Places for Everyone — but maybe not Oldham
Plus, after a summer of racist riots, is history repeating itself?
Dear readers — we hope you’re enjoying the first of a few bright and clear days (according to our weatherman). Today, our main item is about Places for Everyone, the giant housing plan that spans nine of Greater Manchester’s ten boroughs, promising to deliver hundreds of thousands of homes. It’s already lost the support of Stockport, and now councillors in Oldham want out too — but is that an empty threat? Experts doubt how the council could leave the plan — which took a decade to pass — legally, or without dissolving it entirely. That’s below.
If you missed our weekend read, Mollie wrote a deep-dive into how Afflecks went from a quirky indie bazaar filled with “vulgar tat” to a tourist destination owned by a big property firm. Come for the nostalgia, stay for the mystery of two unrecorded Banksys that might have been painted on the outside walls. “I mean, everything The Mill does is great, but I liked this one a lot!” wrote reader Colin Warhurst. Read the full piece here.
Editor’s note: It’s an exciting time at The Mill — we were recently nominated for a British Journalism Award, we’ve just hired our third staff writer, and we have several exciting investigations in the works, including an inside look at the huge parties involving “industrial-sized canisters” of laughing gas in Deansgate Square, and the twins who left their childhood home in Chorlton to join ISIS. To avoid missing out, sign up as a member today.
Inside the race to develop the Covid vaccine
From today’s sponsor: The global spread of a novel coronavirus in Spring 2020 sparked a worldwide scientific effort never seen before. The race to create a vaccine began at breath-taking speed, with scientists, researchers and innovators collaborating to find solutions.
The Science and Industry Museum’s exhibition Injecting Hope is telling the incredible story of those involved in creating the vaccines that saved millions of lives, and it’s showing for just one more week before it closes on 17 November. The exhibition tells the story of the resilience shown by communities in the North West, and the healthcare and community workers who fought to protect the vulnerable. To find out more and catch the exhibition before it closes, click here.
⛅️ This week’s weather
Some lovely sunshine this week, according to our local weatherman Martin Miles, with temperatures average for this time of year.
Tuesday 🌤️ A frosty start with mist patches locally. Dry throughout the daytime with light winds and sunny spells, albeit hazy at times later. 11°C.
Wednesday ⛅️ Misty to start the day then largely cloudy, although with a few bright spells during the afternoon. Feeling chilly. 9°C.
Thursday 🌥️ Another murky start with patchy mist and fog which will lift into low cloud. A few bright spells will come through later and conditions will be mostly dry. 10°C.
Friday ☁️Cloudy and chilly with patchy drizzle where the cloud is thickest. 9°C.
Outlook 🌧️ Turning colder and unsettled into the weekend with rain and showers at times. Remaining cold next week and potentially turning wintry, especially over the hills.
You can find the latest forecast at Manchester Weather on Facebook — daily forecasts are published at 6.15am.
The big story: ‘Legally perverse’, the will of the people, or petty politics? Oldham looks to leave Greater Manchester’s biggest housing plan
Top line: The majority of Oldham’s councillors have voted to write to Angela Rayner, secretary of state for housing, asking for the borough to leave Greater Manchester’s flagship development plan, Places for Everyone (PfE). Pulling out of the plan is being described as risky, “legally perverse” and cynical politicking. Let’s take a look.
Context: PfE hasn’t had an easy life; it’s long been a point of contention in the city region, mainly in areas where there is a lot of opposition to greenbelt building. (Back in 2020, when the plan was called the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework, Stockport pulled out after Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors rebelled over greenbelt development.)
However, the plan was finally signed off back in March this year, to many a sigh of relief. It allocated 5,500 acres of land on which 175,000 houses would be built.
Meanwhile, Lib Dem-led Stockport Council is still yet to get a replacement development plan in place, and experts say stepping out of the plan has actually made it harder for the borough to meet targets and defend against the greenbelt developers. Alas…
Last Wednesday, Oldham council voted on a motion brought by local Lib Dem leader Howard Sykes to write to Angela Rayner and request Oldham be pulled out of the plan. As with Stockport, this has a lot to do with greenbelt building, as well as making sure the housing that is built in Oldham is affordable. PfE has been criticised for being “developer-led” and not guaranteeing affordable homes. Sykes said:
When Labour lost control of the council earlier this year, we promised the people of Oldham we would force another vote on this issue and lead the charge to pull out of this scheme in favour of a brownfield-first strategy for truly affordable housing.
Legally perverse: An officer report said filing a revocation request would be “legally perverse and unreasonable”; nevertheless, the motion passed with 30 votes to 29. “That was one of the most emotive officer reports I’ve ever seen,” Sykes tells the Mill. He believes those questioning the legality of asking to be removed from the plan are just fearmongering. “How can it be illegal to write to the secretary of state? Get real.”
“I think it's probably unlawful”, says Paul Smith, managing director of The Strategic Land Group, a planning consultancy. “Because it’s their adopted development plan, so the only way it can not be their adopted development plan is if they replace it with something else.” But that’s easier said than done. It took a decade to get PfE over the line. Locally, the government wants to remove red tape, but even then, their speedier process would take 30 months.
Aside from the legality question, how would Oldham pulling out of PfE affect the other eight boroughs remaining? Well, the plan took the overall housing target for all the boroughs and distributed it to prioritise areas where high-rises could deliver more numbers, or in areas earmarked for big regeneration projects. “If one borough were to withdraw, it wouldn’t actually change the target for any of the others,” Smith says. “In essence, those homes [planned for Oldham] would just disappear.”
But that’s only in theory. In reality there is no legal mechanism by which the council can withdraw, says its officers, so the best it can do is request that the secretary of state revoke the plan. This would mean the entire plan dissolving on account of one council, which seems unlikely.
Places for Everyone has Oldham building 772 homes per year. That’s just under a hundred more than it would be under the existing standard method for calculating housing targets. However, under the standard method proposed by the new government, Oldham would need to deliver 1,049.
So if, theoretically, Oldham Council could put forward a local plan to replace its part of PfE, it would have to deliver more homes, and field planning applications from developers wanting to develop all over the borough, rather than only the sections put forward in PfE.
This doesn’t worry Sykes, despite the cost to the council if it opposes planning applications that later go to appeal. He says Oldham doesn’t have the same queue of developers that boroughs like Manchester and Salford have. “I'd like to think we have all these people sitting on the boundary of Oldham waiting for this to happen,” he says. “But we haven't. If we were in a place where we had plenty of developers and planning applications, I'd be a lot more worried.”
Is this all just point-scoring? Spectators from other councils think Sykes is playing politics, and that ultimately Oldham is going to stay in PfE, but he’ll be able to tell voters he stood up for the greenbelt. “It’s just populism,” says former leader of Oldham Council and now Bolton Councillor Sean Fielding. “The opposition has framed it as: ‘if Oldham is not part of Places for Everyone, then they don’t have to provide as much land to develop houses’, when the opposite is true.”
When asked if he was trying to score political points, Sykes highlights he has opposed PfE ever since it was the spatial framework, and he campaigned saying he’d oppose Oldham’s part in it: “I don’t think it’s playing politics, I think it's delivering on your pledges.”
Bottom line: The motion passing does not mean the council is already drafting its letter to Rayner. What the council voted against last week was what the officers put forward in their report, i.e. that writing to Rayner was legally dubious and unproductive. “Just because you say: ‘we don’t agree writing a letter is illegal’ doesn’t mean you actually write a letter,” says Fielding. Sykes sees it differently: “The original motion, which was to write [the letter], stands. So that’s what the council needs to do.”
Your Mill briefing
🐝 A collision between two bee network buses near the junction of Rochdale Road and Livesey Street last Saturday left 17 people in need of hospital treatment. The Guardian has reported that nine ambulances, two response vehicles, and an air ambulance attended the scene. Harry Yearsley, a nearby resident, told the MEN that he and his partner were woken by “the biggest bang [they’d] ever heard”. Fortunately there have been no serious injuries.
👮 2023-24 has seen the highest number of officers sacked and barred by the GMP in at least six years. Figures released by the College of Policing show that 36 officers have been sacked and barred in the last year, and since 2018, 107 officers have been kicked out of the GMP. Assistant Chief Constable Tom Harding has described the substandard conduct of officers as “hugely disappointing,” but asserts that the figures “show that we have effective, robust procedures in place to identify and deal with these officers swiftly”.
🏠 Andy Burnham vowed to work alongside landlords in order to raise rental standards at this year’s NRLA Landlord Conference. The GM Mayor has said that he aims to ensure regulation of Manchester’s rental market is as fair and effective as possible, and he told the crowd that “housing is the single best investment that the UK can make”. Burnham also confirmed that he does not want landlords to exit the market, and claimed that the Good Landlord Charter could help to build long-term trust between the GMCA and the wider landlord community.
🟥 And the tents have returned to St Peter’s Square following the end of the Remembrance Day parade last weekend. The homeless encampment was cleared by police on Friday morning ahead of the service, but the now well-known red tents are beginning to be pitched in the square once more – as was prophesied by the residents of the encampment that The Mill spoke to last week.
Home of the week
Ever dream of waking up to the sound of honking geese? This 2-bed cottage in Worsley Village backs onto the historic Bridgewater Canal, so you can do all your water-fowl watching from your window. £365,000.
Our favourite reads
Up in smoke: the artist who lost 1000 paintings in a house fire — The Guardian
Max Ayres, 72, has never left his hometown of Leigh, “has never been abroad, never married and never stopped painting”. During his childhood, he suffered with poor health that left him in agony, “but he’d still relentlessly march out and paint the region’s doomed industrial buildings, capturing them before diggers and men in hi-vis jackets took them apart.” He believes bad luck follows him around — in a particularly devastating moment, he found out that a house fire had destroyed 1,000 of his paintings while he was in hospital in February this year — but still, he says that his art says something about hope and human potential. “It represents human achievement,” he says. “Before people can achieve things they’ve got to have some sight, some vision – a goal to aim towards. And a belief in the possible.”
Scapegoating the Immigrant — The New York Review
In late August 1958, Majbritt Morrison, a Swedish woman, got into an argument with her husband Raymond, a Jamaican man, outside a tube station in West London. The altercation led to a group of white boys hurling racist abuse at them, escalating into a “weeklong orgy of racist violence” in Notting Hill, inspiring similar clashes in Nottingham. Then, in 1962, “the British political class drew a perverse conclusion from the riots: that the core of the problem was not racism but the presence of Black people”, and introduced a voucher system that limited the number of Commonwealth citizens entering the UK. Sixty-six years later, is history repeating itself? After a wave of racist riots in Southport, Manchester, Rotherham and Middlesborough, Yvette Cooper, the new home secretary, has announced plans to crack down on immigration “in a bid to bring up deportation rates to the highest level since 2018”.
Life on the Johnson Fold estate with the undeserved reputation — The Bolton Lead
Johnson Fold, one of the largest housing estates in Bolton, made headlines in 2009 when a local woman reported antisocial behaviour on the estate. The local community responded with uproar, and Roger Hayes, the local councillor, says her allegations were “strongly exaggerated” and received poorly by Johnson Fold residents who believed her concerns “did a lot of damage”. “It’s sad that it’s got a reputation in certain parts of Bolton, a very undeserved reputation,” says Hayes. “Yes, there are people we’d rather not have around. Of course there are. There are in most parts. But there are also some very good people.”
Our to do list
Tuesday
📚 Manchester Museum is hosting a free discussion group of stories, poetry and non-fiction that share themes with the museum’s Wild exhibition, which explores our relationship to the natural world. Book a place here.
🎄 A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickins’ iconic story of a miserly old man who develops sympathy and generosity towards a poor, disabled child after being visited by the ghosts of his past and future, is showing at The Plaza in Stockport. Tickets here.
Wednesday
🎞️ Bury Art Museum is showing Granny, an award-winning short film that celebrates the life of Lizzy Ashcroft, a football star who played with the Dick Kerr Ladies in Preston. It’s showing from 2.30pm and it’s free to attend; just call 0161 253 5878 to confirm your place.
🎸 Langkamer, a “mournful folk” quartet that features Ben Woods, the deep baritone singer known for his side project the Golden Dregs, are performing at Gulliver’s in the Northern Quarter. £13.
Thursday
🎻 The Hallé Orchestra is performing Shostakovich’s ninth symphony at the Bridgewater Hall from 6pm. Tickets here.
🎶 Los Dedos, a summery, '60s-inspired surf rock band, are performing at the Eagle Inn in Salford. £11.
Thanks to our sponsor, the Science and Industry Museum.
This is utterly, utterly bizarre. I spent quite a lot of time in Oldham planning the Metrolink line, and have a lot of sympathy for a hard-pressed but proud town. Oldham has suffered enough and doesn’t deserve this current debacle. If the rebel politicians have their way, in supposedly defending open land from development, they will actually facilitate MORE development of open land than if they had not tried to withdraw from PfE – this is exactly the situation that happened in Stockport where after withdrawal from PfE, the Council is faced with much higher housing figures, that bite immediately (adoption of PfE gives all the other GM districts a significant amount of respite from the new targets), and where the Council is already losing on Green Belt appeals – Maybach Fields, and soon Gately Golf Course, with more to follow.
In the case of Oldham, the additional development will not be urban regeneration, but green field houses near motorway junctions for people who have jobs elsewhere. They will contribute little to the life of Oldham, but establish unsustainable travel patterns based on car dependency. It shows that the opportunistic desire for power (LibDem in this case, but other desperate parties are available in other areas) is greater than any feelings for the good of Oldham. They should hand their heads in shame.
My guess is that officers in the end will refuse to send a letter that they know is nonsensical (as you explained) and has no legal effect. If the LibDems push it, this would result in some hefty losses at an Employment Tribunal, so I expect the Council Leader to send it himself to save face – but the Government will simply ignore it. None of this will leave Oldham in a good place.
Just to clarify. Places for Everyone is not just a ‘giant housing plan’. It’s a full development plan covering all sorts of other stuff. Including Atom Valley, part of which falls in Oldham. That might also be affected by their recent decision. In the unlikely event that Angela Rayner would agree to their withdrawal. But it does put her on the spot, no doubt to the delight of the Lib Dems.