HUHNE COMPLAINS TO COMMUNITIES MINISTER ON SDA

Eastleigh MP Chris Huhne has lodged a formal complaint with the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears on plans for 6,000 homes north east of Hedge End.

Mr Huhne says that the South East plan, which includes a Strategic Development Area on green fields north of Botley, has been improperly adopted because the public were not consulted.

Mr Huhne said: "The law states clearly that the public are meant to be consulted, but many of those people most affected by this decision were not notified at all because they did not receive the literature sent out by Hampshire County Council.

"Moreover, those that did receive the special edition of Hampshire Now were hardly any the wiser, because the plans were described so vaguely that many local residents had no idea where the new houses would be built."

Mr Huhne said that he hoped that the Communities Secretary would think again on the plan, which would otherwise be vulnerable to a legal challenge by a judge reviewing the minister's decisions.

The full letter is as follows:

I am writing to make a formal complaint to you about the consultation arrangements prior to the adoption of the South East plan in general and the proposal for a Strategic Development Area (SDA) north and north east of Hedge End in Hampshire in particular, as I believe the consultation to be at variance with the legal requirements and as such to be an obstacle to the adoption of the plan. If there were a judicial review of the process of decision-making, I believe that a judge would rule that the process was so flawed that it should begin again. I hope therefore that you will consider this option now.

A large number of my constituents in Botley and Boorley Green are extremely upset at what they perceive - rightly in my view - to be the lack of consultation over a potential development that could be far more serious in its local implications than a neighbour's porch extension. Yet ironically, they will have received no specific, individually addressed notice (as they would for a nearby planning application) and in many cases they received no notice whatsoever since even a general outline of the proposals was not delivered to them. This is in stark contrast to the legal requirements set out for the adoption of the plan. In this letter, I set out a) the legal requirement and b) the evidence that these requirements were not met in the case of the South East Plan in general and the SDA north and north east of Hedge End in particular.

Let me start with the requirements, which are stated in Planning Policy Statement 11, Regional Spatial Strategies, published by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2004. Paragraph 2.17: "It is essential that the public is able to be involved throughout the RSS revision process and this should include broad public consultation rather than relying on targeted consultation with particular groups." In paragraph 2.18, it makes clear that the "pre-submission consultation statement" required under Regulation 13 must "not restrict itself to how consultation has been carried but goes further and summarises how the RPB has engaged stakeholders and the wider public in the preparation of the revision on a basis of active participation. It is essential that this pre-submission participation is not viewed as a one-off and fixed period of consultation on an early draft of the revision. Rather it is a more continuous process of proactive involvement as explained above".

The Regional Planning Body is required under section 4 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to seek the advice of bodies with strategic planning expertise when preparing, keeping under review and monitoring the implementation of a revision of the regional special strategy, defined in section 4(4) of the Act as a county council, metropolitan district council, National Park Authority or a district council for an area for which there is no county council. I assume that the RPB did indeed seek the advice of the relevant authority in the case of Botley and Boorley Green - Hampshire County Council - and that is the reason why HCC seems to have been charged with overseeing what consultation there was. I would be grateful to know whether there was any formal arrangement between the RPB and HCC to handle the consultation, and which body bears the responsibility for what failed to happen.

I now turn to the facts of the inadequate consultation. The "South Hampshire sub-regional strategy, Background document 3, Statement of Consultation", published by the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire in December 2005 of which Hampshire County Council is the only relevant section 4 (4) member, gives both the procedure followed and the results of the consultation on the SDA. Paragraph 2.2 states: "The options for the three sub-areas of Hampshire - North Hampshire, South Hampshire and Central Hampshire and the New Forest - were set in a single document called "Where shall we live"…This was targeted at stakeholders. In addition, a special edition of the county council's residents magazine 'Hampshire Now', exclusively dealing with this topic, was distributed to home across the county council's area".

The edition of 'Hampshire Now' was partly distributed with free newspapers, and failed to reach the homes of many residents including those living in the area most affected by the proposal, namely Boorley Green and Botley. Should you require, I can arrange to deposit with you affidavits from residents in the most affected area - who will be surrounded by new estates if the proposal goes ahead - who testify that they never received the document. The minutes of Eastleigh Borough Council, a participant in PUSH but not a section 4(4) council under the Act, state for the full council meeting of 2nd October 2008: "There is significant evidence that many residents in the rural part of the borough failed to receive regional assembly and county council consultation material during the formative states of the South East Plan ahead of the Examination in Public".

It is also important to note that, even if a local resident received the edition of 'Hampshire Now', they would have had a very general reference so that a specific response about the siting of the SDA would have been impossible. This was admitted in a letter dated 25th November to a member of the local action group from Hampshire County Council (the relevant section 4(4) council) which states: "The county council would agree that sufficient detail and information should be provided in any consultation, but this has to be subject to information availability. At the time of the 2005 consultation, the SDA proposal had not been developed by PUSH (Partnership for Urban South Hampshire, which includes all three section 4 (4) councils in the area: Portsmouth, Southampton and Hampshire) in any greater detail than being 'to the north/north east of Hedge End' so it was not possible to be more specific than this in the consultation documents".

In sum, the consultation process on the South East Plan, at least as it affected my constituents, was clearly not as is required under the Planning Policy Statement 11 issued under the relevant Act, namely the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. The flawed process of consultation - involving both a failure to contact those with a legitimate interest in the decisions, and a failure to set out the proposals with enough detail to make a meaningful comment - must now involve scrapping the conclusions and starting again. I look forward to your comments and your response, and trust that you will see the need to put this consultation on a sound footing.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Huhne MP

(Eastleigh constituency, including Boorley Green and Botley)