Who Runs This Town? Communities Vs Developers

Grace L

One year after taking charge of Hastings Council many of our local councillors look ready to throw in the towel. Residents turned up to the 9 June meeting of the council cabinet (the leading members of council) to demand answers about the old Bathing Pool site and Sandrock Bends – two incredibly unpopular proposed developments on plots of land that are currently publicly-owned green space. Developers want to build expensive private housing that will destroy these local amenity spaces and cause environmental damage, but with no gain for our community – and councillors seem to feel powerless to stop them.

Our local MP likes to claim this building frenzy is all for the benefit of people struggling to buy or rent a secure home. But seriously. We all know the drill now with these developments and we’re fed up of it. Developers get planning permission that includes a small amount of ‘affordable’ housing only to withdraw the affordable homes once the building work has started because they suddenly announce it’s not ‘viable’. This is why the Station Plaza development for example, will now have no affordable homes.

Some of them don’t even bother with the pretence anymore. The new flats on West Hill Road won’t have any affordable homes because they are not ‘viable’ without massive stabilisation works to stop them falling off the cliff. Wonder who will pay for the impact of that in the future if the developers cut corners?

Local developers, Roost (the scourge of this town who already make millions out of renting substandard ‘temporary housing’ to the council on a nightly basis) has just got planning permission to convert Gensing Manor into 20 private flats without including one single affordable unit, because they also claim it would make the project ‘unviable’ (ie. a little less profitable). The council must have a big heart to have bought that sob story.

How is it viable for our council to keep spending fully HALF of the town’s ENTIRE budget on expensive temporary housing due to a lack of affordable homes, but continue approving developments that will do absolutely nothing to meet that housing need? How many of the luxury apartments built on the Bathing Pool site will just become holiday lets or second homes?

Campaigners challenged councillors about why they don’t use the council’s Local Plan (a legal document they are about to publish which determines what kind of development is allowed in every part of the town) to protect green spaces and public amenities and insist on the affordable, sustainable housing we need. The responses were not encouraging. Councillors appealed for understanding that the Local Plan is incredibly complicated and that they are bound by government targets for housebuilding – regardless of where, or what kind of housing, that is.

So it turns out that winning elections and taking control of a local council doesn’t mean you actually have much power at all.

The government is in the process of pushing through new legislation – the Planning and Infrastructure Bill – which will make things even worse. If it is passed into law then planning applications won’t even be voted on by councillors anymore, instead they’ll just be automatically approved by council officers if they fit with the Local Plan. A myriad of environmental restrictions are being dumped and developers will be allowed to destroy whatever habitat they like in exchange for a fee (that they will just factor into their build costs). It’s clear that the government has decided that ‘economic growth’ (read short-term private profits) is more important than affordable secure homes, nature, community spaces or the future of our living world. It’s a pretty grim reality for those of us without money, power or influence. 

Of course our local councillors don’t have much power in all this. But they could do much more to use what power they do have, to try to stand up to the government and developers. There are many, many of us who would stand with them if they did. So I’m not trying to garner sympathy for politicians. If you are elected to represent, that’s your first, middle and last responsibility, and if that means creating a Local Plan that developers and the government don’t like, then do it, and prepare to fight for it.

But it’s an important reminder. The whole planning system, the whole political system, is rigged against us. We don’t need politicians who will try to manage a crap system, we need politicians who will try to fight it. And if they can’t or won’t – we need to look to our own strengths. If our community doesn’t want a development to go ahead, then we need to make it so unpopular, so expensive and so extended for the developers that they regret trying to get planning permission in the first place!

For developers time is money. We need to let them know before they start investing that every bulldozer will be blocked and that every tree will have a campaigner tied to it. If they think they can take our council to court to bully their way into overturning democratic planning decisions, then they need to anticipate how every one of their directors will respond to being publicly shamed about the impact this has on our small town’s budget.

Campaigners are planning a ‘Protestival’ on the bathing pool site on Sunday 13 July. A chance to reclaim a community space for some fun – food, music, kids games – but also for the serious business of building grassroots coalitions to stand up for ourselves. When it’s communities Vs Developers, we need to stop trying to play them at their game, and instead fight them on our own terms! It’s time we set the developers and the politicians straight on who should really run this town.

To get involved contact housingrebellion@protonmail.com