The three key issues facing Cornwall are
- how to reduce the excessive number of speculative and unaffordable houses being built in Cornwall. The way these are marketed helps to create the current high rate of population growth.
- how to do our bit to encourage the transition to a decarbonised economy.
- how to reduce our dangerous over-dependence on an unsustainable and damaging tourist sector.
What do the party manifestoes have to say about these issues?
Unaffordable housing
Overall, there is much bluster about affordable housing with everyone promising more of it. Strangely, this promise was also at the forefront of manifestoes in 2017 but the miracle still hasn’t happened. You might have expected this would have given the parties some food for thought and made them search for some radically new solutions. Yet, little is said about unaffordable housing or reining in the activities of developers and estate agents.
Take the Liberal Democrats. ‘No to the developers’ charter’, ‘No to concreting over Cornwall’, they breezily chirrup. This is all very well but isn’t this the same bunch who’ve been supposedly running Cornwall Council for the past four years? Years in which permission has been given to developers to build 60,000 houses in just 20 years. At least 45,000 of these will be unaffordable, even by the Government’s generous definition. This is a house building rate 50% higher than the previous 20 years and 8,000 or so higher even than the target insisted on by the Tory Government.
Full marks for a breath-taking flood of crocodile tears and sheer disingenuity. No marks for owning and apologising for the failure to do anything to stop the suburbanisation/gentrification/colonisation process steamrollering over Cornish communities. Indeed, it’s been ratcheted up during the period the Lib Dems and their Independent chums have pretended to be grasping the levers of power, levers that don’t appear to be attached to anything.
What about the Tories? Ignoring the issue of unaffordable housing, they discover a mysterious policy of dumping large affordable/social housing projects onto rural areas. Having persuaded themselves that such a policy really exists, they then promise to reverse it, with ‘small pockets’ of affordable housing sprouting all over the place, as they ‘prioritise housing for local people’. Like the Lib Dems, this is an amazing display of chutzpah. Like them, it’s also utterly lacking in any shred of credibility, as the Tories have actually been doing their best for the last decade to prioritise housing for the better-off, the Home Counties middle classes and second home buyers.
Turning from the questionably certifiable insane, we have the Labour Party who want ‘enough of the right housing in the right places’, although what exactly is ‘right’ is left undefined. In a lengthy and detailed manifesto that hardly anyone will read they do promise to change the definition of affordable, which, thanks to the Tory-Lib Dem Government if 2010-15 now means unaffordable, and ‘turbocharge social/council house provision’. Nice, but how is less clear.
The Greens focus more on the planning system and call for ‘democratic accountability’ and a more transparent process that will end ‘destructive development’ and the stitched-up deals between planners and developers. The Council, they say, should resist all building projects that do not meet environmental and carbon criteria.
MK is the only party to explicitly note the need for a ‘lower and more sustainable housing target, geared to local needs’. This will require control over planning by a ‘Cornish Assembly or parliament’. the Greens also commit themselves to a referendum on an assembly. Labour merely claims it will ‘accelerate Cornish devolution’. The Lib Dems have dropped the demand for a Cornish assembly, having miserably failed to deliver it. By ignoring it, they presumably hope the idea will quietly slink away and bury itself forever.
Decarbonisation
The Tories prefer not to utter the distasteful words ‘greenhouse gasses’ or ’carbon emissions’. Instead, they focus on the ‘madcap’ spending schemes of the Lib Dems. Still fighting their brexit campaign for all they’re worth, they highlight the biggest issue to be the continued existence of a Council office in Brussels. However, they take time out from their brexiteering to promise they will put the environment ‘at the heart of all our decision-making’. However, this seems to amount to little more than putting recycling bins in car parks (if people demand them), while working to ‘green space’, whatever that means.
The Lib Dems point proudly to the fact they are retrofitting 0.35% of our housing stock every year, while planting 100,000 trees annually. At this rate all houses will be carbon-zero by 2305! How many of the trees survive is also another matter. For instance, it looks as if almost half the young trees planted on the Tolgus ‘Boulevard’ at Redruth have given up the ghost and expired.
Tree planting and a bit of retrofitting is hardly likely to get us anywhere near being carbon zero by 2030, as they also promise. This is even less feasible as they intend to press on with their grandiose schemes for major housing settlements and new roads, without a clue as to their carbon costs.
Labour has a few more practical and credible suggestions to offer, such as community energy companies or encouraging the local sourcing of goods and services for example. But this is still well below what’s actually needed.
MK rather vaguely promises it will ‘promote initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ but doesn’t actually spell out what those initiatives might be.
The Greens also want a community energy strategy and also more generally an end to decisions that increase carbon emissions, plus the rewilding of green spaces and a prohibition on the use of dangerous herbicides by local councils.
But no party, even the Greens, dares to propose we take immediate action to fit the ‘emergency’ part of the phrase ‘climate emergency’, such as closing down the airport that the Council owns for example, or having car-free zones.
Tourism and second homes
Neither the Tories, Lib Dems, Labour nor MK explicitly mention tourism. In contrast, the Greens propose a tourist tax, a ‘small levy on accommodation booked by the 4.5 million visitors’, the money to go to create more sustainable businesses.’
One blight that tourism spawns is second homes, which hollow out our communities and have dire effects on the housing market and local services. All the parties, apart from the Tories, who make no mention of their second homes, promise to do something about this issue.
The Lib Dems are loud in their condemnation of the Tories for ‘forcing’ them to build even more houses to ’accommodate second homes’, and for allowing the owners of second homes to benefit from covid business grants. But they don’t actually tell us what they’re going to do. As they’ve used the last four years to do nothing effective to stop the spread of second homes, their castigations lack a little credibility.
Labour councillors have been strong on this issue. Building on that, they want to close the business rate loophole for second homes and lobby the Government for the right to charge a housing offset levy to offset the damage caused by second homes.
MK wants more planning restrictions on future second homes and local control over planning in order to stop the growth of second homes and then reverse their numbers.
The Greens want to double the council tax on second homes and go further in extending this to holiday lets.
As for Independent candidates you’ll have to ask how they intend to tackle these issues. If the two standing in my ward are any guide they won’t have much to offer other than bland promises that they can’t possibly deliver. These betray an alarming ignorance about how local government works in the over-centralised state that we’re forced to live in,
You’d better get a move on though. By this time tomorrow, it’ll be too late. Happy voting!
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 