Officers warn of financial and reputational consequences if council taken to judicial review over request to Angela Rayner to pull out of adopted joint development plan
Oldham councillors have voted to pull out of its adopted joint development plan with eight other Greater Manchester local authorities.
Oldham Borough Council has voted to be removed from Places for Everyone (PfE), due to concerns the plan would lead to the loss of green belt sites in order to enable a housing strategy “focused solely on developer profit”. The vote means the council’s leaders are now required to write to housing secretary Angela Rayner to formally request Oldham’s removal from the strategy. A report by officers warned that the housing secretary has never been asked to revoke a newly-adopted local or joint plan before.
The motion to withdraw, not supported by the council’s Labour leadership, which runs the council as a minority administration, narrowly passed, with 30 council members voting to leave and 29 voting to stay part of PfE.
Howard Sykes, a Liberal democrat councillor pushing for withdrawal, said that he had faith that Oldham Council could deliver a local housing strategy on its own, rather than losing “precious green spaces in pursuit of unaffordable housing that will price out local people”.
However speaking in the meeting, deputy council leader Elaine Taylor stated that if Oldham Council were to withdraw from PfE “we would be required to meet the new nationally set local housing need requirement in full and straightaway”. This would result in the authority’s new mandatory housing target going up by 54% from 680 to 1049 new homes per year.
Taylor noted: “I do understand that people feel strongly about releasing green belt land for development and that as a local authority we don’t just have a professional planning responsibility, we have a moral obligation to maximise the use of all available brownfield land”.
She added that the council is only releasing enough green belt land to meet its housing requirements. However, she said “if our housing numbers were to increase we would have no option but to significantly expand the amounts of green belt land for development purposes”. She stated that without the protection of an up-to-date local plan like PfE, the borough will struggle to defend itself against housing applications on green belt land.
In its report, the council stated that none of the concerns about PfE provide sufficient justification for requesting that the housing secretary remove Oldham from the plan.
The report indicated that if the decision were challenged at judicial review, it would be considered “legally perverse and unreasonable”, making the reasons for the revocation request unreasonable.
It said: “Members have been advised that there are financial consequences for losing a judicial review and there will be reputational consequences if the deicision proceeds to write to the secretary of state.”
The plan, which was agreed to designate land for 115,000 new homes over the next 15 years, was signed off in March of this year. Under the current plan, Oldham is expected to build 11,560 homes by 2039.
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