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 English Partnerships - Yet another Government quango - now own nearly all of the agricultural land around Northampton. They are hell-bent on converting the land that they purchased or inherited at less than £4,000 per building plot into prime building land which will fetch more than £80,000 per plot. The total potential profit on the 45,000 houses planned around Northampton town will soar to over £3.4 Billion. For the proposed Wootton Development alone, the Government could earn a whacking £342 Million from land sales. At Upton Lodge, the 2,600 houses proposed there will rake in another £198 million. And yet apparently it is almost impossible for the Government to offer more than a paltry £30 million pounds towards the cost of essential infrastructure such as new roads, medical care, schools, sewerage and all the other staples of a civilised society. It seems typical of this Government that they are prepared to make a massive profit whilst overlooking the misery that their unreasonable and unthinking planning directives are causing.
Why is it a swindle? Well, the farmland is obviously an intrinsic asset cared for, managed and populated by Northamptonshire folk over centuries. The Government have purchased it at a rock-bottom price and stand to make an astronomical profit from its sale as building land. Yet so far they are refusing to return any of this windfall to fund the substantial investment that will be required to help local residents cope with the stress that the massive expansion will cause. Instead, they are forcing West Northamptonshire Development Corporation to impose a £20,000 roof tax on developers, which will eventually be passed onto local residents and from which infrastructure might be funded - long after the damage is done and the population of Northampton has exploded.
When it was suggested in a memorandum to the the House of Commons in 2002 that English Partnerships, “is seen as one more developer taking extensive land sale profits and development benefits away from the town”, the implication was that the quango should invest a substantial percentage of this money back into the community that generated it - Needless to say English Partnerships were powerful enough to ignore this advice.
So why isn’t this windfall being reinvested into the County? And where is it ending up? Peter Springett formerly of English Partnerships told us that it was “Government Money” and therefore couldn’t be given back to the County. We wonder whose Government he was talking about - his our ours?
Surely, it is morally wrong for the Governments’ executives, English Partnerships, to take this huge profit from the County and then refuse to stump up for essential infrastructure to support the very activity that will make the money in the first place? We haven’t seen a swindle like this since the days when the Carpetbaggers tricked people out of their own land back in 18th century America.
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