The lie of the land

Dunsfold Park would be regarded as a dream setting by both country-lovers and housebuilders. It is 600 acres of prime Surrey land not far from Guildford, where the predominant colour in your field of vision is green. That grassy view is, says Jim McAllister, chief executive of the site's owner, the Rutland Group, Dunsfold's Achilles' heel: "It means people think of it as greenfield when in fact it is a brownfield site. There are more than 150 acres of hardstanding to the airfield." The arrival of a plane on the 2 km long runway is all it takes to make his point.

If Rutland gets its way this former Second World War aerodrome will change dramatically. The company wants to redevelop the site with up to 2500 homes. McAllister talks of creating a community where people walk to their on-site workplaces, homes are heated by combined heat and power plants fuelled by local woodland, and residents call up the community babysitting service when they fancy a Saturday night out.

The realisation of these dreams, however, will depend on McAllister and his team's ability to negotiate what look like some pretty difficult planning hurdles. The site is not in the green belt and is not an area of outstanding natural beauty - a rarity in Surrey, says McAllister - so in theory development is not ruled out. But the site is also not yet on the development map, either regionally or locally. It doesn't feature in any of the nine growth areas set down in the South East Plan and what new housing that is being built in the area is being targeted at existing urban hubs like Guildford and Woking. At a local authority level, Waverley council's core strategy includes the option of sanctioning a new settlement, but instead the borough is using windfall sites within existing towns and villages to provide new housing.

Until just over a year ago Rutland was working with Waverley to produce supplementary planning guidance (SPG) for the site. That process was halted by the new Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, as SPGs have been replaced by Area Action Plans (AAP). Waverley has not set a date for the production of an AAP for Dunsfold Park, but Rutland is continuing to make its case for development. Next month it will begin a consultation with the community to help in masterplanning the site.

The government's latest package of policy proposals could prove to be a mixed blessing for the site's future. At first reading the development team think the proposals might just help improve the site's prospects of being developed. But at the same time they fear they could at best jeopardise some of the innovative and high-quality features that would lift the housing development above the norm, and at worst threaten the development as a whole.

Rutland Group chief executive Jim McAllister runs Dunsfold Park as an airfield and a business park. Under the development plans, the business space would be retained and the runways used to increase the energy efficiency of the buildings

The proposals

McAllister says he is not aiming to create just another housing estate at Dunsfold. "We're hoping to create a very high-quality mixed-use development, with a wide range of jobs, a diverse range of housing, recreational facilities, lakes and parks. I would like the site to be a role model for sustainable development," he says.

It is not surprising that McAllister is talking up the proposed community as he is working to make development acceptable, but Rutland's track record suggests he would be true to his word. The company created the award-winning Bedfont Lakes business park scheme, just to the south of Heathrow Airport, producing not only high-quality offices but a country park alongside them that has now become a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Rutland and Royal Bank of Scotland have jointly owned Dunsfold Park for four years and operate the site as an airfield and a business park. The runway's surrounding sheds and hangars are occupied by some 90 businesses ranging from cake-makers to high technology companies. The runways themselves also earn their keep as a circuit for the Top Gear programme.

The business space would be retained under Rutland's plans, providing the basis for sustainable walk-to-work living. McAllister says the site could have 2000 jobs, and he is keen to prioritise a sizable chunk of the site's housing for people already working in or coming from the area.

Affluent Surrey may have few decaying urban streets that need regenerating, but some of its picture-postcard locations are struggling with issues of housing affordability and underused services. About 80% of the working households in Waverley can't afford housing in the lowest quartile of prices. When initial public consultation was undertaken for the proposals for Dunsfold, older people living in the area were against development, but young people were in favour. "The community moving in here is rich and retired. Younger people are being displaced," says McAllister. These wealthy older incomers are not strong supporters of local services, so local bus services are poor, the nearest school has closed and one of two local pubs has also closed down, McAllister points out. He maintains that Dunsfold's development could help alleviate the area's affordable housing shortage, improve the viability of local services, and forge a link to the nearby village of Cranleigh.

Likely impact of planning policy

We take good design, environmental design and energy consciousness as absolutes Jim McAllister

In a number of ways, Rutland is ahead of emerging government policy. The new draft planning policy statement 3 proposes requiring local authorities to carry out assessments of their local housing market, but Rutland has already commissioned agent Savills to carry out its own. It has commissioned a housing demand and need study covering not only the Cranleigh area, but the whole sub-region as far as Guildford, Horsham and Chichester. The study looked at such factors as employment and labour supply, economic drivers and traffic congestion. "We seem to be addressing things, and when contrasted with PPG3, PPS3 looks a great deal more straightforward," says Ian McDonald, managing director of consultant and project team leader, Strategic Planning Advice.

On fine detail such as density and design quality, the aspirations for the site are entirely in tune with PPS3. Rutland is looking at a density of between 30 and 50 units/ha, between the rural and suburban density requirements of PPS3. Architect Pollard Thomas & Edwards is already on the project team as masterplanner and McAllister sees no problem with having a design code drawn up for the site, as is being advocated by government. "We take design as a sine qua non. We take good design, environmental design and energy consciousness as absolutes," he says.

The developer also ticks all the right boxes on affordable housing. Its package is designed to be entirely privately funded, with no public subsidy for affordable housing, and Rutland is looking at different ways of offering low-cost shared ownership and affordable rented housing.

The intention is to have the 2500 homes heated by combined heat and power plants fuelled by local woodland

The Code for Sustainable Homes

Although the site is not government or English Partnerships land, there could be pressure to apply the government's proposed Code for Sustainable Homes. PPS3 urges local authorities to encourage developers to apply the code for strategic sites. Rutland's proposals already put ODPM's latest environmental thinking to shame. Although the Code for Sustainable Homes has been criticised by environmentalists for, among other things, its low energy-efficiency standards, McAllister talks of creating a development that is water, energy and waste neutral.

"We're still dealing with the strategic issues on sustainability. We're beginning to address issues like how we can generate electricity on site," he says. "With the homes themselves we'll be hoping to go well beyond EcoHomes' Excellent rating." The more ambitious ideas under discussion include: crushing the concrete runways and using them to make thermal mass which will be put under buildings to increase their energy efficiency, and creating a wood-fired combined heat and power station, drawing on the fuel resource of surrounding local woodland. McAllister, who owns a local forest, says there is enough woodland within a 15-20 km radius of the site to fuel a 1 megawatt power station. "If you start blue sky thinking, then you come to ideas like bringing the biomass fuel via the canal," says McAllister. "That might sound blue sky at the moment, but I wouldn't mind betting that it will happen one day. Petrol prices will double and people may not be able to commute. Changes like that could happen in the lifetime of a development like this."

McAllister is also looking at biological treatment of household waste on the site: "We've had a demonstration of a waste treatment plant that ended up with a product that could be used to fuel boilers or as a building material. We're looking at how to treat waste as a resource. We could look at recycling not only for this site, but beyond borough boundaries."

Other ideas being explored include the potential of running some kind of public transport link along the line of the long-disused Horsham-Guildford rail link to ease traffic congestion and communication, and the delivery of social support services within the community like babysitting. McAllister explains the latter: "We're trying to recreate at a dense level a community where it is easy to be cheaply supportive of each other. We've got to start looking at development in a radically different way. We've already contributed to a local school winning specialist status as a science-based school."

The planning gain supplement

The prospect of paying a planning gain supplement would, however, be a strong deterrent to Rutland's ambitions. McAllister says: "A tax is certain, but the risks of development are uncertain. We don't know how much development will cost until we finish it. At Bedfont Lakes it was expensive to decontaminate the site and create the parkland. We'd never have been able to create that parkland to that standard with a planning gain supplement."

So overall…

McDonald says: "What we're campaigning for at the South East of England Regional Assembly and with Waverley council is to have option D [the option for a new settlement] seriously considered and evaluated publicly in a consulted fashion." Overall, he sees the government proposals as good news: "On the face of it, it looks more favourable to what we are trying to achieve. Under current planning policy we don't fit because the site is not in the hub centres, but given that we can make a leap in this cluster of communities, we deserve a hearing and it looks like PPS3 will open the door for us to get that."

But whether the government's proposals and Rutland's proposals will both happen as planned remains to be seen. Watch this space.