Lisa Nandy MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities announced ‘We need more housing!’.
Housing built in Cornwall, rarely affordable for local people on local wages, has served to accommodate the affluent pockets of inward migration, second homers and holiday lets. Also the further impact of ‘Buy to Leave’ properties has seen Cornish housing bought-up by investors, then left unoccupied until they appreciate, to be sold at some later date.
Cornish writer Natasha Carthew, whose books include Winter Damage, Only the Ocean, The Light is Lost, All Rivers Run Free and the latest Under Current, has written extensively about homelessness and poverty in Cornwall.
Cornwall’s ‘Devolution Deal’ and the ‘Local Plan’
Cornwall’s councillors, MPs and local pressure groups, have supported more devolution in Cornwall, specifically over housing and planning.
In 2015, the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, chose Cornwall for a ‘Devolution Deal’.
However, the devolution package was limited. While significant areas of public spending, notably transport and local investment, were to be handed to Cornwall Council, the key areas over which Cornwall Council had sought jurisdiction (specifically housing and planning) were pointedly left out of the deal.
Cornwall’s ‘Local Plan’ was formally adopted in November 2016 to ‘provide a positive and flexible planning policy framework for Cornwall up to 2030.’
Cornwall’s Social and Economic Research Group published an earlier document that identified the ‘Local Plan’ as flawed approach: top-down and developer-led, pointing out the fundamental flaw of the Local Plan stems from the fact that it is a misnomer. It is neither ‘Local’, nor is it a ‘Plan’:
‘First, despite lip service paid by central government to ‘Localism’, this is a top-down and not a bottom-up strategy. It is imposed by the central state and willingly being delivered by its local agents. Moreover, the Council has not properly consulted those who ought to be the principal stakeholders in its plan – the people of Cornwall’.
Second, ‘to plan’ implies identifying an appropriate end to which planning instruments are then applied. It is unclear from this strategy what the ends are. The ‘Local Plan’ claims it will deliver a ‘sustainable community strategy’ and ‘manage future development to ensure all communities in Cornwall have an appropriate balance of jobs, services, facilities and homes’. This ill-defined and inchoate ‘vision’ leaves out all reference to those other communities that the strategy benefits. These include the externally based community of developers and construction companies, the internal community of landlords, estate agents, solicitors, architects and others who profit from house building, not to mention those communities currently living outside Cornwall but who will benefit from moving to Cornwall, either permanently or temporarily.
The ‘Local Plan’ merely legitimates the population and housing-led growth we have suffered since the 1960s. It fails to establish the longer term consequences of this approach – that it locks us into unsustainable housing growth that will produce a resident population of at least 850,000 by 2100 and that a large proportion of the building is aimed at expanding the second home/holiday let sector. It fails to assess the success or failure of this policy in the light of our experience of the past 50 years. It fails to confront the fact that in Cornwall we have to build over more of our countryside in relation to population growth than elsewhere in the British Isles.
If the ‘Local Plan’ and its central policy of business-as-usual housing and population-led growth is inherently unsustainable environmentally, it has long been pointed out that it is unsustainable culturally. Mass in-migration since the 1960s, combined with a net out-migration of the native population, has steadily reduced the proportion of native Cornish in the population from somewhere near 80% in the 1950s to around 40% nowadays. While the Council masks the unsustainable environmental consequences of its plan in a rhetoric of greenwash, its attitude towards the Cornish question is, shamefully, to ignore it entirely’.
The fundamental flaws in the ‘Local Plan’ as pointed out by CoSERG, have since proven to be correct. In 2022, an article in The Guardian ‘Everyone wants a piece of Cornwall‘ highlighted:
‘Cornwall has 12,776 second homes and more than 11,000 holiday lets, while 21,817 people were on its housing register this week’.
The Conservatives ‘House Planning Policy Framework‘ of further imposed housing targets set above Cornwall’s already flawed ‘Local Plan’ . Recently, and due to a 60 backbench rebellion, the Conservative government agreed to water down housing targets for local councils.
However, the Labour Party has now declared its intention to re-impose those housing targets.
Cornish Parliament within the UK
More housing in Cornwall without devolution over housing and planning, will exacerbate the current situation where homeless local people outnumber second home owners and holiday lets.
In April 2023, a further ‘devolution deal’ proposed by Government in the form of a directly elected ‘Mayor’. Through a public consultation the deal was rejected. Concerns included of lack of transparency and too much power invested in one individual. Also, the deal included funding that was tied to accepting the proposal, which was considered by some as ‘blackmail’. The funding amounted to £360m over 30 years, falling far short of the funding Cornwall received prior to leaving the EU; funding which MPs assured Cornwall would receive post-Brexit.
At a Full Council meeting on 18th April, councillor Dick Cole and leader of Cornwall’s political party Mebyon Kernow, proposed a motion seeking greater devolution for Cornwall. The motion argued that Cornwall merited parity with Wales and Scotland in terms of devolution and sought to “commence negotiations for a proper devolution settlement similar to those enjoyed in the other Celtic parts of the UK (such as a National Assembly of Cornwall or Cornish Parliament).
The motion was lost by 38 votes to 36. Supporters included all MK, The Green Party, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, plus all members of the Independent Group – bar one – and three Conservatives. It was opposed by 35 Tories, one “Conservative aligned independent,” one non-aligned independent and the one member of the Independent Group.
Councillor Cole has highlighted past ‘devolution deals’ from Westminster amounted to nothing more than tweaks to local government.
Labour leader Keir Starmer, promises he will “devolve sweeping powers to local communities”. A promise that falls way below the Full Council motion of a ‘National Assembly of Cornwall or Cornish Parliament’ that received cross-party support – on a council with a Tory majority.
A devolved Cornish Parliament within the UK, with primary legislation over policies such as housing and planning, free of any interference or input from Westminster, is real devolution.
Mebyon Kernow the Party for Cornwall, that campaigns for greater devolution, has set out its proposals the document ‘Towards A Cornish Parliament‘ including policies ‘Cornish Housing Policy Framework’ to replace the Government’s ‘Nation Planning Policy Framework’, that would allow policies and targets to be agreed locally, without interference from Whitehall. Planning decisions would be taken by local councils and any appeal process would then be controlled by the Parliament – so that planning inspectors from Bristol can no longer over-rule the views of local communities and their elected representatives.
Professor Philip Paton ‘Cornwall: A History”
‘The failure to devolve housing and planning meant that Cornwall would remain powerless to address what by the second decade of the twenty-first century had become the greatest threat to its future—a developer-led growth strategy which promised ever more houses and a spiralling population. More than a quarter of a century after the publication of the influential Cornwall at the Crossroads in 1988 had demonstrated the deleterious consequences of such a strategy, it had returned with a vengeance. In fact, it had never really gone away, with developers continuing to argue that more houses and more people would stimulate the faltering Cornish economy.
The evidence was to the contrary, of course, as Bernard Deacon explained in his The land’s end: The Great Sale of Cornwall, published by the Cornish Social and Economic Research Group in 2013. But this did not prevent developers pushing forward ambitious plans that would see tens of thousands of new houses built across Cornwall in the next two decades. Although there would be allowance for ‘affordable’ [sic] homes, the vast construction programme was not aimed at local needs. Indeed, it was anticipated that a growing housing stock would encourage growing levels of in-migration, which in turn would fuel demand for yet more development.
As more and more Cornish countryside disappeared under concrete, brick and mortar, and as ever greater strain was placed on the provision of basic services such as schools and GP surgeries, observers were entitled to ask where it would all end?”
Without a devolved Cornish Parliament with primary legislation, there can be no end.
CORNOVIA 