Careful planning saves villages!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the investment in homes and new families that keeps our towns and villages alive when a local community considers planning as not a defensive task but instead a visionary opportunity. In response I heard from Cllr Ernest Mallett MBE, with a tale from his area. Ernest is a long-serving councillor in Surrey. The village he mentions is not named to avoid singling it out – many similar stories are being written up and down the country.

Ernest writes:

“Your article on saving a small towns/villages/schools has a first class example in Dibley (not its real name) in Surrey, which was once a thriving small village and is now a straggling village, still with buildings but few facilities at risk from departing businesses. I don’t actually know if it had a school, but some of the buildings look reminiscent of such.

Whilst the village is not exactly adjacent to the old airfield site which is the other side of the A3 and half a mile East, the residents have run a long campaign against redevelopment of the airfield for maybe as many as 3000 homes. The campaign is gradually continuing after Surrey County Council was wrongly influenced by many foreign signatures from visitors to the famous Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) gardens, who were led to believe that a central Surrey Waste Station on the site the other side of the A3 from RHS would destroy all the RHS planting.

Ever since Surrey more or less withdrew, except for an EU directive which allowed/called for a Composting Unit to operate on the site, the local, very rural, spread-out population have campaigned vigorously for no development. I was roundly criticised for describing the airfield site as ‘industrial’, in spite of the fact that virtually all of the previous massive war-time aircraft production, and civil airliners until recent times, made their first and only take-off from Brooklands Airfield to land at this airfield for final fitting.

Anyway, the effect of too small a population to maintain Dibley Village facilities has resulted in closure of most of the shops, some of the pubs and a continuing decline of the few restaurants and even the quite well-visited buildings specialising in certain antiques.  The village has long needed development of the airfield to provide population demand for its economic survival. This has been viciously rejected until now; it is only the outlying countryside residents who display ‘NO AIRFIELD DEVELOPMENT’ notices. With the present mobile way of life, housing on the airfield may be too late to restore the economic viability of Dibley village.”

Now not every village or town has a brownfield site nearby. However many will face closure of key local facilities without careful planning of sensible growth. New homes means new families – and new pupils for schools and new shoppers for local businesses. Neighbourhood Plans and Local Plans need to consider the benefits for local facilities of planned new family homes before decline leads to closures.