But some are concerned that the value of land is so low in the central areas of the borough that developers will not be interested enough.
Swindon Borough Council’s cabinet member for placemaking and planning Councillor Marina Strinkovsky and her team were quizzed by members of Euclid Street’s corporate overview & scrutiny committee on the work to draw up a new Local Plan.
This is a legally required road map for the way the town develops over the next 20 years, and the next version is approaching being ready for public consultation this summer, after which it could be amended before being examined in public by a government-appointed planning inspector.
Senior planning policy officer Philip Bylo said: “There are two key areas for central growth in the plan- north of the railway line around the Oasis and south of the railway in the town centre. There will be a reduction in retail space.”
In response to a question by committee chairman Councillor Dale Heena about whether it was realistic to say there would be no urban extension of the borough over the next 30 years, Cllr Strinkovsky said: “We already have the 17,000 homes coming forward in the New Eastern Villages, Wichelstowe and Kingsdown baked into this Local Plan. That’s three huge suburban expansions.
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“There will be some sites outside the centre coming into the Local Plan, but the emphasis has shifted to deliver those already planned and to intensify the centre.”
The leader r of the Conservative Group Councillor Gary Sumner, himself a former cabinet member for infrastructure and strategic planning said he was concerned the council was putting too much emphasis on housing growth in the centre of town: “We need another six and bit thousand homes to meet our targets and you’ve chosen to do it in the least viable part of the borough, in the town centre where the land values are near nil, compared to the New Eastern Villages where the land values much higher.
“The dangers here are if you promote areas for development which are not viable and inspector will look closely at that, and if it becomes part of the plan, but those sites are not deliverable, we’ll end up with precisely what we don’t want, more urban sprawl into the countryside because of the failure to deliver sites in the town centre.”
Cllr Strinkovsky responded: “We are still building 2,000 homes in Kingsdown, and homes in the NEV and Wichelstowe, but we are not exclusively building a housing supply of large houses for families who aren’t interested in living in the town centre.
We are looking to shift the image and desirability of the town centre – there’s nothing intrinsically low about the value of land in the town centre.
Developers fundamentally will build where they can sell, and based on the event about our plans in the House of Lords last week, they’re not too difficult to convince it would be economically advantageous for them.”
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Another member Councillor Daniel Adams asked about the three tallest buildings in the centre, the DMJ tower, Signal Point above the railway station and Debenhams, which he said were empty or functionally empty in the case of the DMJ.
Cllr Strinkovsky said the administration would welcome the conversion of Signal Point and Debenhams building to housing, and said: “The DMJ is a much bigger challenge, both structurally and financially because it has been so neglected.”
A draft Local Plan should be made available for public comment within the next six months.
