Time to stop idle chat over green fields
SAY what you like about this States – and sometimes people do – but some members are nothing if not courageous.
How to annoy the Guernsey population? Threaten to tax them more, threaten to restrict freedoms in their motor car, or threaten to build on green fields.
In the latest bid to address a chronic lack of key worker housing for the PEH, Health & Social Care has announced a surprise move to investigate building on a sloping green field in the hospital grounds near the Vauquiedor entrance.
Key worker housing is just one of housing crises we write about almost every day. We regularly hear that key workers are impressed with Guernsey and keen to move, until they discover how much of their salary will be gobbled up by housing costs.
People accept jobs and then change their minds because of the cost of housing or the lack of key worker accommodation, which does not meet the circumstances or ambition of every applicant.
HSC president Al Brouard said yesterday in a statement that he understood that Policy & Resources had written to the Development & Planning Authority to explore the possibility of building on this field, but it was just ‘very early stages’ and no formal application has been made.
After P&R's property lead’s careless talk about ambitions for five-bedroom houses on green fields near the Castel Hospital, which became the focus of the committee’s decent work thus far on rationalisation of the States’ property portfolio, you would think committees might think twice before jumping into discussions about building on green fields. Especially when other concerns proliferate, including whether key worker accommodation could be supplied elsewhere, why hospital workers need to live in its grounds, and whether ‘brownfield’ developments are available on redundant or semi-redundant properties on site.
Such a proposal, if one ever emerges, would also require a rarely-used planning policy to enable ‘exceptional consideration’ of the proposal, due to strategic importance or public interest.
The greater public interest at this point would seem to be that deputies stop talking about development on green fields, and start looking harder for better alternatives.