Proposed Main Modifications

I write, yet again, with grave concerns regarding the sheer lack of any proper planning within the Draft Deposit Local Plan, and the shortcomings therein with regard to a large shortfall for future provisions of Self-Build/plots right across the District.
I spent two separate sessions before you during the Examination In Public, last year, and provided a great deal of background and evidence in support of future Self-Build aspirations for North Hertfordshire District.
The government had previously set clear and detailed targets for future Self-Build in its Report, Laying the Foundations: A Housing Strategy for England (published 2012). Nationally, 8% of new dwellings can on average be defined as "Self-Build", and as the Council knows, the government wishes to expand this thriving sector. At the moment, that can't happen, not in North Hertfordshire, anyway. During both the Hearing Sessions, I carefully explained that the proposal of only 100 new Self-Build dwellings across the entire plan period 2011-2031 was woefully inadequate.
Given the chance to improve on this, instead, the Council have gone completely backwards; now proposing just 56 plots, or about 0.4% of the total. Apart from the contrived attempt to promote the false idea that once their Local Plan has been adopted, North Herts District Council will be able to show, as required, a five-year supply of deliverable and permissioned land.
Quite the contrary; since 2011, a careful examination of the first seven years of their own Annual Monitoring Reports, show the cumulative total of only 2,275 completions, and of which only 530 were affordable homes. Worse still, virtually no Self-Builds were achieved at all.
Of even greater concern, in the reporting year 2017/18 there were only 281 completions District-wide, following on from a "starts" figure in the previous year of only 215. In the same reporting year (2017/18) this dreadfully poor performance has continued, again with just 219 "starts" recorded. Of course it's these "starts" which always translate into the following year's completions.
I attach a copy of a report in the Sunday Times of 6th April; interesting reading, showing just how difficult it is for small and medium sized enterprises to make any meaningful contribution towards a housing delivery target. Nationally, coupled with great political interference, too much restrictive Green Belt, and an over-worked and under-funded planning regime still hooked on the misguided belief that the only solution is for large strategic sites to deliver lots of poor standard builders-boxes.
Locally, the continuing failure in North Herts to grasp the opportunities small-scale Self- Builds will bring, has again simply been completely overlooked. This at a time when the most recent government report released, highlighted just how poor the quality of many new-build homes from the national builders are; squeezing smaller and smaller new dwellings with less amenity space, less parking provision; as one former housing minister put it "pig- ugly"!; again, NHDC have simply taken the easy route of allocating a few large sites which they propose to Master-Plan; heaven help us all if they simply repeat all the same dreadful mistakes made at Great Ashby. These simply are not the homes the good people of North Hertfordshire need nor deserve.
By contrast, just last week, Kevin McCloud has just started presenting a new Channel 4 series, following a group of 10 new Self-Builders in Cherwell, Oxford. There, the local Council has a proper target of up to 2,000 new Self-Build dwellings to be delivered eventually right across the County, providing a beautiful mix of eclectic new homes, occupied by a wide variety of Self-Builders determined to put down long term roots. Proper communities!
Here, those same opportunities could still happen in North Hertfordshire if, in and around the forty existing villages similar support were provided by the LPA. A couple of new homes every year in and around every settlement over the next 12 years or so of the Plan Period to 2031 would provide the windfall sites North Hertfordshire so desperately needs to make up its numbers shortfall; and, the Council will still receive all its new homes' bonuses. Quite frankly, the failure to repeatedly grasp this opportunity is again reflected in the low number of housing starts, stemming from the complete lack of support for Self-Builders or quality Small & Medium sized enterprises.
My other concern on which I addressed you during the Examination In Public; North Herts already has too much Green Belt, much of it pointless, and the proposal to increase the amount of Green Belt will serve absolutely no useful purpose, in as much as the land is already adequately protected by current policies, correctly designated The Rural Area Beyond The Green Belt. In my view, it's very much more important to protect the existing Green Belt between existing settlements, and particularly to minimise any damage caused by creep/encroachment, from both the towns of Stevenage and Luton.
I would again ask you to insist that North Hertfordshire District Council properly reappraise their woefully inadequate approach to all aspects of Self-Build policies; in order to properly support and encourage future Self-Builders and enable them to contribute towards the housing needs of this District, and in order to properly meet its own legal obligation to provide sufficient plots to match the demand of the Self-Build Register, which the current draft policies clearly do not. I consider this substantial shortcoming to be sufficient to consider the Local Plan in its current Deposit form to be unsound; your earlier request for action/progress has been completely ignored. Actually we've just gone backwards.