What a dangerous and intractable issue planning presents, pregnant with possibilities of disaster in the local elections for whoever happens to be in power.
In Uttlesford, a beautiful tract of north-west Essex containing many lovely old villages, the disaster for the local Conservatives occurred four years ago, when they were routed by a new group called Residents for Uttlesford which expanded from its stronghold of Saffron Walden and seized control of the District Council.
George Smith, leader of the group of six Tories now serving as councillors, hopes that on 4th May the Conservatives can make a comeback, Residents for Uttlesford having in the last four years made a hash of the planning system.
On Sunday afternoon Smith picked me up from Audley End Station, only 55 minutes from Liverpool Street Station, a mere 17 minutes from Cambridge, and just outside the lovely market town of Saffron Walden, which is so fashionable The Sunday Times claims it is the best place to live in the East of England.
Smith, now 40, is councillor for The Sampfords and grew up in the village of Great Sampford – in the picture above he stand in front of the village sign – eight miles east of Saffron Walden. His mother still lives there, her house adorned by a “Vote Conservative” poster, and he lives nearby.
Great Sampford, population 550, has a fine old church, a primary school with more pupils than when Smith went there, a pub, the Red Lion, run by a Romanian family who cook Italian food and have “a very good reputation”, and a bus stop, but the only services are school buses to Saffron Walden and Dunmow.
As a boy, Smith would get the bus to the County High School in Saffron Walden, and from 2013-19 he served on the Parish Council.
He was until recently Secretary of Sampfords Cricket Club, whose ground lies up a short path to the side of the Red Lion.
We gazed out over a wide expanse of grass, which like many of the best cricket grounds is on a slight slope.
The outfield has not yet been mown, because of a problem with the mower, nor has the pitch been rolled, for the roller has a leaking battery, but the first game of the season was played away, as will be the second.
“The club struggles with the declining number of people prepared to do the work, which I think is the case everywhere,” Smith remarked, but his three brothers are members too, the club in 2008 bought its ground off a local landowner, they have since erected a fine pavilion, “a building we can be proud of”, and next weekend they will put up a new practice net.
“It is important for us that we keep the club going for the next generation,” Smith said.
An airliner passed overhead on its way to Stansted: “They use the church tower here to line up with Thaxted, the next village along, and then they come in to land.”
When asked whether he is a batsman or a bowler, Smith replied with characteristic modesty that he was “a sort of a bowler”, and added that “from the other end you get a bit of bounce”.
“Planning is the biggest issue in Uttlesford,” he said. “Fitting in the number of houses we are required to fit in is a challenge.”
The abolition of housing targets has meant, he observes, that the whole subject has become “unclear in the public eye”.
Smith accepts that many people want to come and live in Uttlesford, whose population is rising faster than the national average: “We need about 700 houses a year.”
He hopes “the levelling-up agenda will re-energise the economies in the Midlands and the North and take some of the pressure off the South. There are a lot of people who feel Uttlesford has taken so much housing there is only so much we can accommodate.”
But local opposition can “to some extent be placated” if development brings with it local benefits, “whether through sports facilities or the likes of a surgery”.
Uttlesford attracts “lots of people with very well-paid jobs” in the City of London and in bioscience in Cambridge, but also contains many people who struggle to find somewhere to live.
This time last year, Smith became Leader of the Conservative Group on Uttlesford Council: “If I’m putting myself down I’d say no one else wanted to do it.”
He works from home in IT for a major engineering company and went part-time in order to have enough time to lead. His full-time salary was about £40,000 a year. For being a councillor he gets an allowance of about £5,500 year, plus about £2,000 for leading one of the groups on the council.
His appointment coincided with the council’s planning powers being put into special measures, because while Residents for Uttlesford were running the show too many decisions had been overturned on appeal.
This was Smith’s “baptism of fire”, with BBC Look East and other programmes anxious to interview him.
He points out that until there is a plan, the council will be forced to “accept planning applications we don’t like the look of”, because developers will otherwise win on appeal, where one of their strongest points is that there is no local plan.
“More and more speculative planning applications are being approved in places where we probably wouldn’t build if we had a plan.”
We headed by car into a lane outside Great Sampford, with a dwelling every hundred yards or so which Smith was leafletting.
The lane was so quiet he could leave his car blocking it as he dropped off a leaflet, in the confident expectation that he was unlikely to hold anyone else up.
In the course of an hour, we saw a mother and daughter out riding, a young couple walking their dog, a smiling homeowner who came to see what we were doing, an equally friendly black labrador, and two other cars.
We also saw many beautiful old farmhouses restored to a disconcertingly pristine state, most of them accompanied by at least one equally pristine barn conversion.
Here one finds an immaculately painted and gated version of rural bliss, the peace only broken by an occasional aeroplane.
Smith explained that he has had offers of help with his leaflet deliveries, but would rather take care of his patch himself, so other activists can be deployed in the target wards.
At a five-bar gate at the end of someone’s drive, he spotted a Residents for Uttlesford leaflet already jammed into a crack. He took this, placed it with one of his own leaflets inside a polythene bag, which he tied to the gate, and observed that this would stop the leaflets getting wet.
When ConHome remarked that he could have destroyed his rival’s leaflet, he replied that the Greens had been caught on camera (not in Uttlesford) removing another candidate’s leaflet, but “I like to be who I am, which is an honest person.
“The chap who’s standing against me, Mike Tayler, is my former GP. He’s a leftie but he’s a nice chap.
“I know they’d approached three other people about standing, but they didn’t want to stand against me because they know me. I know they were struggling to find someone to stand.”
The Conservatives are contesting 38 out of the 39 wards in Uttlesford: “We’ve got quite a lot of new candidates, we’ve had to spend quite a bit of time with them.”
Every evening from five he will be out, but he does not like to canvas on Sundays: “I don’t want to upset that one person who wants Sunday to be free.”
Smith identified three groups of Conservative voters who are “upset” about national issues: “Either they didn’t like Boris, or they didn’t like the fact that Boris was forced to step down, or the third tranche are upset about the economy and the impact of Trussonomics last year.
“But when we talk to them about the local issues it does seem by and large that they will come out and support us.
“How that translates across the country I don’t know. In Braintree next door they’ve got an insurgent Independent and Green alliance.”
Residents for Uttlesford are this time putting up 32 candidates, but may suffer because Labour, usually not much of a presence in this district, is fielding 21, which as Smith says is “great for us”.
This is a deeply Conservative area: Kemi Badenoch, the MP for Saffron Walden, had a majority of 27,594 in 2019, and every Friday for the past month has been out canvassing. Smith regards her as “a star for the future”.
He thinks that on 4th May, No Overall Control is a more likely outcome in Uttlesford than an outright Conservative victory, but that it might then be possible to work with the Liberal Democrats while “respecting our dislike of each other”.
In Uttlesford, the local elections in 2019 “were definitely the low point”, when “we lost some very effective and diligent councillors”.
He was appalled by the prediction made on Sunday that on 4th May, the Conservatives might lose 1,000 more councillors: “For the party to accept the loss of a further 1,000 councillors would be terrible.”
He recalled that in 2019, the Conservatives not only suffered from the planning issue but from Brexit, which became, Smith observes, “a double-edged sword”, with Remainers, including Lib Dem/Conservative waverers, angry it was happening at all, while Leavers were deeply unhappy with Theresa May’s negotiations.
Smith was one of the defeated Tory candidates in 2019, but two years ago stood in a by-election where he got 384 votes and Residents for Uttlesfield 361.
A sixth Tory joined them after a by-election in January this year, caused because one of the Residents for Uttlesford had moved to Norfolk. The turnout was only 18 per cent and in Smith’s view the Conservatives won because on election day they went round and knocked on the doors of their supporters, while Residents for Uttlesford “didn’t do a lot on the day”.
The Sampfords has about 1750 electors and includes the villages of Great Sampford, Little Sampford, Radwinter, Hempstead and Little Bardfield.
The River Pant flows through Great Sampford and Little Sampford, and takes in Finchingfield Brook from the picturesque village of Finchingfield, before joining the Blackwater at Braintree.
On the far side of Finchingfield from the Sampfords, the Government proposes to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers at Wethersfield, a former RAF station.
Smith is naturally opposed to putting 1,500 young men with nothing to do at Wethersfield, and is likewise opposed to covering the district of Uttlesford with an excessive number of houses.
But how many is too many? In the elections campaign now under way, national needs collide with local requirements, and Conservatives like Smith face the tricky task of reconciling the two.