'We raised £26k in a week to fight developers'

With hundreds of thousands of new homes a year planned by the government, some rural residents are going to new lengths to protect their green fields.

"It's not enough these days to object based on a lack of schools or a lack of doctors surgeries - you've really got to get under the bonnet of development and planning law," said Martine Naughton.

She is the chair of Trull Parish Council in Somerset, which recently raised more than £26,000 in six days for barristers to represent them at a planning appeal.

The government and developers say there is a chronic shortage of housing. The national backdrop is of a country where millions of people are facing high rents, long social housing waits or cannot afford to buy homes where they want to live.

The average house price in England was £300,000 last year - almost eight times average earnings.

The plans for 125 homes on fields in Trull include 30 affordable homes.

So what does it take for local people to challenge plans?

A planning inquiry into the homes planned in Trull started earlier, with the inspector expected to take several weeks to reach their decision.

The application was rejected in February by a committee of councillors at Somerset Council, who went against their planning officers' recommendations to approve it.

Once the developer decided to challenge that refusal, Trull Parish Council swung into action.

"First of all we had to listen to the local community and see if they were in support of us investing public money in fighting for the land - how much did it mean to them?" Naughton said.

"We set up a campaign, we rallied the public to distribute posters and flyers, we set up this crowdfunding page and raised £26,000 in six days.

"And then we had to hire a legal team while simultaneously trying to get our heads around complex planning policy."

No matter what the inspector decides, Naughton said she was "incredibly proud" of what her community had achieved.

The BBC approached the developer, BSL Strategic Ltd, for comment but has not had a response.

Steve Hesmondhalgh has worked as a planning consultant for 30 years, having previously been a council planning officer.

He advises developers on how to gain permission for new homes and said he prepares clients from the outset that many applications will end up going to appeal.

"That's just part of the process at the moment - but also part of the reason we're not delivering all the housing we should be," he said.

Hesmondhalgh explained there had been several changes made to the planning system in recent months aimed at speeding up decision-making.

He said some of the changes took power away from local councillors who might reject applications based on local objections, rather than planning guidelines.

When the Labour government took power in 2024 it promised to deliver a total of 1.5 million new homes in England over the course of a five-year parliament.

That implied an average of 300,000 new dwellings each year, a rate of construction not seen in decades. The latest data suggests 204,000 new homes were delivered in the 12 months to March this year.

"The last time it was this frantic was when the coalition government came in and said we're not building enough housing and housing is going to be the thing that gets us out of the recession," Hesmondhalgh said.

Sometimes an application goes straight to a planning inspector for decision, without being voted on by local councillors.

In the village of Pickwick - said to be the inspiration for Charles Dickens' novel The Pickwick Papers - a developer was given consent for 150 homes after Wiltshire Council failed to make a timely decision.

More than 500 objections from individual residents had been made. Local Liberal Democrat councillor Ruth Hopkinson said people were "not happy, but I think that's going to be the colour of things to come".

She said Wiltshire Council, like Somerset and many others, was unable to show it had enough land allocated for five years' worth of housing.

"Disquiet is an understatement," Hopkinson said, "but it's open season for developers at the moment."

Meanwhile, in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, 195 homes were given planning permission at an inquiry after the local council pulled out of defending its decision to refuse permission days before the inquiry took place.

Campaign group Moreton Against Overdevelopment (MAOD) had previously held a mock funeral over wider plans for more new homes in the town.

Neil Backwith from MAOD said he would do it all again, despite the inquiry's outcome.

"The odds are now so heavily stacked against local residents as to make it quite depressing," he said.

"I would fight it tooth and nail forever because it is fundamentally wrong."

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