplate the end of the home-school era tomorrow. As primary school children return to school I pay tribute to all the parents who have coped with a task far beyond the skillset of most of us; to the teachers who have valiantly taught simultaneously in school and remotely; and most of all to the kids themselves, who have endured months (years in child-time) of banishment from their friends under the regime of harassed parents.
My fortnightly call with the leadership of Wiltshire council and the local NHS was as encouraging as the national picture suggests. Covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths are all sharply down, and our local hospitals are now back in the ‘green zone’ of manageable demand. The leaders are concerned, however, about continued compliance with the rules as we step down progressively from lockdown. Now that the doors are finally, slowly, opening, we must not stampede for freedom, but form an orderly queue and progress out in good order.
Spring is gloriously here, and with the daffodils comes the perennial debate about badgers. I joined a call of rural MPs with the NFU this week to discuss the programme of experimental culls in a number of areas, including Wiltshire, to suppress bovine TB. The case for controlling the badger population is not as clear-cut as it is for the seagulls (see last week’s newsletter). But it does appear the programme has worked, with a substantial reduction in TB in the cull areas. On this basis no new culls will take place after 2022, and the focus will shift to vaccinating cattle instead. Apparently it will take till 2025 to develop the vaccine, however. Given recent success in superfast vax development I wonder if this can be accelerated.
I visited Parliament in person (rather than via zoom) this week for the first time since December, to ask the Prime Minister a question about Social Investment Tax Relief - a small but vital fiscal inducement to investors to back the sort of projects that struggle to attract commercial capital. He was encouraging in his reply and sure enough, half an hour later, the Chancellor’s budget confirmed that SITR will be extended. You can watch our exchange here. Overall, I was pleased with the Budget, especially the help for capital investments that will strengthen our industrial base. The hike in Corporation Tax is unpalatable, but the UK remains competitive in this area.
I mentioned last week my interest in rural housing and this week I had a number of meetings on this topic. CPRE (‘the Countryside Charity, formerly the Campaign to Protect Rural England’ as they describe themselves; I don’t know what the acronym stands for now, or which word in the former name they’re embarrassed about) are leading the good fight against unscrupulous developers. The problem with the current system is that if an area lacks an adequate pipeline of new housing (‘land supply’), developers are allowed to disregard the Neighbourhood Plans that communities have laboriously agreed, and plonk down new housing in the face of local objections. This is happening across Wiltshire - and yet we have plenty of new housing in the pipeline, in the form of planning permissions awarded to the self-same developers who nevertheless decline to actually build until house prices have risen to meet their profit targets. These ‘land banks’ do not count towards the land supply, which is madness.
We also have a problem with Neighbourhood Plans being obsolete if they are more than two years old; they take eighteen months to review and renew; and they can only be renewed if they substantially increase the number of proposed new houses. These surreal rules mean that to control its own expansion and protect its environment, a community has to undertake an endless, exhausting, Forth Bridge-style process of consultation and paperwork, all done by volunteers, and every two years they need to change (upwards) their projection for new housing. It is difficult to imagine a system more perfectly calculated to alienate rural people from the planning system.
These points were rammed home in a call I held with a dozen town and parish councillors and concerned residents, including the redoubtable Robert Hunt-Grubbe. The Hunt-Grubbes have farmed in Potterne since time out of mind. Like everyone else I speak to in the area, they want more housing, and more affordable housing, in their neighbourhood. They just want it to be consistent with existing settlements and for the community to have a meaningful say in where it goes and who gets to live there. I undertook to represent these points to ministers and to continue lobbying for a more sensitive planning system for rural areas.
I read in Chandler that Potterne, Hunt-Grubbe country, was once a vast prehistoric midden, an open landfill of human waste, animal carcasses and potsherds (which probably gave the place its name) covering three and half stinking hectares. I would like to understand the ancient planning system that awarded permission for this, and what the locals thought of it. In the 1830s a government report described the people here as ‘a very discontented and turbulent race’, and related that the local paupers had clubbed together to buy a legal handbook to help them confound the magistrates. That’s the sort of cussed contumacious contrariness we need to defeat the developers. Go Potterne!