ICLT Chair, Mark Read, speaking at a meeting of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
On June 27, our Chair, Mark Read, was invited to present our work as a Community Land Trust at an event for the Royal Town Planning Institute. The event was exploring Ilfracombe and how planning could be used as a tool for regenerating deprived coastal communities. Within his daily work leading the North Devon Salvation Army, Mark is well acquainted with the deprivation and challenges faced by communities in the area, and so was able to offer some insights and description before presenting our Bicclescombe Nursery project as a good example of regeneration.
Mark emphasised the importance of regeneration projects being community-led, in contrast to commercially-led developments. He described how our plan for Bicclescombe has been community-led 1) in design, 2) in purpose, 3) in participation and 4) in perpetuity.
In Design
Speaking with and visiting families and individuals we know, support and work with has given us valuable local knowledge about housing in Ilfracombe. We asked what worked for them and what didn’t. What were their concerns about housing, and what would be important in a new place? They spoke about access, safety, sense of place and community; about having space that is shared and their own. And so our aspirations for the design of the Bicclescombe site became an exercise in co-design – bringing together information and experience to help shape the fabric of our town’s future. Ordinarily, the only means for a community to influence or affect a development plan is to object to planning permission; therefore, it felt important to have a more positive and constructive input into the planning process than just this.
In Purpose
As it is not a commercial site, there is no obligation to generate a profit. And so we can purpose the site to directly serve the pronounced housing need in our town – the need for quality, stable, social housing. Whilst a lot of our input, as a land trust, was in the design, a significant and ongoing influence on the site will be our L.L.P [Local Lettings Plan], which is the legal wording within the contract to ensure that this housing serves our community.
In Participation
It is difficult to overstate how significant this is; that members of the local community are empowered to participate in a project like this. Alternatives to the usual pattern of housing development, such as this, jolt the communal imagination into believing that they can lead interventions that will benefit their community; they can participate in creating their future rather than having it dictated from elsewhere.
In Perpetuity
In reality, many interventions intended to address the deprivation in our town will come and go. Funding streams change course; resources are withdrawn or redistributed; projects, centres and hubs appear and then cease to be. But the words “in perpetuity”, which were quite unfamiliar before this project began, now have a lovely resonance to them – that these houses will continue to serve Ilfracombe; they’re not subject to political priorities or the varying vogues of council policies. They will remain, in perpetuity, available to those in need of quality, social housing in our town.
Having emphasised the importance of being community-led, Mark then explored the role of planning in regenerating a place such as Ilfracombe, noting three key functions. That planning should:
- Collaborate with the community, not just hearing objections, but creating a means for a community to articulate for itself how it wants to shape the fabric of its locality.
- Protect a community from failing housing and dangerous landlords and developers; from the ferocity of commercialism and all the temptations of corruption that emerge when large sums of money or big plots of land are involved.
- Enable alternatives, so that it is not too inflexible or rigid with its policies and priorities, and does not quash something that could be pivotal to a town, just because it is out of the ordinary.
In summary, we need to be more creative in the design and use of tools such as these to solve the problems of housing and coastal deprivation and be less reliant on past conventions.