Perry Walker writes:

This was the question that the people who came to our online event on June 11th, 2025, part of the York Festival of Ideas, wrestled with. And wrestle they really did. More of that later. To start with though, more about the issue.

Marl has a population of 1,000 people in 400 households. It is struggling to stay viable. The pub has closed, the bus service has got worse, and the primary school is under threat. The GP surgery is never open as there are insufficient doctors in the enormous out-lying practice which also covers two nearby towns. Does the community want more housing or not?

A developer is proposing to build 200 additional houses on 3 fields to the north of the village. This would increase the village’s population by 500 (50%). 50 houses will be built each year for ten years.
The task of the participants is to reach a consensus on the developer’s proposal. This consensus will become part of the Neighbourhood Plan and is likely to be decisive on what happens to the proposal.
If they cannot reach agreement, the decision will be taken by the county council, as the local planning authority. The results will be unpredictable and perhaps unpleasant.

The greater the number of houses they agree to, the greater the developer’s contribution, reaching a maximum of £1m if all 200 houses are built. This is a fund the village can use to:

  • create genuinely affordable housing
  • improve the bus service
  • open the GP surgery on more days
  • build a new classroom for the primary school if needs be

Everyone took on a character. There were six characters; three broadly for; three broadly against. In each case, the reading material provided suggested what was each character’s main concern. One of the principles of our format, the Win-Win Workout, is finding out what really matters to people; Below, we give the main concern of each character, and their underlying aim, which emerged as we probed deeper through group discussion.

  • Character A: (Main concern) More infrastructure >>> (Underlying aim) Giving continuing life to the village as a community
  • Character B: Genuinely affordable housing >>> Putting my roots down in a viable community, keeping pace with time.
  • Character C: A healthier mix of ages and incomes >>> Preserve and enhance the relational community – economic vibrancy, viability and connectedness among neighbours.
  • Character D: More housing will make the village more unsafe >>> Safety will help preserve the essence, scale and connectedness of a small rural community
  • Character E: More housing will undermine the rural character of the village >>> Maintain the nature, beauty, safety and peace of the village
  • Character F: More housing will destroy our heritage (for example, by destroying the famous view of the church painted in the C19 by that regionally well-known painter, John Hardy. It is for this painting that the village is best known) >>> Preserve the heritage, character, craftsmanship and beauty, to show that there are alternatives to mass production.

As one of the participants, Anne, pointed out, every underlying aim used either the word ‘community’ or the word ‘beauty’. That provided common ground on which to build for the final section of the event, when the group sought a consensus on the developer’s proposal.

The group decided on a relatively high number of houses – 150 – compared to a possible maximum of 200. Our resident housing and planning expert, Julian Ridge, advised that this was probably the minimum needed for a vibrant village. The concerns about beauty were met by imposing conditions on the developer, in terms of fitting in with the local vernacular, having lots of greenery, and creating a viewing corridor to preserve the view of the church.

150 houses implied a developer’s contribution of £750,000. The group spent this on: ensuring that 20 houses would be genuinely affordable; providing 4 extra buses per day; having the GP surgery open two more days per week; and building an extra classroom for the primary school.

The second principle of the Win-Win Workout is to seek a solution acceptable to all. Everyone could live with the solution that we came to, even if some were reluctant and accepted the outcome partly because of the threat that the county council would decide if they did not. But come to agreement they did, despite their very different starting points. We give the last word to another participant, Tia: “It restored my faith in human nature”.