Squeezed Out: The Kleptogarchy part 24

Posted: September 12, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Land ownership, Low-impact living, Planning | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Squeezed Out

Farmland in Eastern England in 2021 cost about £8,410 an acre and in South East England £8,390 an acre, according to the agents Savills. Great Britain’s cheapest farmland was on average £5,460 an acre in Wales, where companies are now eyeing upland farms for tree planting as potential carbon sinks. Savills commented that “Investment in farmland is seen as a hedge against increasing inflation and we may see investors looking to diversify their portfolios with agricultural assets.”[1] Large productive farms in the UK sell for millions of pounds, one of their attractions being the easy exemption from Inheritance Tax at 40%. Within the UK, Europe, North America and across the industrialised world, most people live in cities. The rural population in the UK, for example, all those living in countryside areas and not just farmers, was 16% in 2018, and in the USA 17%.[2] In a locally provisioned world, a revival of small farms is surely essential.

Local authorities in the UK used to provide small ‘county farms’ for new entrants, but most of this land has been sold off as councils struggled to make ends meet. The acreage of county farms in England halved in the 40 years to 2018, an investigation by Who Owns England has found:[3]

“County Farms are farms owned by Local Authorities and let out to young and first-time farmers, sometimes at below-market rents. They’re a vital ‘first rung on the farming ladder’ for newcomers to a sector that has high up-front capital costs: by providing the land and buildings, the public sector is helping get fresh blood into an industry where the average age of farmers is 60.

“Yet the acreage of County Farms across England has plummeted from 426,695 acres in 1977 to just 215,155 acres in 2017.”

The investigation explained that:

“The origins of County Farms lie in the late-Victorian agricultural depression, during which widespread cries for land reform led radical Liberal MP Joseph Chamberlain to stand for election on the promise of “three acres and a cow” for landless tenant farmers. He went on to propose a solution whereby councils would buy up land and lease it out to small tenant farmers on cheap rents. A succession of government Acts in 1892, 1908 and 1925 created County Farms, sometimes called County Smallholdings.”

It all went wrong in the 1980s:

“Fundamentally, the problem is central government cuts to local authority budgets. …the period of decline has coincided with the era of privatisation, cuts and centralisation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s, and accelerated under the austerity budgets of the Coalition and current government.”

The county farm entry road has become a narrow path indeed.

In Wales, a planning policy called One Planet Development allows people who own or buy land to build a home on it, subject to strict conditions. It is popular with applicants but less so with councillors sitting on planning committees. Here is an example from Carmarthenshire, dating from 2016.

Alwyn B Nixon, Planning Inspector, allowed on appeal a mini eco-hamlet of four homes on 21.5 acres at Rhiw Las, Abbey Road, Whitland. The original planning application, from Rhiw Las Ltd’s Dr Erica Thompson, was submitted under Wales’ One Planet policy for sustainable development in the countryside. Her application was refused by Carmarthenshire County Council’s planning committee, who went against the advice of planning officers. There was an extra sting in the tail for the planning committee – Erica Thompson reported that the council was required to pay the full costs of the appeal.

One Planet policy allows new land-based live-and-work enterprises in the countryside provided that detailed rules are followed. The guiding principle is to use very small amounts of finite resources, and to rely on renewable resources which planet Earth can continuously provide.

The reasons that councillors gave for rejecting Rhiw Las Ltd’s application included their personal opinions that occupants would fail to make a sufficient living, that they could live elsewhere and work on the land during the day, that it would encourage similar applications, and that it was too far from a village. Committee members then asked the planning department to come up with valid reasons for rejecting the plan. In the end, planning officers extracted three policies from the 2014 Carmarthenshire Local Development Plan and applied them to the One Planet policy in such a way as to make it very unlikely that any One Planet application for a rural location could ever be approved in the county.

At the behest of the critical councillors, planning officers suggested that the proposed site, 3.5 miles from Whitland and 2.2 miles from Llanboidy, was inadequately served by an integrated transport network catering for pedestrians, cyclists and public-transport users, and so conflicted with policy ‘GP1’ of the Local Development Plan. They said there was also a conflict with policy ‘TR2’, because the site was too remote from public transport, and was accessed from a road which lacked a pedestrian pathway. They also cited policy ‘TR3’, requiring public transport to be accessible.

Erica Thompson lost no time in appealing against the refusal, and she was vindicated when the appeal was allowed.

Alwyn B Nixon said in his decision: “It is clear that there is some scepticism amongst local community representatives as to the feasibility of the proposals; also a concern that such development will fail to integrate with the wider community. However, I find that the proposals are supported by a detailed development programme which fully meets the specific requirements laid out in Welsh Government guidance for their consideration of land-based OPD (One Planet Development) in the countryside.”

In response to councillors’ concerns over accessibility and public transport, the inspector concluded that “the development would be acceptably located as regards as regards its accessibility to local facilities and the availability of alternatives for sustainable travel options” and “it accords with the provisions of the development plan, so far as material to the development concerned, in this respect”.

Mr Nixon continued: “I am aware that some opponents of the proposal feel it unfair that development of this kind can be permitted in the countryside, whilst strict controls apply to the location of other housing. Ultimately, however, determination of the acceptability of this proposal rests on an objective consideration of its own planning merits, assessed in the context of the One Planet Development policy”.

Erica Thompson and husband Chris Vernon had formidable intellectual resources to draw on during their battle with the council’s planning committee. Erica, a PhD in physics, is Senior Policy Fellow in the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chris, with a glaciology PhD, is a climate scientist and an engineer. If they are convinced of the urgent need to live differently, why is there still so much resistance? Tess Delaney experienced this resistance. She tried to start a One Planet Development in Pembrokeshire. She failed to convince the planning authority, a tale related in her book NOPD. Pete Linnell, buildings and energy sustainability consultant, wrote an appendix in which he commented (p.181):

“Legal remedy is only available to those with spare resources which can be put at great risk by court action. Consequently, those with limited means do not have access to all the options available to secure an OPD consent in the face of determined local opposition.”

Pete Linnell’s analysis also questioned the lack of seriousness with which the planning authority and then the planning inspector treated the management plan prepared by Ms Delaney as a central part of her application. He quoted (p.187) the inspector’s report as stating that:

“Appellant has produced the Management Plan herself, and I cannot rely on the information in it unless it is backed by clear evidence to support the various assertions made. In this respect the Management Plan is deficient in a number or elements.”

Yet the inspector also said:

“Some planting and growing has already taken place in 2018 and 2019, and the Appellant has used the results of these trials to help make projections of future production levels at the end of a 5-year period.”

Somewhat contradictory statements? True, Tess Delaney was not a professional horticulturist, but that is not a condition of receiving planning permission under the One Planet Development scheme.

Tess was defeated. Local authorities have vastly more resources at their disposal than the average resident like Tess. Elsewhere, I have seen expensive resources like lawyers used to silence critics whose assertions were regarded by officialdom as untrue. Protection of the institution (and thus of themselves) has been more important to some senior officials than the rights of wronged or ignored individuals. As a rule of thumb, the greater the wrong, the stronger the effort to deny it!

If we apply this rejection tendency to climate change, we see that people whose current lives depend on fossil fuels, on synthetic chemicals and other heavily carbon-emitting industries, on long-haul transport and tourism and the suchlike, are unlikely to be in the vanguard of any movement towards a zero carbon world.

In Wales, vociferous opponents of OPD remain. They find change an uncomfortable concept, and they include many with a tendency to downplay the dangers of global heating, to prefer sheep and cattle farming over the horticultural basis of many OPDs, and to assume that Life As We Have Known It can continue far into the future.

[1] The Farmland Market, Savills, January 2022, p.6.

[2] Data from the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS, accessed March 31st 2022.

[3] ‘How the Extent of County Farms has Halved in Forty Years’, by Guy Shrubsole for Who Owns England, June 8th 2018. https://whoownsengland.org/2018/06/08/how-the-extent-of-county-farms-has-halved-in-40-years/, accessed March 31st 2022.

Mammoth Landholdings: The Kleptogarchy part 23

Posted: September 10, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Land ownership, Planning, Social inequality | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Mammoth Landholdings

The 20 largest landowners[1] in the UK own more than 11% of the entire land area. Just the top five possess over 8%. They are the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence, the Crown Estate, the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The major private landowner in 2018 was the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, with over a quarter of a million acres, but the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen may have caught him up. Mr Povlsen, owner of clothing chain Bestseller and the largest shareholder in fashion company ASOS, is a dedicated rewilder and acquires land to return it to its natural state. There are eight individuals and family holdings in the largest 20, including five ancient dukedoms – Buccleuch and Queensberry, Atholl, Westminster, Cornwall and Beaufort.

Mammoth landholdings are built up through conquests, advantageous marriages, favourable laws, and deference among the landless classes, who are often fed the thought that if only they worked hard and achieved financial success, they too could join the landed gentry. Hard work is not inevitably the route to landed proprietorship. Financial riches accompany birth in or marriage into affluent families, luck in speculation, or genius in invention. Wealth brings land, homes, trust funds, and influence to protect ownership of these and other assets into the future. Social reformers or agitators, depending on your point of view, protested against the privatisation of the countryside, but with very little success. In the 19th century radicals like Herbert Spencer referred to the removal of land rights as a crime:

“It may by-and-by be perceived that equity utters dictates to which we have not yet listened; and men may then learn that to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth is to commit a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.”[2]

Spencer reasoned that access to land is an inalienable right, a viewpoint that most politicians of the time disregarded. And still do. Communist revolutions in the 20th century led to land nationalisations notably in the USSR, China and North Korea, but control lay not with the farm workers but with the government chain of command. The changes by and large did not benefit the rural proletariat. In China between 1958 and 1961 over 15 million died of starvation, perhaps up to 55 million. Stalin’s enforced collectivisation led to severe famine in Ukraine, where maybe four million died. Cuba collectivised too after the 1959 revolution, but private farmers were able to hold up to 160 acres each, and independent co-operatives involved all members in decision-making. This model would surely have achieved greater prosperity had it not been for the continuing embargo by the United States, starving the island nation of funds for investment.

While wholesale land nationalisation is unlikely to succeed because it is too dramatic, too divisive, there need to be routes into farming for newcomers whose families are not landowners. In the UK, now separated from the European Union, the exorbitant price of rural land is a steep barrier. Land is a tax shelter if it is farmed or has commercially managed woodland on it. Favourable tax treatment generally extends to the farmhouse too, and to cottages even if they are let, provided the letting business is subsidiary to the land-based activities.

The argument for exempting farmland from Inheritance Tax, particularly, is so that farmers can leave their acres and buildings to their legatees without also leaving a bill for up to 40% of everything above £325,000. While favourable to existing farmers, the policy does nothing immediate to encourage aspiring new entrants, whose problems are summarised by the Access to Land Network:

“New entrants in the UK face a range of problems in relation to land that are exacerbated by the UK’s highly priced and unregulated land market. Typically (although not always), the demand from new entrants is for smallholdings as entering on a small scale can allow an individual to test a business model and slowly build markets.

— Land prices prohibit new entrants from buying land

— The lack of a comprehensive land registry means it is difficult to identify owners

— Land in rural areas is often not advertised, so without family or community connections new entrants find it hard to access ‘word of mouth’ opportunities

— New entrants often start out on very small areas of land limiting the potential to earn a sustainable livelihood

— Smaller areas of land are often more expensive

— New entrants tend to look for land in their own locality, due to lack of funds to move, or dependency on alternative (or partner’s) incomes.

— Local authority land in rural areas is managed along very conservative lines so new entrants with alternative plans (organic, CSA, niche markets) are not taken seriously

— Lack of affordable housing in rural areas is a major issue for new entrants (indeed for farmers generally).[3]

Planning law in England, particularly, has a presumption against ‘development’ in the countryside. This presumption, combined with the chronic shortage of affordable homes, limits the creation of new farms. The restrictive regulations also work against farmers who want to retire but stay living on the land, because it is often a costly and complicated process to obtain permission to build a new home for the successor farmer. There used to be old farm buildings suitable for conversion, but few remain. They have been converted for alternative uses under official farm diversification policies.

[1] The compilation of landholdings is from a list drawn up by abcfinance.co.uk and cross-referenced. https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/who-owns-the-uk/, accessed January 27th 2022.

[2] ‘The Right to Use the Earth’ p.143 in Social Statics by Herbert Spencer, 1865, D Appleton & Co, New York.

[3] ‘The United Kingdom’ by Rachel Harries and Tom Carman, in Europe’s New Farmers, Access to Land Network, September 2018. https://www.accesstoland.eu/Access-to-land-for-new-entrants, accessed April 27th 2022.

Carmarthenshire Councillors Express Hostility to One Planet Developments

Posted: October 17, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Low-impact living, Planning | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Yes, there’s a climate emergency, agreed Carmarthenshire County Council in 2019.

The world is getting hotter, climates are increasingly unstable, and weather events are more intense, with severe repercussions for future food supplies.

But how concerned are individual councillors?

For many members of the Planning Committee, not much at all, to judge from their decision on October 14th to refuse, by nine votes to five, permission for a new One Planet Development (OPD) smallholding at Maes Digonedd, Penybanc, Llandeilo.

One Planet Development is the Welsh Government’s decade-old scheme for encouraging new smallholdings that confine their use of resources to the level that the Earth can continuously provide. Their greenhouse gas emissions must be ultra-low and ideally negative. The conditions stipulated are onerous, and if not achieved after five years, any new constructions on the site are at risk of removal.

Several members of the committee were hostile to the whole concept of One Planet Development. They included Plaid Cymru members, whose former party leader Leanne Wood is a green eco-socialist. Perhaps that is why she lost the leadership in 2018 to Adam Price, whose views are harder to categorise.

To an outside observer, the views of councillors representing rural areas often seem remarkably similar, regardless of party affiliation. They may see themselves as the guardians of the countryside in which they live, and while frequently happy to allow farm buildings to be converted into tourism accommodation, or for existing farmers to build a new house for a family member/ worker/ students, they may not be so keen on newcomers who want to depart from the traditional enterprises of beef, sheep and dairy and to try horticulture, or agroforestry – especially if, as One Planet Development allows, they plan a carbon-neutral dwelling.

The hostility to OPDs seem to stem from unfamiliarity with the detail of the policy, although it has been part of Wales planning law for a long time, and took shape under the Labour – Plaid Cymru coalition government of 2007-2011.

Maes Digonedd lies in the area of Manordeilo and Salem Community Council, which objects strongly to the OPD plan. The community council is upfront about wanting a moratorium to the policy because “large swathes of open countryside (including within National Parks) could be given over to OPDs if enough people wish to pursue them”. Residents have “no certainty or security about where OPDs may or may not be developed “, and “they could theoretically emerge on any suitable piece of land that is not specifically protected for conservation reasons”.  Manordeilo and Salem’s county councillor, Joseph Davies (Independent), sits on the county council’s planning committee and he proposed that the OPD application be refused, although it was supported by planning officers and by the consultants from Terra Perma Geo, the firm engaged by the council to evaluate the applicant’s management plan. Refusal was seconded by Cllr Gareth Thomas (Plaid Cymru, Hendy).

Stephen Morris, the applicant, intends to grow 17 different crops, to rewild part of the site, and to plant a forest garden. The details are in his management plan, which can be seen on the county council’s website under the number PL/00489. There would be a cob greenhouse, and a timber dwelling and farm building using local and reclaimed materials. Solar electricity and biomass would power the enterprise. Forty-three people wrote in support of the plan, while there were only nine objections.  

Cllr Davies felt he was just as qualified as the consultants to comment. He questioned whether the three acres could support a family of three, as proposed in the plan. He had nothing against the applicants working the land and living elsewhere, he said. He mentioned the allotments at Dinefwr Park and said he had not heard of anyone sleeping there. Hiking tours and music therapy, proposed as ancillary businesses, had nothing to do with land-based activity and should not be allowed, said Cllr Davies.

Cllr Gareth Thomas queried the independence of the consultants, as they had connections with OPDs. He thought that the applicant could live in Llandeilo and travel to the site daily. This was echoed by Cllr Jean Lewis (Plaid Cymru, Trelech), who did not understand why a dwelling would be needed for a smallholding growing crops. Neither did Cllr Carys Jones (Plaid Cymru, Llansteffan), who also wondered if the council had the time or expertise to monitor OPDs. Cllr Dorian Phillips (Plaid Cymru, Llanboidy) doubted whether the smallholding could provide enough income for a family of three, or more if the family expanded. Cllr Ken Howell (Plaid Cymru, Llangeler) said the site was too small, and he too worried that the consultants were biased – like giving the fox the key to the hen shed, he suggested.  

Cllr Kevin Madge (Labour, Garnant) wanted to approve the application, and so did Cllr Sue Allen (Independent, Whitland) and three others, but they were outvoted. Committee chair Cllr Alun Lenny (Plaid Cymru, Carmarthen Town South) tried to elicit from the objectors valid planning reasons for turning down the application, and in the end told Cllrs Davies and Thomas to email them – but Cllr Thomas said he could not do this as he was about to go on holiday.  Council solicitor Steve Murphy warned that refusal without valid reasons would probably lead to an appeal, and Cllr Madge said that if the council lost money because of a successful appeal, he would be very angry.

PDR, personal opinion

Revive a town without revitalising its rural hinterland? No way

Posted: May 4, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Low-impact living, Planning, Rural Economy | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Llandovery in Carmarthenshire is a victim of centralisation. Since the start of the millennium all the bank branches have closed, the Royal Mail sorting office shut, the county council decided to build a new comprehensive school 13 miles away and to transport the pupils there and back by bus. The Chamber of Commerce folded.

“How can we revive the town?” the county council wondered (after ignoring strong local opposition to its decision to close the senior school). Reports were commissioned. Recent ones include a ‘Llandovery Economic Growth Plan’ prepared by The Means, Llanelli, which appeared in draft in March 2021, and Severn Wye’s ‘Community Wealth Building in Llandovery’, which was finished the same month.

Reports must follow the brief drawn up by their commissioners, and so it is no surprise at all that they do not question the objective of economic growth. ‘Growth is good’ is conventional wisdom, after all.  

Severn Wye’s report includes interesting original research, including the finding that in the Llandovery area – defined as Llandovery, Llangadog, Cilycwm and Cynwyl Gaeo, covering the rural north-east of the county and with a combined population just over 7,450 — almost 40% of businesses are not looking to expand. This goes against the view that businesses are generally run by ambitious entrepreneurs who want to grow, grow, grow. Some do, but there are multiple reasons for setting up a business in a rural area, such as a means of earning enough money to live, or to augment a pension, or to provide more flexibility than a clock-on, clock-off job for those who have to combine work with caring.

Llandovery in its rural setting. The river Tywi flows north to south, and the Heart of Wales railway clips the western side of town. Photo from Google Earth

Over 90% of Carmarthenshire businesses have fewer than 10 employees, Severn Wye found. Their average turnover in the most recent reporting year was a little over £81,000 a year. In the Llandovery area, most businesses turned over less than £50,000. Not that there are a great many businesses within this area of 230 square miles: Severn Wye found 249, one for every 30 people.

Yet if you want to start a new rural business, unless it’s a tiny one run from your kitchen table, you have to grapple with planning regulations that preclude rural repopulation, or buildings for new rural enterprises, except for tightly defined exceptions in Wales such as One Planet Developments (OPDs) or Rural Enterprise Dwellings. The OPD policy, dating from 2010, allows a new dwelling in the countryside if it is the applicants’ only home, if their land can meet their minimum food, energy, income and waste treatment needs within five years, if there is a binding management plan, if all development is ultra-low carbon, and so on. Over the whole of Wales, only some four dozen individual smallholdings have received permission under the OPD regulations during the 10+ years of their existence.

Rural Enterprise Dwellings are also strictly controlled. The guidance document says:

“ Four specific circumstances are identified in TAN (Technical Advice Note) 6 relating to the provision of new rural enterprise dwellings:

· to meet the needs of established rural enterprises (including farms) where there is a functional need and a requirement for a full-time worker together with a prospect of long-term business financial sustainability;

 · to enable the transfer of control of farm enterprises to the next generation (second or further dwelling on a farm only);

· to meet the needs of additional workers on established farms where there is a functional need, and a requirement for an additional 0.5 or more of a full-time worker earning at least 50% of a farmworker’s salary (second or further dwelling on a farm only); and

· to meet the needs of new rural enterprises where there is a functional need and a requirement for a full-time worker.

(Welsh Government, Technical Advice Note 6, December 2011, section 2.13)

The final grounds for approval, referring to new rural enterprises, is difficult to meet because applicants cannot prove that their venture will be profitable. They must provide a full business plan, and even if the plan suggests a rosy outcome, any permission would normally be for a temporary dwelling, for three years only.

So it’s tough to persuade planners and planning committees to depart from the view that the countryside is a landscape to be protected from change, even if changes are desirable in the interests of soil improvement, habitat enrichment, crop diversification and enough people living in rural areas to support essential public services. Usually they cannot be persuaded, because they must follow the published Development Plan, which outside existing towns and villages mainly means No Development (unless a big developer comes along with promises to create dozens or hundreds of new jobs for the region).

The report from The Means is focused on Llandovery town, and suggests sustainable outdoor recreation, innovative events, a makers quarter for craft-persons, the re-establishment of Llandovery and District Chamber of Commerce (and/or the setting up of an Economic Growth Plan team), a cycling hub, digital hoardings and more, including a number of feasibility studies. The report’s authors see the surrounding countryside mainly as a tourism venue and possibly a source of renewable energy. They do not question the policy of ‘no rural development unless it’s BIG’ (they suggest £60,000 for a feasibility study into an outdoor adventure park). But then, they were justifiably sticking to the approved policies, and working within those.

Reviving a town, though, also means revitalising its hinterland, in the urgent contexts of reversing environmental damage amid an unstable climate, and of living simply and more harmoniously with the nature that is still around us. More opportunities for newcomers to live on the land should be part of our journey to a survivable future.

The Llandovery Economic Growth Plan, draft update March 2021, is from The Means and was commissioned by Carmarthenshire County Council. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dfb7aeaf844f40ff2c70391/t/6057eb81a79fe46cb99f64a0/1616374663453/CRTEGP_Llandovery_Draft+Economic+Growth+Plan+rev+9.pdf.

The Severn Wye report on Llandovery’s Community Wealth Building project took place from September 2020 to the end of March 2021. Severn Wye’s was one of 52 projects awarded funding by the Welsh Government’s Foundational Economy Challenge Fund and the organisation worked with partners: The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), The Bro Partnership and Liz Bickerton Consultancy. It aimed to explore a replicable community economic development model for small rural market towns and their hinterlands, recognising the contribution of and building on the foundational economy, with the potential to retain and recirculate that wealth in the community. https://severnwye.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Foundational-Economy-Llandovery-Final-Report-updated-chart.pdf.

See also A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje, published by Chelsea Green, 2020.

PDR

Wanted: Powerful Persuasion for One Planet Developments

Posted: March 15, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Agriculture, Low-impact living, Planning | Tags: , | Leave a comment

by PDR

One Planet Developments (OPDs) were a great idea of the Labour-Plaid governments in Wales between 2007 and 2011. The plan was to enable people of modest means to buy land at its agricultural value, then submit an application to live and work on it. The caveats were and are huge, a whole racecourse of high hurdles to clear before being allowed to do anything at all, in the interests of a way of living that is sustainable within the resources of our one, small, planet. That is surely a laudable and very necessary aim, given that the UK, including Wales, is consuming Earth’s resources at nearly four times the sustainable rate. (See www.footprintnetwork.org for much more information.)

In the decade since 2010, when the Welsh Government published the criteria for OPDs in Technical Advice Note (TAN) 6, around three dozen One Planet Developments have received planning permission. They are essentially smallholdings, and their total area is unlikely much to exceed that of a single 400-acre dairy farm. Yet despite their tiny footprint on the land of Wales, there is powerful opposition to them from multiple quarters: from within local authorities, from people living near application sites, from commentators who see incomers as threats to existing communities. The fuss is out of all proportion to their scale.

To succeed, people who sink their resources into an OPD have to work like Trojans, count everything – all their inputs, all their outputs – to set against their calculations in their initial mandatory Management Plan, build their own house while they work, generate their own power, improve the soil and raise its fertility. As well as subsistence crops, they need to make enough money from their land to pay essentials like council tax. If they don’t achieve the prescribed level of self-sufficiency within five years, their planning permission can be revoked.  

If people buy land, improve it, meet the conditions to build a home on it, but then experience a major change in circumstances, such as long-term debilitating illness or injury that prevents them from working on the land, then they can sell to someone else who is willing to take on the same restrictions. We live in a capitalist society where profit is the name of the game, so it shouldn’t be a shock if an OPD goes on sale at an open-market smallholding price. After all, the OPD is likely to be in countryside with great views, and a unique, highly energy efficient home.

Permission refused: the field near Meidrim, Carmarthenshire, where Neil Moyse and Kelly Mitchell wanted to start a One Planet market garden. Photo from Google Earth.

Under current conditions, the chances of the OPD experiment persisting for more than a generation seem slight. Smallholdings will be sold on the open market as their owners age, become infirm, or cannot produce the specified minimum of 65% of their basic needs from their land. There are no signs that it is becoming easier to obtain planning permission, in fact the opposite. In March 2021, Carmarthenshire County Council’s Planning Department refused permission to Neil Moyse and Kelly Mitchell, experienced gardeners, for an OPD market garden near Meidrim, west of Carmarthen, on land sloping down to the Afon Cynin and containing a pond. The reason for refusal included this:

“The proposal is not supported by sufficient information to demonstrate that the development would meet the One Planet Development criteria. Planning Policy Wales defines One Planet Development as development that, through its low impact, either enhances or does not significantly diminish environmental quality. The suitability of the site was questioned at pre-application stage and those concerns for the development of an OPD in this location are sustained. For this reason the proposal constitutes an unjustified form of development in a countryside location.”

All rather vague.  In fact and in contrast, Natural Resources Wales said: “We have no objection to the proposed development as submitted and provide the following advice” [listed in the consultation response]. The Planning Ecologist detailed work to be undertaken for the development to proceed. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Dai Davies, wrote:

“I have, over the last 15 years, served on various Welsh Government panels and boards concerned with economic development and regeneration. As a consequence I have developed a keen interest in localised supply chains and the principles of the foundation economy which is now being championed in government.

“I have known the two applicants for the last three years during which time they have helped and advised me on the creation of a woodland garden and wildflower meadow at my home. They are impressively knowledgeable and hard working and are already making a success of their niche horticultural business.”

There were several other letters of support, including from Somerset organic market gardening guru Charles Dowding. But there were also objections from local people worried about consequences such as possible traffic, construction of buildings on the site, and whether the applicant would run out of money, which in the end had greater influence over the decision. These worries could apply to virtually any development, and if they are going to win out, it means that new OPDs will be rarer than hens’ teeth.

If that happens, we lose valuable exemplars of how to live lightly on the land.

Less Now, or Nothing Later

Posted: November 25, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Energy, Low-impact living, Politics | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Is it really such a hard choice?

Consume less – or in future risk consuming nothing at all. The message is so unpalatable that politicians tend to deny it or bury it. Our whole economic system depends on larger and larger numbers, the adding up of the values of all transactions purportedly to show that economies are ‘growing’. No matter that serious consequences, the uncounted ‘externalities’, such as soil loss, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and  resource depletion, are excluded from the sums! (Although cleaning up polluted sites, rebuilding after floods and other disasters, the drugs trade and even prostitution are included as they can be counted or at least estimated in national accounts.)

New York, home to 8.4 million people, faces an underwater future — as do coastal cities around the world. Photo source: Unsplash

Only the reality of data demonstrating climate change, and of the terrifying experiences of those at the sharp end of weather disasters, forced reluctant governments to show they are doing ‘something’ to slow down – or apparently slow down – damaging emissions that are making the Earth’s climates hotter and therefore more unstable and unpredictable, and are melting ice so fast that coastal zones, where most people live, will often be under water.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that if every glacier melted, sea levels would rise about 230 feet. Goodbye London, New York, Kolkata, Shanghai and waterside cities, towns, villages and hamlets around the world. Clearly President Trump, aficionado of oceanside Florida, does not pay attention to USGS. Where will the displaced go? To where other people are already living, or more probably trying to subsist.

To stand any chance of avoiding the worst aspects of this scenario, we have to plan economic contraction in countries like UK. If we do not plan, the outcome is worse and economies crash anyway.

Paul Mobbs, author of the 2005 book Energy Beyond Oil, has concluded that we in affluent nations have been living beyond our energy resources for so long that we have to consume far, far less.  Nuclear won’t save us. Hydrogen won’t. Electricity generated from ‘renewables’ won’t.

Problem is that this prospect does not fit into the window frame of permissible thought.  That frame is very narrow.

As Paul Mobbs writes in ‘Britain’s Energy and Climate Crisis’ (fraw.org.uk/weird, issue 3 2020):

“For many trapped within consumer culture, this conclusion [to cut consumption] is dismissed as ‘negative’. It offers no hope of preserving the affluent modern lifestyle as part of solving climate change – which is why the popular political debate ignores this reality.”

The consequences of dramatic downshifting are colossal. Two new books and one older one reviewed on this site here, here and here, address aspects of the issue, especially the necessity to protect soils and farm in what we might call an old-fashioned way, using rotations, cover crops and enough livestock to supply manure.

Jobs in wholesaling and retailing, in road transport, customer services, in selling complex financial products, in tourism and hospitality, would be among those to shrink, given the declining amounts of energy available. What a shame that the UK, unlike Norway, squandered the revenues from North Sea Oil and did not build up a sovereign wealth fund to ease the transition to a post-consumer society.  

PDR

Energy Beyond Oil by Paul Mobbs was published by Matador in 2005, ISBN 1 905237 00 6

Entrenched Attitudes Slow Advance of Sustainable Living

Posted: October 11, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Low-impact living, Planning | Tags: | Leave a comment

Local planning authorities can present a huge barrier to social and ecological advancement when elected councillors on planning committees scour planning policies to find ‘reasons’ for rejecting sustainable living ventures.

This is an example from Carmarthenshire, Wales:

Impartiality in Carmarthenshire? Not for every Tom, Dick and Harry

Since 2009 the Wales Government has had a pioneer ‘One Planet’ policy to encourage rural enterprises which have ultra-low impact on the Earth’s non-renewable resources, but conservative (small c) councillors often struggle to appreciate the reasons for it — and that’s if they have heard about it at all!

Tipi Valley’s Wider Impact

Posted: September 19, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Low-impact living | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Pioneers of low-impact communities need to be resistant — especially to suspicion and hostility from their longer-established neighbours. This was the case in Carmarthenshire’s Tipi Valley, which the local authority tried to quash, but failed. The settlement now has a much wider impact, as this short extract from my book ‘Solving the Grim Equation‘ indicates:

Tipi Valley is not paradise – too cool and rainy – but people can live there quietly and with very little money. Tipi Valley is a Carmarthenshire low-impact village, founded in 1974 with no permission at all, and the subject of protracted battles with the planning authority, Carmarthenshire County Council. The community describes itself thus, on the alternative communities ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ website:

‘To be honest, we’re a bunch of hippies, some of us ‘originals’. Tipi Valley is high in the Welsh hills, on 200 acres that we have bought bit by bit over 35 years. Our oldest land has already reverted to temperate rainforest. The idea is that we are part of nature, living within nature. Thus all our homes are low-impact dwellings such as tipis, yurts, domes and thatched or turf-roofed round houses. We are a village, not a commune, and everyone is responsible for their own economy. We do not have regular business meetings, and we never vote. It works by consensus and personal relationships.”

Forty years on, Tipi Valley is no longer ‘separate’. Children who grew up in the valley often live more energy-intensive lives than their parents, but possess practical skills which set them apart from children who were raised in houses and who received a conventional, book-based education. They can also support themselves and their families in unpromising surroundings because they have experience of getting by on very little.

These Tipi Valley ‘graduates’ frequently live in houses themselves, but like to stay close to the valley. They are electricians, carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, growers, therapists, often more than one at a time. They socialise and they help each other out, and they are also a bridge between the valley and the surrounding communities. Their parents were much more often English middle-class rebels than Welsh country folk, but several now have a foot in both groups. The original ‘back to Nature’ purpose of Tipi Valley’s founders no longer guides many in the second and third generations, at least not so strongly, but as they integrate into other communities, they bring a rich range of different perspectives. If the founders had not battled for permission to stay, and had meekly left, the story of their experiences, including the capability to adapt to the environment, would be missing.

PDR

Culture Clash: Planning is for Profits not for People

Posted: July 21, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Planning | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

The exciting Lammas eco-hamlet project was eventually given planning permission by Pembrokeshire County Council under its pioneer Policy 52, a forerunner of One Wales One Planet, despite strong opposition from within the council itself. Lammas is a community creating nine low-impact smallholdings at Glandŵr, near the Pembrokeshire-Carmarthenshire boundary.

The Lammas founders, orchestrated by Tao Paul Wimbush, sought to make this a legitimate rural development by obtaining planning permission before construction, rather than going ahead and then seeking retrospective permission. The exhausting process revealed the chasms that exist between policy and practice, and highlighted the clashing frames of reference which planners must somehow align.

The planning system in England and Wales is currently mired in the 1950s, when the global context was entirely different. Local food production was perceived as of diminishing importance because cheap transport meant imports could be sourced easily. ‘The countryside’ was a collection of landscapes for rich people to live in and for poorer people to enjoy from a distance. As for the poorer people, new jobs in the bright technological future would result in each generation being more prosperous than the last, and these new middle classes would be car-dependent and live in spacious suburbs.

A wave of New Towns, including Basildon, Bracknell and Harlow, reflected the Utopian aspirations of the Labour governments of 1945-50 and 1950-51, led by Clement Atlee. The first section of the M1 London to Birmingham motorway opened in November 1959. Dr Richard Beeching came along in the 1960s and on his recommendation the rural railway network was largely abandoned. He thought the car would rule from then onwards. The UK was still a manufacturing nation, jobs were plentiful, and when oil from British fields in the North Sea started flowing in the early 1970s, how bright the future seemed. The Franco-British supersonic Concorde made its first commercial flight in January 1976. The fatal flaw of Concorde, the fatal flaw of the transnational industrial age, was profligate use of energy. Concorde’s engines burned 5,638 gallons of fuel per hour, or 56.38 gallons for every one of a capacity load of 100 passengers. Concorde was not sustainable, and was withdrawn from service in 2003, the final flight taking place on November 26th.

The England and Wales planning system, though, has remained in the 1950s, in a landscape of suburban estates, industrial ‘parks’ and town-centre bypasses.

Lammas’s founders suffered years of failing to convince Pembrokeshire’s planners and councillors of the legitimacy of their vision, because low-impact development was off the agenda when the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was assembled, and has never been properly recognised as a permissible land use. We are stuck with outdated conceptions of development which oppress today’s priorities for low-emission, low-energy, local lifestyles.

Battles over planning legislation since 1947 have focused on whether and how to tax the rise in land values following the granting of planning permission.  The 1947 Act in Labour Britain introduced a 100% charge on the rise in land value, but the Conservatives suspended it when they came to power in 1951 and abolished it in 1954, although public bodies were able to buy land at its existing use value until 1959. The 1966-70 Labour government created both a Land Commission to buy land required for the implementation of national, regional and local plans, and a ‘betterment levy’ of 40% on value uplift. The following Conservative government of 1970-74 abolished both. When Labour returned in 1974, they tried a ‘development land tax’ of 80%, which Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government of 1979-83 cut to 60%, before her second government did away with it in 1985. During the ‘New Labour’ interval between 1997 and 2010, a ‘planning gain supplement’ was mooted but the idea, vehemently opposed by developers, was dropped in 2007.

Since 1945 the big argument has been about taxing the financial gain conveyed by planning permission. The concept of land use for an ecologically balanced future is missing from the main legal framework.

The first gesture towards low-impact development was on the edge of the UK, in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. In June 2006 Pembrokeshire County Council and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority (the planning authority in the national park) adopted Policy 52, Supplementary Planning Guidance ‘Low Impact Development Making a Positive Contribution’.

Policy 52 applications must pass eight tests:

  • There must be environmental, social and/or economic contribution with public benefit.
  • All activities and structures must have low impact on the environment and low use of resources.
  • If there are buildings on the site, their re-use must have been investigated and incorporated wherever practical.
  • The project must be well integrated into the landscape and have no adverse visual effects.
  • The project must require a countryside location, must involve agriculture, forestry and/or horticulture, and be tied directly to the land on which it is located.
  • A sufficient livelihood for the residents on site must be provided.
  • The number of adult residents should be directly related to the demands of running the enterprise.
  • If the project involves members of more than one family, it must be managed and controlled by a trust, co-operative or other similar structure in which the occupiers have an interest.

The policy sets low-impact development firmly in a business frame. An appendix states that “if residents become unable to contribute to the proposal, due to age or illness, the Authorities will consider whether they can remain on the site”. This condition implies that a low-impact settlement is only for the hale and hearty, and primarily an enterprise, not a home or group of homes.

from ‘Solving the Grim Equation’, published in 2015 by Cambria Books, written by Pat Dodd Racher, pps 147-150. Planning policy 52 conveys an assumption that enterprise income is more important than family or group solidarity. Planning, generally, is about access to profit.

Outdated Concepts Dominate Planners’ Thinking

Posted: April 3, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Housing, Planning, Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, the classic 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, is probably even more relevant today — the mark of a great book. She emphasises that visual order is very different from functional order, a lesson which our planners and politicans have not heeded:

Housing Is Not A Single Issue!

PDR

 

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