The Village News

by Tom Fort

  To my surprise I found that – far from being an arena of vacuous windbaggery – it was a quietly seething maelstrom of tensions and rivalries, fascinating to behold. The chairman at that time was in her late seventies, a woman of formidable energy and personality who had grown used to treating the council as her personal fiefdom and directing it to implementing her will. Her disposition was tyrannical and her demeanour towards anyone who dared challenge her – or even mildly question her wishes – was ferocious. The majority of the other members of the council were docile, and the clerk was no more than an instrument of the chairman’s purpose.

  She had so arranged matters that all decisions of any significance were taken by the General Purposes Committee, whose composition was carefully arranged by her and the clerk. These decisions were subsequently endorsed by the full council under standing orders that prohibited any discussion of the issues. In the context of democratic debate the monthly meetings of the council thus came to resemble those of the Politburo in Soviet Russia.

  Any attempt to raise an issue or voice a doubt as to what useful purpose was served by these charades would be met with impatient scorn by our chairman. But the grandmother of my elder daughter’s friend – let us call her Chrissie – was not one to be cowed by anyone. She raised questions and duly came to be hated by the chairman. A particular source of tension between them was Chrissie’s efforts to get modest funds from the council for her pet project, which was to enhance the centre of the village by restoring three neglected raised flowerbeds and planting them with pleasing blooms and shrubs. Our chairman hated spending council money except on her own pet projects and therefore hated Chrissie all the more.

  I was supposed to be Chrissie’s ally, but I confess that – certainly in the early days – I was somewhat intimidated by our chairman’s forceful personality and capacity for sudden outbursts of alarming rage. I once, rather timidly, raised the matter of the flowerbeds. ‘Don’t talk to me about those bloody beds,’ our chairman snapped at me, and to my shame I complied. She was then engaged in a disgraceful, but ultimately successful, manoeuvre to divest the council of responsibility for the village’s recreation ground, arguing that the cost of maintaining it and the clubhouse with it could not be afforded. She did not care about those who wanted to play football or cricket, and was obsessed with keeping down the precept – the minute proportion of the council tax that goes to parish councils – and increasing the financial reserves.

  Exceptions were made for her particular enthusiasms, chiefly children’s play areas and the welfare of the ducks on the pond. On one occasion it slipped out that a bill for £2500 had been nodded through the General Purpose Committee and the Finance Committee for a new structure on the pond for the ducks to sit on when they didn’t want to get their feet wet. Meanwhile the sports fields were relinquished into private ownership; I still feel ashamed that I was one of those who allowed this to happen without significant protest.

  Our chairman met her nemesis in the form of another, much more effective ally enlisted by Chrissie, a retired teacher abundantly equipped with the stomach for a fight. She tried to bully and silence him, but he would not be bullied or silenced. Unlike the rest of us, he took the trouble to study our standing orders and knew exactly where they were defective. Our meetings turned from rubber-stamping exercises into a succession of tense and enthralling battles for power. Time and again he disputed our chairman’s rulings, and time and again she lost her temper and failed to quell him. Like two beasts of the savannah they fought it out. But his strength was greater than hers, and gradually she lost her dominance over the pack. Her allies – chosen for their submissiveness – proved inadequate as open warfare broke out. Eventually, like the king of the lions, she was toppled.

  She resigned and a new chairman was chosen, ushering in a new era of comparative peace. For a while she circled around, roaring in an echo of her old majesty about our disgraceful profligacy. When election time came she attempted to stage a comeback. Contested parish council elections are not the norm (a more familiar problem being finding enough volunteers to fill the slots). But she persuaded enough of her supporters to stand to force a vote, then orchestrated a venomous leaflet campaign alleging every kind of malfeasance against the new council. But her day was done, and she finished at the bottom of the poll. She slunk off into the undergrowth and was hardly heard from again.

  In time her nemesis became chairman (as he is now). All the old divisions and enmities were forgotten. We became a team, working together for the good of the village. We acquired a new clerk, a retired businessman of strong personality and abundant energy, with an apparently inexhaustible capacity for mastering the intricacies of council responsibilities and getting them properly discharged.

  Instead of hoarding our reserves we began to spend them on village needs. We helped keep the library and the youth club open when they were threatened with closure by county council cuts. We had footpaths repaired and the allotments’ car park resurfaced. We paid for a weatherproof noticeboard recording the salient details of the history of the pond (I wrote the text!). We gave funds to the Village Gardeners, to the Scouts, to various other worthy bodies (although we were never able to get our sports ground back). Our formidable clerk now has an equally effective deputy; and we spent and are spending money on a scale that the old chairman would have viewed in the same way that the Popes of the sixteenth century viewed the heresies of Martin Luther.

  The personnel of the council has changed somewhat, but quite a few of the old faces remain. We are all friends now and our meetings are exercises in teamwork. I have no doubt that we are doing a better job for the village. But I confess that I sometimes look back to those epic tussles of old with something like nostalgia. I miss the drama. It’s all quite boring now.

  *

  In 2011 a piece of government legislation called the Localism Act came into force. Among its provisions was one that offered – or appeared to offer – the opportunity for villages to decide where new houses should be built, and what sort of houses they should be. The right to draw up what were to be called Neighbourhood Development Plans was presented as a way to appease or accommodate the growing sense of helplessness felt in many parts of the country by communities confronted with a developers’ land grab. People wanted to challenge, or at least to have their voice heard, as development companies pursued their ambition to exploit for their gain the unarguable need for more homes, and in doing so to take advantage of every conceivable fault line in the incoherent hotchpotch of regulations that constitutes our planning system.

  Sonning Common was one such community. Its location and road and rail connections made it a juicy target for developers. It was all the more alluring because its extreme ordinariness meant that it was free from those pettifogging conservation restrictions that in more picturesque regions so easily impede the turning of paddocks and fields into useful housing estates. Property and building companies were beginning to circle us like hyenas scenting a new kill. Applications were lodged to build on the east and west sides of the village; and although these were sturdily rejected by the local authority, South Oxfordshire District Council, it was obvious that these hungry predators were not going to be fobbed off indefinitely, or persuaded to go and hunt elsewhere.

  Knowing next to nothing about what would be involved, the parish council decided to venture boldly down the path of a Neighbourhood Development Plan for Sonning Common. Volunteers were sought, both from the council and the village as a whole, to form a working party. And, yes, I put up my hand.

  We went to work, full of noble aspiration but notably short of awareness as to what we were letting ourselves in for. Once the scale of the enterprise became slightly clearer several of the early enthusiasts dropped out. To guide us we hired a firm of consultants, experts in the field. They advised us, suggested pathways, drew up documents and came to a few of our meetings. Because of other commitments – that was my excuse – I was less engaged than others, and rarely had
a clear idea of what the consultants were on about. Even now I am unclear how much use they were.

  As time went on, the quantity of documentation produced from within our group, from the consultants, from those we recruited to survey potential development sites, from the district and county councils and various other more or less interested outside bodies grew to unmanageable proportions. Each new document was like a bale of hay added to a haystack that grew so vast it threatened to blot out the sun altogether.

  To give some idea of what I am talking about, before settling down to write this account of what turned out to be a four-year marathon I asked the member of our group who gallantly undertook most of the detailed number-crunching how much, in volume terms, it had all added up to. He said that in his NDP file he had stored 5.5 gigabytes of documents. These included maps, charts and photographs, but still amounted to a veritable mountain of words. He had 5000 NDP emails on file, and he calculated that he had given 4000 hours of his life to the project, excluding those spent at meetings.

  We did surveys, organised public meetings and exhibitions, put leaflets through hundreds of letterboxes, surveyed traffic, surveyed businesses, surveyed our heritage assets (the pond and Old Copse, so that was not too onerous). We held meetings for the residents affected by the sites chosen for housing, so that they could tell us that they accepted the need for new homes but please could they go somewhere else. We commissioned a report on wildlife that ran to many pages. We commissioned an expert on traffic management to tell us how the traffic might be better managed. We produced reports on recreation needs, housing needs, retail needs, health and education needs, power lines, environmental impacts, drainage, flooding, how to safeguard the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, demographics, landscape, sustainability and a host of other matters.

  In addition to the public meetings and the meetings with consultants, landowners, developers, the district council’s planning officers and even, occasionally, with our MP, we had a working party meeting most weeks at the home of one of our members. It is these I remember most vividly – not what happened, because I rarely had a firm mental grip on what was under discussion, but my own sensations. I felt like a man sinking into a swamp of verbiage, being sucked down into a bottomless pit by exchanges of opinion which – because of my ignorance and inattention – seemed to have had no beginning, to have no middle and to offer no hope of ever reaching an end.

  The proceedings reminded me vividly of attendance at church when I was at school. As the vicar inched his way through the Nicene Creed or busied himself interminably with the intricate preparations for the Communion, I would experience an intensity of boredom so acute that I would wonder how it could be that time could slow in such a way as to seem at risk of stopping altogether. Our NDP meetings began at 6.30 p.m. and at around 8 p.m. I would plead the pressing need to feed my daughters or help them with their homework or see my wife – anything to escape before I went under. And I would depart, shame yielding to relief; and I would hear later that the meeting had gone on for another ninety minutes or two hours.

  As month succeeded month and year succeeded year, we gradually discarded the high ideals with which we had started out. We had talked of remodelling the village centre, providing a new library, upgrading the village hall, promoting business opportunities, solving the parking problems. We had even indulged in dreams of social engineering, arresting the ageing of the demographics, opening arms to young families.

  But increasingly the focus narrowed to the issues involved in housing: how to divide the allocation imposed on us by the district council – originally 138 homes – between the sites we had approved, what kind of houses they should be, how they should be arranged and screened and landscaped. The one noble aspiration we clung to was that of securing land to provide the village with its own recreation ground and – one fine day – its own sports centre.

  It was necessary for us to have extensive dealings with various versions of that proverbially slippery customer, the developer. The role of the developer – who may or may not be the same as the company that actually builds the houses – is to find a way in which that unkempt, unnoticed paddock grazed by a couple of antique piebald nags or that field or that patch of scrubby woodland can become prime real estate worth millions. It is worth reminding yourself repeatedly when dealing with developers that this is what they do, and it is all they do. Their words are honeyed, their promises alluring, their methods sometimes unscrupulous, their objectives wholly determined by self-interest.

  At the start of the negotiating process they will tell you how delighted they are to have this opportunity of working with the village so that the village may rejoice in all the blessings that will arise from covering that paddock or those fields or that woodland with five-bedroom family houses. When the village – in our case, through the voice of our NDP working party – replies that what the village actually needs is two- and three-bedroom houses so that the sons and daughters of village residents might have a chance of living there, the developers smile their condescending smiles. May we remind you, they say patiently, that the district council already requires us to designate 40 per cent of the homes as ‘affordable’, to be handed over to the Housing Association. That, they imply, is their gift, their social conscience at work. But where is our profit to come from, they ask? And all this screening you want, and the open space, and the low density? You cannot be serious.

  Behind the smiles, we know what they are thinking. Amateurs, why must we deal with amateurs? The district council planning officers are bad enough, but at least they understand the rules. But these people! Well-meaning do-gooders who think they are serving their precious communities when all they are actually doing is getting in the way of the professionals.

  At the end of the meeting there are handshakes and expressions of goodwill. The developers’ side go away promising to dwell on what they have heard and to come back a month or so later with their design. A month or two later they reappear and present the design, with the air of an art dealer showing off a rare eighteenth-century print to a collector. In its way it is an artefact of some elegance, certainly much superior to the crude Google Earth and OS map reproductions that we rely on. It shows access roads and avenues and closes curving beguilingly between groves of little round trees and clusters of tasteful toy red-brick houses and garages discreetly concealed behind shrubberies. There are no straight lines or right angles, nothing so vulgar as a terrace except, perhaps, where the ‘affordables’ have been deposited. The composition is bosky, semi-rustic in character: an invitation to believe that, once it is all done, you will hardly notice that it is no longer a paddock and that the horses have gone.

  And we, by now hardened to this exercise in make-believe, look down at the bottom of the design, where the number of houses and their size are specified. We say: ‘But this is not what we asked for.’ And he, the man in the sharp suit, smiles his condescending smile and replies: ‘That’s market realities for you,’ which turns out to be the answer to everything.

  *

  Our greatest difficulty, among many, was that for a long time we really did not know what we were doing. Looking back now, it strikes me as disgraceful that – in bestowing the right to draw up Neighbourhood Development Plans – no attempt was made to show how it should be done. The civil servants did not bother, the ministers did not care. What mattered to them was the gesture, the noise they could make about devolving power away from the centre to the people. What happened thereafter did not concern them.

  There was no blueprint, no ‘toolkit’, to use the jargon. There was some financial help, which went on paying the consultants, but little in the way of useful guidance as to how a group of well-meaning, untrained volunteers – most of them, like me, at a fairly advanced stage in life’s journey and therefore not as quick on the uptake as they might once have been – were supposed to undertake the considerable range of awesomely complicated and time-consuming tasks dumped on them. Advice was available from t
he district council, but it was mainly reactive. We would show them what we had done, they would point out the many defects, we would try again, they would identify more defects, and so on, like some elephantine game of patball.

  Different metaphors occurred to me at different times to describe our progress. We were a caravan of camels battling our way across the dunes of the Empty Quarter towards a distant oasis, forever deluded by mirages glimmering in the haze. We were Captain Scott and his team floundering up and over the Beardmore Glacier on our way to the South Pole. We were Lewis and Clark dragging our canoes up the headwaters of the Missouri, heading for the Pacific. As with all these and every other voyage of exploration, we had our differences. Many were the rows, the explosions of angry words, the expressions of dismay. Many were the times we seemed to have reached rock bottom, only to go deeper; many the times we reflected that had we known what was going to be involved we would never have started.

  But on we plodded, as much as anything because to have given up would have been to admit that all the time and effort had been wasted. Were you to have looked at our NDP website – I would not have advised it – you would have found our Draft Plan (137 pages), our Environmental Report (116 pages), our Sustainability Scoping Report (87 pages, and please don’t ask me what that means) and our Basic Conditions Statement (a mere 20 pages). The Evidence Base was there, containing such jewels as the Business Survey, the Traffic Report, the Ecology Study, my own Equality Impact Assessment – no, I cannot begin to remember what was in it – the Landscape Assessment (53 pages) and much much more besides, as well as a vast array of maps, tables and other stuff.