Around the houses... again!

Swindon is still attracting thousands of new workers from throughout the world and they must all live somewhere. BARRIE HUDSON explores the issues.

PEOPLE who breathed a sigh of relief when the Swindon's Front Garden and not their own neighbourhoods was ear-marked for development may be in for a shock.

The recently-released first draft of the Swindon Local Plan 2011 reveals that the Swindon area must find room for 7,500 new homes within the next nine years.

Planning experts expect that up to 4,500 of those will be swallowed up by the Front Garden the large tract of countryside bounded by the existing southern boundary of Swindon to the North and the M4 to the South.

But that leaves 3,000 extra homes, and they have all got to go somewhere.

Therefore, Swindon and many of the communities surrounding it can brace themselves for a repeat of the scenes played out four years ago when a list of possible sites for new development was drawn up to accommodate the last round of planned building.

Then the locations considered, apart from the Front Garden, included Wootton Bassett, Kings-down, the Lydiards, further sites to the West of Swindon, further sites to the North of the town, and a proposed development called Earlsgate to the East.

In each case, people living in the affected areas protested vigorously against extra development there, claiming that new housing would damage their quality of life.

Eventually, after a drawn out and often bitter process of public consultation, the Front Garden was selected.

People living nearby were so outraged that some came together as the Front Garden Action Group, whose protests culminated in an unsuccessful and expensive High Court battle to prevent the council from having its way.

The action group cited every-thing from impracticality to the disturbance of a colony of great crested newts as reasons why the plan should not go ahead.

Aside from expanding outlying communities where unavoidable, there is an ongoing policy in Swin-don of using so-called brownfield sites land and even buildings which have fallen into disuse and are suitable for turning into housing.

Decisions about how much new housing each part of the country should be expected to provide are taken at Central Government level.

Officials make those decisions on the basis of factors such as the state of the local economy, the number of workers migrating to the area, and the density of its existing accommodation.

More than a decade ago the Government of the day ordered that Wiltshire provide 67,000 new homes between 1991 and 2011.

Swindon's share was set at 23,000 there were about 80,000 existing homes in the area at the time.

Later Government planning guidance for Wiltshire as a whole suggested that the county should provide an average of 3,000 new homes a year between 1996 and 2016.

The latest Wiltshire Structure Plan, currently in preparation, will give a detailed breakdown of projected development and growth in the county until 2016. The latest Swindon Local Plan takes these factors into account, along with the specific Government guidance for the Swindon area.

Swindon Council has a specialist team in charge of translating planning guidance into practical reality, headed by Nick Fenwick, the head of environmental health and development, and local policy team leader Richard Bell.

Mr Fenwick said: "The situation that we have with policy is that we must make sure there is a continuous supply of housing that is set out in the guidance we have got."

The department feels it will meet its target for 2011 but Mr Fenwick added: "We can't force developers to build, so in many respects we are governed by the market.

"One of the things that came out of the last Wiltshire Structure Plan was that, because of the property crash of the early 1990s, build rates at the time were not particularly high."

However, with the current boom, in which house values in the Swindon area are thought by experts to be rising at the rate of up to £50 a day, times are changing.

And even taking into account the downturn in the global communications market which has cost thousands of jobs in and around the town, Swindon is home to more than 30 company headquarters and the figure seems likely to rise.

Taking all these factors into account, the provision of new housing is vital, say the planners.

The Government has identified the Swindon area as what it terms a Principal Urban Area, and says a high proportion of new building should be directed toward such areas.

Asked whether Swindon Council had any particular site in mind for the development of the rest of the area's housing share, both Mr Fenwick and Mr Bell stressed that no such decision had been made.

Mr Fenwick said: "The local plan is opening up the consideration of any suitable site that can sustain that capacity.

"It is something we have to do, and we have to make these decisions."

Mr Bell said sustainability the providing of an infrastructure of workplaces, shops and leisure services was a key factor in deciding on any location.

Mr Fenwick added: "When people think about growth, they immediately think about housing, but we have to factor in the employment sites as well.

"In Swindon, we have to look at the larger sites for the major companies, but there again we have to work medium-sized and smaller businesses into the equation as well."

The draft local plan has already been studied by the council's cabinet, and went before the full council last night.

Later, it will be made available for full public inspection and comment.

Almost before the ink was dry on the document, it provoked controversy in Wootton Bassett, with local and North Wiltshire District Councillor Peter Doyle complaining that too little attention was paid to the needs and views of his constituency when deciding on possible expansion strategies for Swindon.

He said: "Communities must be able to decide whether they wish to be included in this particular process, as it may determine whether they are eventually moved to fall within the boundary of Swindon borough.

"I have no democratic mandate to support the inclusion of my constituency in the Swindon urban area quite the reverse, in fact."