“The citizens of Wrexham thought they were electing a council fit for a city and have ended up in Clochemerle”

The First Minister Mark Drakeford has blasted councillors who recently rejected the Local Development Plan, warning the people of Wrexham “you will have uncontrolled and unplanned development”.

Llyr Gruffydd MS asked the First Minister about Wrexham Council’s rejection of the Local Development Plan, “The question people are asking now is, ‘How will the Welsh Government respond to that?’ Will you and the relevant Minister, for example, accept the local view and allow the proposed plan to be withdrawn, or will the Welsh Government require that the council enforce the plan against the wishes of residents in the area?”

The First Minister did not hold back in a response critical of the political leadership of the council, “Of course I’m aware of the position in Wrexham. It’s an extraordinary sequence of events where a local authority approves its own plan as being sound, submits the plan, which is its plan, which it has confirmed as sound, to the planning inspectorate. The inspector confirms that the plan is sound and then the local authority rejects its own plan. It seems to me that the citizens of Wrexham thought they were electing a council fit for a city and have ended up in Clochemerle.”

The latter being a slightly obscure reference to the satirical French novel by Chevallier notable for farcical and petty parochial politics, featuring Mayor Barthelemy Piechut (a ‘crafty individual and consummate schemer’) who was looking for a personal legacy to show the superiority and progress of the village of Clochemerle, and how his idea for a magnificent urinal turned into an object of scandal, corruption – along with local social and planning issues. The matter reaches a crescendo with violent splits between the Urinophobes and the Urinophiles, although it is unclear which groups would be which on Wrexham Council.

The First Minister cited other excellent written works, namely the Wrexham.com report on the Council Leader Mark Pritchard calling for a “fresh start on new Local Development Plan”.

The First Minister said, “I read the leader of the council saying that, ‘Wrexham is in a good place because we can start again.’

“Ten years. 10 years of work went into producing that sound plan, and a council advised by its own chief executive, by its own chief planning officer, by its own chief legal officer that the plan should be adopted – wilfully, it seemed to me, failed to discharge that responsibility. And I’m afraid the answer cannot be, ‘So, what is the Welsh Government going to do about it?’ This is the responsibility of the local authority and they cannot discharge that responsibility by trying to make difficult decisions the responsibility of somebody else.

“Of course the Welsh Government will be responding to the local authority, and our response will be to them that they need to take the responsibility that is theirs. They should stop being the only local authority in Wales that does not have a local development plan.”

“I can tell you what will happen, because when I was first elected to this Chamber, Cardiff didn’t have an adopted local development plan, and Cardiff West, my constituency, has far too many examples of where housing developments took place that were never designed for housing developments, which were opposed by local people, and where the council lost every case because it didn’t have a local development plan adopted that could defend the planning regime for which it is responsible.

“That will now happen to the residents of Wrexham until the local authority faces up to its responsibilities and makes the right decision.”

Huw Irranca-Davies MS also spoke on Local Development Plans, specifically his love of them so deep he sits down ‘of an evening with a cup of tea or a glass of whiskey and go through them page by page’.

He invited, “Would you join me in sending out a message from this Senedd Chamber today that local development plans are not dry and dusty, boring documents; they’re pivotal to the future of thriving, lively communities, and we want everybody to sit down of an evening with a shot of whiskey and take their time poring over them?”

The First Minister agreed, “It is an exciting prospect that the Member for Ogmore sets out for us. Where I definitely do agree with him is that local development plans do indeed shape the future.

“My anxiety for people in Wrexham is that, without such a plan, they will see their green spaces and their green corridors now at the mercy of people where there isn’t a plan to protect those places.

Perhaps referencing this write up of the decisive LDP meeting he added,”I read the whole debate that was held in Wrexham County Borough Council and I was astonished to read people arguing that if you didn’t have a local development plan you somehow wouldn’t have any development. That would be the end of development because you didn’t have a plan.

“Exactly the opposite is true. Now you will have uncontrolled and unplanned development.

“The reason why people do spend time—community councils, interested local groups—the reason they do spend time, as Huw Irranca has said, looking through the detail of local development plans, is because you can see there where the future of those communities will lie. Of course, anybody with an interest, it would be worth their time to do that, and in 24 of the 25 local planning authority areas in Wales, they have a plan that does just that.”

Top pic: The urinal in Clochemerle as imagined by Penguin Books – in the novel the village ended up with three. Wrexham appears now set to embark on a third go at the LDP.