A
Anonymous
Guest
A statement by SAVE Britain’s Heritage to the Inquiry into the proposed Compulsory Purchase Order affecting the “Red Earth Triangle” in Darwen, Lancashire
1. I am Adam Wilkinson, Secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage. I hold an MA in Mediaeval History and Russian Language and a MSc in Historic Conservation from Oxford Brookes and Oxford University. I also am a director of Maintain our Heritage, a member of the Churches Conservation Trust conservation advisory committee, a trustee of the Monuments and Mausolea Trust and sit on the Council of Europa Nostra, the pan-European federation of heritage organisations.
2. SAVE Britain’s Heritage is an independent charity that campaigns for threatened historic buildings and areas across the UK.
3. SAVE’s interest in the fate of Northern towns and cities dates back to the early 1980s when we published a series of reports on Northern towns and their heritage, and put on the exhibition “Satanic Mills” looking at the heritage of the northern mill towns.
4. Over the last two years we have become especially involved with local groups in Pathfinder areas, supporting them whilst gaining a broad understanding of the Housing Market Renewal Initiative’s aims and varying methods.
5. SAVE has recently published “Pathfinder”, an investigation into the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. This report takes a critical looks at the Housing Market Renewal Initiative and includes a series of case studies including the Red Earth Triangle. The report calls for a moratorium on the demolition of up to 168,000 pre-1919 terraced houses on a series of grounds, from improvements in the housing market through to a failure to properly investigate the alternatives to demolition. It is difficult to see how in a capitalist economy the State could ever interfere with the operation of otherwise free housing market. A copy of the report is annexed to this statement.
6. Our attention was first drawn to the Red Earth Triangle by concerned local residents in the summer of 2004. In spite of our clearly stated interest in the area, and communication with the local authority, the Pathfinder body, Elevate East Lancashire, and the Government Officer for the Northwest, at no stage were we informed of the timing of this Public Inquiry. For this reason I apologise for the rather hasty appearance of this evidence.
7. Article 6(1) of the European Convention requires that equality of arms be secured in respect of the hearing into whether or not a person’s home be taken against his or her will. That obligation also binds the inspector. It is not enough for him or her to give mere “leeway” to lay objectors. There is a gross inequality of arms in this “regeneration” process, both in the creation of proposals for a clearance area and in this particular forum – the local authority has at its disposal a level of expertise and funding not available to local residents, whether individually or en masse. There can be no doubt that the residents were unfamiliar with the planning process, even less so with the complex legal and factual in and outs of the (many) Housing Acts, which can be very confusing even for lawyers, let alone lay people. A responsible local authority ought, in such a situation, offer a community group financial support for the hearing into its acquisition of individual’s home which it most often is otherwise unable to afford. There is no legal aid for inquiries other than exceptionally. SAVE is not aware of any support being offered by the local authority.
8. In the question of demolitions on the scale proposed for the Red Earth Triangle, the key point is whether the loss of good historic buildings and their attendant communities is balanced out by wider gains for the community that would result from the demolition. This was clearly summarised by the Inspector in the recent CPO inquiries in Whitefield, Nelson. The community in and around the Red Earth Triangle has nothing whatsoever to gain from the demolition of their homes.
9. Consequently it is virtually impossible to discuss historic areas such as the Red Earth Triangle separately from the local community. The community brings the heritage to life and the buildings are, respectively, their heritage.
10. The Housing Market Renewal Programme does not require mass demolition of historic buildings. It can equally be used to help areas through careful repair and inspired leadership. SAVE holds that the Red Earth Triangle proposals have little to do with Housing Market Renewal and more to do with a scheme for a city academy. There is little evidence that the housing market in the area had actually failed before the emergence of the clearance proposals.
Heritage
11. Heritage is not confined to historic listed buildings but includes the built fabric and the community inhabiting it.
12. The threatened buildings are part of a mill workers’ estate dating from the 1870s and they adjoin a conservation area. The estate remains mostly intact, other than the loss of one of the churches. Such estates aimed to provide affordable housing for workers and their families, a function that they have carried out well ever since. A part of the estate is within a conservation area. There is little difference in the quality of buildings in the conservation area and those not in the conservation area but in the proposed clearance area. The majority are simple two-up two-down houses with small back yards, upgraded by their owners to meet the requirements of modern living. They were at the time of our first visit in 2004 lived in by a well established community, within walking distance of shops, schools and churches – in essence a model sustainable community.
13. Heritage forms an important part of the identity of Darwen and of the community. This is not necessarily the statutorily protected heritage, rather it is the wider heritage or Darwen as a historic mill town, with its mighty India Mill, and a pattern of housing that impart a clear sense of place, with views out to the hills beyond.
The abuse of the Housing Act
14. SAVE holds that this is a case of the wrong Act served on the wrong houses in the wrong manner for the wrong purposes.
15. The key points in relation to the Council’s failure to correctly execute the Housing Act are:
· The correct statutory test should be whether the houses are fit for “occupation” not “habitation”, which is a higher threshold. Instead the Council appears to have considered the fitness test against a wrong (and higher) threshold, at one point even citing the Decent Homes Standard. It follows that the statutory presumption of fitness is not discharged.
· The pro forma letter sent to residents reveals no fact and degree assessment of analysis of why a given house is not suitable for occupation by reference to the qualifying criteria. That means that the neither the Inspector nor objectors are able to know how or why a house is said to be unfit or why the Council thinks it so. It is not enough for the Council to say that criteria x applies to a house, because the statutory test requires the consequences on occupation of that particular criteria to be thought through.
· Section 289 (3)(a)(i) requires the Council exclude from the clearance area map any residential property that is not unfit – that is the statute removes from the order lands, by operation of law, properties fit for occupation.
16. The removal from the clearance area map of all the buildings that at the time of the survey were fit for occupation (not habitation) would reveal only a handful of unfit buildings remaining within the Order Land as “unfit”, not the 94% claimed. This figure is a gross exaggeration of the real situation. It also demonstrates the Council’s failure to act in accordance with the law required as the start point to any interference with another’s property or home.
17. Section 289 (2) makes it clear that demolition has to be the most satisfactory course of action. SAVE has seen no evidence to prove that this is the case – there has been no real discussion of the alternatives to demolition, such as improvement or adaptation of the existing houses, and as far we are aware this has never been presented as an option to residents.
18. It is clear that from the outset of the scheme there has been a proposal to erect a city academy on the Order lands, and that this proposal was withheld from residents. This in effect means that firstly, the key driver for the scheme is not the condition of the houses, rather the desire to create a development site suitable for the academy, and secondly, that the entire consultation process was a farce. This can do little for the credibility of the Council or confidence of the people in the system.
19. Section 604 of the Act, in relation to the condition of a house, assumes until proven otherwise that:
(a) It is structurally stable
(b) It is free from serious disrepair
(c) It is free from dampness prejudicial to the health of the occupants (if any)
(d) It has adequate provision for lighting heating and ventilation
(e) It has an adequate supply of wholesome water
(f) There are satisfactory facilities in the dwelling house for the preparation and cooking of food, including a sink with a satisfactory supply of hot and cold water
(g) It has a suitable located water closet for the exclusive use of the occupants (if any)
(h) It has, for the exclusive use of the occupants (if any) a suitable located fixed bath or shower and wash hand basin each of which is provided with a satisfactory supply of hot and cold water
(i) It has an effective system for the draining of foul, waste and surface water
20. SAVE strongly questions the ability of the (alleged qualified) surveyors employed by the Council to judge all of these points on the basis of a brief visual external inspection. Furthermore, we question the qualifications of these surveyors and of those interpreting the surveys. The surveys that we have seen appear to have been altered in places to “mark down” buildings to ensure that they did not meet the tests for unfitness.
21. The inspector is himself unable to make good deficiencies in the Council’s case otherwise than unfairly (and in breach of Article 6(1) fairness requirements including impartiality).
22. The question of the qualifications of the surveyors was brought up both by SAVE and by Mr. Brian Clancy in letters to the Council. There appears a real skills deficit within the Council for which the residents should not carry the demolition can. Residence evidence indicates the surveys were undertaken by unqualified students. It appears that the surveyors were not properly qualified to make a properly considered nor adequate assessment of the condition of the houses that could withstand scrutiny at an inquiry- yet the proposals for clearance are based on such alleged “surveys”.
23. Mr Clancy surveyed a number of houses in the order lands that had been deemed unfit by these surveys. Mr. Clancy is a highly qualified and highly reputable surveyor with extensive experience of dealing with historic buildings and structures. Following thorough surveys of these houses, he found that the to be in at worst fair and at best good condition.
The approach of the Council
24. The attitude of the leader of the Council to Mr. Clancy’s surveys, as outlined in her letter to me of 15th September, is without explanation, dismissive, and unbecoming of the leader of a democratically elected body, in whose hands the future of a community lies. This attitude pervades the entire scheme.
25. The attitude of the Council to the community throughout the process has been interesting. Mr Clancy relates in his letter to Mr Osman the bizarre story of his visit to one house, to find a Councillor seemingly purporting to be its owner. This sort of bullying is unacceptable. It appears that this bullying is not just confined to residents: the local MP was censored by her own party for speaking up in favour of residents whose homes were threatened.
26. Consultation of the community by the Council has fallen short of any lawful and meaningful standard. It has instead been ineffective. To our knowledge the Council has not produced any figures for the percentage of households that voted for demolition.
27. Indeed it is not clear that the demolition of the entire area was ever mentioned to residents as an option. The absence of survey justification may be the reason why not.
28. Meetings between the Council and representatives of the community (minuted by Natasha Lea Jones) confirm that the community was largely kept in the dark throughout the process of the development of the scheme – having asked what the exact figures were for the repair of the buildings vs demolition and rebuild, the community was told that these would be produced at a Public Inquiry. SAVE would be interested to know if the Inspector has been informed of these figures. Likewise they were told that evidence of subsidence would be produced at the Public Inquiry.
29. A further, and quite dreadful example of the complete lack of communication between the Council and the community is that the community had to ask what the criteria for a Section 289 notice were. Likewise, one of the reasons given for clearance of the area was subsidence through mining activities, yet the area has a live railway line travelling through it. Curiously, the subsidence appears to stop abruptly at the edge of the conservation area. Even more curiously, historic maps reveal no mining activities in the area
Abandonment and Market Failure
30. Aside from whether it is possible for the Government to lawfully or factually interfere with a free market outside of command economies such as the former USSR, the key motivation for the Housing Market Renewal Initiative is to (attempt) to solve economic and social issues surrounding market failure. In September 2004 there was little evidence of market failure, with two bedroom houses in the area fetching between £60,000 and £75,000. While this is a little below the average for the area, it is as far from tales of homes changing hands in a pub for £10 as could be imagined. Any market failure that has occurred since has in effect been engineered by the Council and the Pathfinder body through the scheme.
31. When SAVE first visited the area in 2004 there were at most ten empty houses, owned by the local authority. Abandonment has only really occurred since the proposals for clearance came to light. It could be argued that the abandonment of this historic area is not so much about people abandoning it as about the local authority abandoning it. The proper management of areas, historic or otherwise, is key to their market value. The CPRE’s research “Useless Old Homes?” found that the key problems were not the buildings but the social conditions that surround the homes – perceived crime levels, litter and so forth.
32. People leave an area such as this only when they feel that they have done all the can when confronted with a faceless and unaccountable system intent on the blighting and consequent destruction of their homes and heritage. We understand that the Council has already demolished some of the homes in the area that it owns. SAVE is concerned that actions such as this, while not materially affecting the question of fitness, unnecessarily create blight and threaten those still in the area.
33. The true picture appears as follows.
http://www.schmidtreport.co.uk/Subscribers/sub1.html
“Here’s a quick reminder to readers involved in property development that the tax incentives on any regeneration of brown-field sites mean that “qualifying land remediation expenditure” is eligible for up to 150% tax relief. In plain English if you spend £50K making previously developed land (a brown-field site) suitable for say housing _ and then build those houses – you can claim £75K tax relief. The relief exists because the government want to see new dwellings built on previously developed land. It is a fantastic method of boosting property profits"
Sustainability
34. The demolition of around 160 well built, structurally sound attractive stone houses built at a PPG3 compliant high density in an urban setting that can support public services and which contribute to the sense of place is also a blatant waste of scarce resources and embodied energy. Yet there have been no energy calculations to demonstrate the scale of the loss of this energy.
35. Whilst a key benefit to private market developers, it is also a waste of scarce public funding, which could be better spent on helping owners, where needed repair their historic homes, and where needed, knit the townscape back together. Economically the scheme makes little sense: to demolish a house of this sort, while salvaging its materials costs in the region of £15,000, and the cost of purchase, at market rates, should be at the very least £50,000. Thus the Council appears to be spending in the region of £10,000,000 to destroy a community, destroy 160 historic homes to create a development site. The cost of repair, at a generous £25,000 per building would be at most £4,000,000.
Summary
36. This scheme is:
· not about Housing Market Renewal,
· not about the condition of the houses,
· not about the proud heritage of Darwen,
· not about sustaining the local community.
37. It is about a Council imposing its will on the unwilling, and attempting to abuse the powers granted to it under the Housing Act.
38. Even in doing this, it has failed to follow the law, meaning that the presumption of fitness remains intact on the basic facts. A map of those fit for occupation could not constitute a clearance area map. We would draw the Inspector’s attention to the result of the Inquiry into the proposed compulsory purchase of homes in Whitefield, Lancs, in particular to the section on fitness.
39. It is SAVE’s experience that homes such as these can be easily repaired and areas such as this easily be given new life, such as with the Railway Village in Swindon. Demolition should always have been the last option for the Red Earth Triangle; instead it appears to have been the first. Less intrusive means of regeneration have been simply ignored in pursuit of brownfield profits at community expense.
40. SAVE urges the Inspector to throw out this unnecessary attempt to compulsorily purchase this historic area for clearance as part of a contrived effort on the part of the Council to create a town centre development site. There is no overwhelming public benefit in this scheme.
1. I am Adam Wilkinson, Secretary of SAVE Britain’s Heritage. I hold an MA in Mediaeval History and Russian Language and a MSc in Historic Conservation from Oxford Brookes and Oxford University. I also am a director of Maintain our Heritage, a member of the Churches Conservation Trust conservation advisory committee, a trustee of the Monuments and Mausolea Trust and sit on the Council of Europa Nostra, the pan-European federation of heritage organisations.
2. SAVE Britain’s Heritage is an independent charity that campaigns for threatened historic buildings and areas across the UK.
3. SAVE’s interest in the fate of Northern towns and cities dates back to the early 1980s when we published a series of reports on Northern towns and their heritage, and put on the exhibition “Satanic Mills” looking at the heritage of the northern mill towns.
4. Over the last two years we have become especially involved with local groups in Pathfinder areas, supporting them whilst gaining a broad understanding of the Housing Market Renewal Initiative’s aims and varying methods.
5. SAVE has recently published “Pathfinder”, an investigation into the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. This report takes a critical looks at the Housing Market Renewal Initiative and includes a series of case studies including the Red Earth Triangle. The report calls for a moratorium on the demolition of up to 168,000 pre-1919 terraced houses on a series of grounds, from improvements in the housing market through to a failure to properly investigate the alternatives to demolition. It is difficult to see how in a capitalist economy the State could ever interfere with the operation of otherwise free housing market. A copy of the report is annexed to this statement.
6. Our attention was first drawn to the Red Earth Triangle by concerned local residents in the summer of 2004. In spite of our clearly stated interest in the area, and communication with the local authority, the Pathfinder body, Elevate East Lancashire, and the Government Officer for the Northwest, at no stage were we informed of the timing of this Public Inquiry. For this reason I apologise for the rather hasty appearance of this evidence.
7. Article 6(1) of the European Convention requires that equality of arms be secured in respect of the hearing into whether or not a person’s home be taken against his or her will. That obligation also binds the inspector. It is not enough for him or her to give mere “leeway” to lay objectors. There is a gross inequality of arms in this “regeneration” process, both in the creation of proposals for a clearance area and in this particular forum – the local authority has at its disposal a level of expertise and funding not available to local residents, whether individually or en masse. There can be no doubt that the residents were unfamiliar with the planning process, even less so with the complex legal and factual in and outs of the (many) Housing Acts, which can be very confusing even for lawyers, let alone lay people. A responsible local authority ought, in such a situation, offer a community group financial support for the hearing into its acquisition of individual’s home which it most often is otherwise unable to afford. There is no legal aid for inquiries other than exceptionally. SAVE is not aware of any support being offered by the local authority.
8. In the question of demolitions on the scale proposed for the Red Earth Triangle, the key point is whether the loss of good historic buildings and their attendant communities is balanced out by wider gains for the community that would result from the demolition. This was clearly summarised by the Inspector in the recent CPO inquiries in Whitefield, Nelson. The community in and around the Red Earth Triangle has nothing whatsoever to gain from the demolition of their homes.
9. Consequently it is virtually impossible to discuss historic areas such as the Red Earth Triangle separately from the local community. The community brings the heritage to life and the buildings are, respectively, their heritage.
10. The Housing Market Renewal Programme does not require mass demolition of historic buildings. It can equally be used to help areas through careful repair and inspired leadership. SAVE holds that the Red Earth Triangle proposals have little to do with Housing Market Renewal and more to do with a scheme for a city academy. There is little evidence that the housing market in the area had actually failed before the emergence of the clearance proposals.
Heritage
11. Heritage is not confined to historic listed buildings but includes the built fabric and the community inhabiting it.
12. The threatened buildings are part of a mill workers’ estate dating from the 1870s and they adjoin a conservation area. The estate remains mostly intact, other than the loss of one of the churches. Such estates aimed to provide affordable housing for workers and their families, a function that they have carried out well ever since. A part of the estate is within a conservation area. There is little difference in the quality of buildings in the conservation area and those not in the conservation area but in the proposed clearance area. The majority are simple two-up two-down houses with small back yards, upgraded by their owners to meet the requirements of modern living. They were at the time of our first visit in 2004 lived in by a well established community, within walking distance of shops, schools and churches – in essence a model sustainable community.
13. Heritage forms an important part of the identity of Darwen and of the community. This is not necessarily the statutorily protected heritage, rather it is the wider heritage or Darwen as a historic mill town, with its mighty India Mill, and a pattern of housing that impart a clear sense of place, with views out to the hills beyond.
The abuse of the Housing Act
14. SAVE holds that this is a case of the wrong Act served on the wrong houses in the wrong manner for the wrong purposes.
15. The key points in relation to the Council’s failure to correctly execute the Housing Act are:
· The correct statutory test should be whether the houses are fit for “occupation” not “habitation”, which is a higher threshold. Instead the Council appears to have considered the fitness test against a wrong (and higher) threshold, at one point even citing the Decent Homes Standard. It follows that the statutory presumption of fitness is not discharged.
· The pro forma letter sent to residents reveals no fact and degree assessment of analysis of why a given house is not suitable for occupation by reference to the qualifying criteria. That means that the neither the Inspector nor objectors are able to know how or why a house is said to be unfit or why the Council thinks it so. It is not enough for the Council to say that criteria x applies to a house, because the statutory test requires the consequences on occupation of that particular criteria to be thought through.
· Section 289 (3)(a)(i) requires the Council exclude from the clearance area map any residential property that is not unfit – that is the statute removes from the order lands, by operation of law, properties fit for occupation.
16. The removal from the clearance area map of all the buildings that at the time of the survey were fit for occupation (not habitation) would reveal only a handful of unfit buildings remaining within the Order Land as “unfit”, not the 94% claimed. This figure is a gross exaggeration of the real situation. It also demonstrates the Council’s failure to act in accordance with the law required as the start point to any interference with another’s property or home.
17. Section 289 (2) makes it clear that demolition has to be the most satisfactory course of action. SAVE has seen no evidence to prove that this is the case – there has been no real discussion of the alternatives to demolition, such as improvement or adaptation of the existing houses, and as far we are aware this has never been presented as an option to residents.
18. It is clear that from the outset of the scheme there has been a proposal to erect a city academy on the Order lands, and that this proposal was withheld from residents. This in effect means that firstly, the key driver for the scheme is not the condition of the houses, rather the desire to create a development site suitable for the academy, and secondly, that the entire consultation process was a farce. This can do little for the credibility of the Council or confidence of the people in the system.
19. Section 604 of the Act, in relation to the condition of a house, assumes until proven otherwise that:
(a) It is structurally stable
(b) It is free from serious disrepair
(c) It is free from dampness prejudicial to the health of the occupants (if any)
(d) It has adequate provision for lighting heating and ventilation
(e) It has an adequate supply of wholesome water
(f) There are satisfactory facilities in the dwelling house for the preparation and cooking of food, including a sink with a satisfactory supply of hot and cold water
(g) It has a suitable located water closet for the exclusive use of the occupants (if any)
(h) It has, for the exclusive use of the occupants (if any) a suitable located fixed bath or shower and wash hand basin each of which is provided with a satisfactory supply of hot and cold water
(i) It has an effective system for the draining of foul, waste and surface water
20. SAVE strongly questions the ability of the (alleged qualified) surveyors employed by the Council to judge all of these points on the basis of a brief visual external inspection. Furthermore, we question the qualifications of these surveyors and of those interpreting the surveys. The surveys that we have seen appear to have been altered in places to “mark down” buildings to ensure that they did not meet the tests for unfitness.
21. The inspector is himself unable to make good deficiencies in the Council’s case otherwise than unfairly (and in breach of Article 6(1) fairness requirements including impartiality).
22. The question of the qualifications of the surveyors was brought up both by SAVE and by Mr. Brian Clancy in letters to the Council. There appears a real skills deficit within the Council for which the residents should not carry the demolition can. Residence evidence indicates the surveys were undertaken by unqualified students. It appears that the surveyors were not properly qualified to make a properly considered nor adequate assessment of the condition of the houses that could withstand scrutiny at an inquiry- yet the proposals for clearance are based on such alleged “surveys”.
23. Mr Clancy surveyed a number of houses in the order lands that had been deemed unfit by these surveys. Mr. Clancy is a highly qualified and highly reputable surveyor with extensive experience of dealing with historic buildings and structures. Following thorough surveys of these houses, he found that the to be in at worst fair and at best good condition.
The approach of the Council
24. The attitude of the leader of the Council to Mr. Clancy’s surveys, as outlined in her letter to me of 15th September, is without explanation, dismissive, and unbecoming of the leader of a democratically elected body, in whose hands the future of a community lies. This attitude pervades the entire scheme.
25. The attitude of the Council to the community throughout the process has been interesting. Mr Clancy relates in his letter to Mr Osman the bizarre story of his visit to one house, to find a Councillor seemingly purporting to be its owner. This sort of bullying is unacceptable. It appears that this bullying is not just confined to residents: the local MP was censored by her own party for speaking up in favour of residents whose homes were threatened.
26. Consultation of the community by the Council has fallen short of any lawful and meaningful standard. It has instead been ineffective. To our knowledge the Council has not produced any figures for the percentage of households that voted for demolition.
27. Indeed it is not clear that the demolition of the entire area was ever mentioned to residents as an option. The absence of survey justification may be the reason why not.
28. Meetings between the Council and representatives of the community (minuted by Natasha Lea Jones) confirm that the community was largely kept in the dark throughout the process of the development of the scheme – having asked what the exact figures were for the repair of the buildings vs demolition and rebuild, the community was told that these would be produced at a Public Inquiry. SAVE would be interested to know if the Inspector has been informed of these figures. Likewise they were told that evidence of subsidence would be produced at the Public Inquiry.
29. A further, and quite dreadful example of the complete lack of communication between the Council and the community is that the community had to ask what the criteria for a Section 289 notice were. Likewise, one of the reasons given for clearance of the area was subsidence through mining activities, yet the area has a live railway line travelling through it. Curiously, the subsidence appears to stop abruptly at the edge of the conservation area. Even more curiously, historic maps reveal no mining activities in the area
Abandonment and Market Failure
30. Aside from whether it is possible for the Government to lawfully or factually interfere with a free market outside of command economies such as the former USSR, the key motivation for the Housing Market Renewal Initiative is to (attempt) to solve economic and social issues surrounding market failure. In September 2004 there was little evidence of market failure, with two bedroom houses in the area fetching between £60,000 and £75,000. While this is a little below the average for the area, it is as far from tales of homes changing hands in a pub for £10 as could be imagined. Any market failure that has occurred since has in effect been engineered by the Council and the Pathfinder body through the scheme.
31. When SAVE first visited the area in 2004 there were at most ten empty houses, owned by the local authority. Abandonment has only really occurred since the proposals for clearance came to light. It could be argued that the abandonment of this historic area is not so much about people abandoning it as about the local authority abandoning it. The proper management of areas, historic or otherwise, is key to their market value. The CPRE’s research “Useless Old Homes?” found that the key problems were not the buildings but the social conditions that surround the homes – perceived crime levels, litter and so forth.
32. People leave an area such as this only when they feel that they have done all the can when confronted with a faceless and unaccountable system intent on the blighting and consequent destruction of their homes and heritage. We understand that the Council has already demolished some of the homes in the area that it owns. SAVE is concerned that actions such as this, while not materially affecting the question of fitness, unnecessarily create blight and threaten those still in the area.
33. The true picture appears as follows.
http://www.schmidtreport.co.uk/Subscribers/sub1.html
“Here’s a quick reminder to readers involved in property development that the tax incentives on any regeneration of brown-field sites mean that “qualifying land remediation expenditure” is eligible for up to 150% tax relief. In plain English if you spend £50K making previously developed land (a brown-field site) suitable for say housing _ and then build those houses – you can claim £75K tax relief. The relief exists because the government want to see new dwellings built on previously developed land. It is a fantastic method of boosting property profits"
Sustainability
34. The demolition of around 160 well built, structurally sound attractive stone houses built at a PPG3 compliant high density in an urban setting that can support public services and which contribute to the sense of place is also a blatant waste of scarce resources and embodied energy. Yet there have been no energy calculations to demonstrate the scale of the loss of this energy.
35. Whilst a key benefit to private market developers, it is also a waste of scarce public funding, which could be better spent on helping owners, where needed repair their historic homes, and where needed, knit the townscape back together. Economically the scheme makes little sense: to demolish a house of this sort, while salvaging its materials costs in the region of £15,000, and the cost of purchase, at market rates, should be at the very least £50,000. Thus the Council appears to be spending in the region of £10,000,000 to destroy a community, destroy 160 historic homes to create a development site. The cost of repair, at a generous £25,000 per building would be at most £4,000,000.
Summary
36. This scheme is:
· not about Housing Market Renewal,
· not about the condition of the houses,
· not about the proud heritage of Darwen,
· not about sustaining the local community.
37. It is about a Council imposing its will on the unwilling, and attempting to abuse the powers granted to it under the Housing Act.
38. Even in doing this, it has failed to follow the law, meaning that the presumption of fitness remains intact on the basic facts. A map of those fit for occupation could not constitute a clearance area map. We would draw the Inspector’s attention to the result of the Inquiry into the proposed compulsory purchase of homes in Whitefield, Lancs, in particular to the section on fitness.
39. It is SAVE’s experience that homes such as these can be easily repaired and areas such as this easily be given new life, such as with the Railway Village in Swindon. Demolition should always have been the last option for the Red Earth Triangle; instead it appears to have been the first. Less intrusive means of regeneration have been simply ignored in pursuit of brownfield profits at community expense.
40. SAVE urges the Inspector to throw out this unnecessary attempt to compulsorily purchase this historic area for clearance as part of a contrived effort on the part of the Council to create a town centre development site. There is no overwhelming public benefit in this scheme.