PROJECT REPORT: SOCIAL & AFFORDABLE HOUSING
perhaps wouldn’t have if it were a “lesser scheme.”
“Because it was such a high quality eco-scheme, they were very strict with us, causing a lot of frustration,” Pritchett continues. “First, they took away our permitted development rights – which nearly lost us sales – and then they began drilling down into a lot more of the design than is typical.”
The MD believes this pressure caused the team to rush through the planning process in order to meet the unexpected extra demands. As a result of this, he says, there were some missing elements of the project in the early design that needed amending; mostly small changes such as slight window repositioning. One large omission however, was that the solar panels to be installed on the roofs hadn’t been explicitly shown at the reserved matters application stage.
Greencore put in an application for ‘non-material amendments’ to fix these issues, which, at first, the planners agreed to. After eight weeks through the process, however, “when they were just about to approve it,” says Pritchett, “they suddenly pulled the rug out from under our feet and said – ‘the key effect of the changes is material, and therefore you’ve got to withdraw this application and submit it as an Action 73 Application.’” “We wasted two months in that process,” he complains, “and then we spent another 13 trying to get the Section 73 approved.”
This produced a sequence of bizarre scenarios, where “busloads of councils, local MPs, reporters and more were coming round to say, ‘this is the way to build houses going forward,’” and all the while the team was installing the solar panels that were being celebrated – without yet having permission. “It was a nightmare, we nearly lost the sale of all the affordable houses to this,” he adds. “It was a great example of how the planning process is not fit for delivering eco houses for the future – it’s really set up for delivering more of the same rather than something different.”
Time for change Moving forward, Pritchett is glad that the project has been so well regarded, but he argues that, if the country is to meet its 2050 Carbon targets, there has got to be “serious movement in policy.” As well as removing some of the planning barriers the company has faced
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at Springfield Meadows, he argues that there should in fact be financial incentives for building better. He suggests, for example, that the Community Infrastructure Levy should be variable, with cost savings for building above the Building Regulations in terms of sustainability.
As an example of success in the past
here, he notes the “generous” early subsidies for solar panels, and the “highly lucrative” feed-in tariffs at its inception, which once paid significantly more than at present for any remaining electricity from solar panels sent back to the grid. “The policies around PVs have shown
that, within a 10 year period of growth in the market – during which we saw massive uptake and vastly reduced manufacturing and installation costs – you no longer need huge subsidies.”
Whatever the Government does next, however, Pritchett is proud to have “set an example of how development could be done in the future.”
“There are still three million new houses planned by the Government over the next 10-15 years,” he says. “If everything was built using a system like ours, you’d save about 600 million tonnes
of CO2 emissions – on the pathway to zero carbon by 2050, big numbers like that can’t be ignored.”
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
“If everything was built using a system like ours, you’d save about 600
million tonnes of CO2 emissions”
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