An interview with Hugh Williams
In the last of the Somerset Lives series that we started in The Leveller, Stephanie Harris Plender interviews the chair of CPRE Somerset, Hugh Williams.
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Somerset Lives
An interview with Hugh Williams, Chair, CPRE Somerset, The Countryside Charity by Stephanie Harris Plender
Any regular reader of The Leveller, or Somerset Confidential for that matter, will be aware of CPRE Somerset campaigns on a range of issues that reflect concern for the countryside – indeed, the letters CPRE stand for Campaign to Protect Rural England. There’s a local CPRE branch in every county in England, mostly constituted as separate charities with separate funding, and here in Somerset Hugh Williams took on the role of chair a couple of years ago. Stephanie Harris Plender visited him in his village near Crewkerne to talk to him about the charity’s work and his involvement.
Hugh, tell us a little bit about your background and your connection with Somerset.
HW: I had a mixed upbringing. I think we lived in 6 houses before I was about 13! We were living in Chelsea when my parents divorced. Mother took on the responsibility for the three children and we moved to Sherborne where I went to the small grammar school but didn't really succeed because the curriculum was completely different from in London. The bottom line was that I only got four O-levels. The headmaster said I was only good to work on a farm and I should leave. So I went to Yeovil College. I'll never ever forget a guy called Gwyll Leyshon, who was the head of business studies - his attitude was, you’ve got four O-levels, you can do anything you want! After college, I got a job with Westlands, now Leonardo. I did an HNC in Business Studies with them and ended up in corporate planning accounting. I was headhunted by the IT industry and stayed in IT until I retired six years ago. I worked for IBM for the last 17 years of my career, looking after very large outsource accounts which involved extensive travel.
At what stage did you get involved in CPRE The Countryside Charity – did you always love the countryside?
HW: I've always preferred the countryside. I'm not a townie. It's quite impersonal. Our youngest daughter lives in London and when we were there last weekend, we took our grandson to a sports hall, tried to say hello to people and you just get blanked. Whereas in the countryside, it's the opposite. You say hello to somebody and half an hour later, you're let go. I've been very honest that I didn't know who CPRE were until we had a planning application for 35 houses in this village. A part of the village that is very prone to flooding. It was completely inappropriate and just wouldn't have fitted in this village. That's why I got involved with CPRE. I was a trustee for about four years before I was persuaded to be chair. I was humbled by being asked and I'm delighted to be the chair of a charity that really is focusing on looking after the countryside.
The charity is often criticised for NIMBYism and given there is an acute shortage of affordable housing, what’s your approach to housing policy?
HW: We absolutely need rural, affordable houses but they do need to be in the right place. When our children lived here, they didn't want to buy a house in a small rural village, there's little to no bus service, there's little to no entertainment. There need to be activities that are going to fulfil what people are looking for in terms of their lifestyle. Local infrastructure. The affordable homes issue is complex. Partly it’s down to greed and the pure profit and return on the investment for the builders. At the end of the day, if you build a two bedroom house which you sell for £120,000, the cost is disproportionate compared to if you made it a four bedroom house and sold it for £350,000. Time and time again we’ve seen that when plans are put forward they've got a percentage of affordable housing. The plans are granted. And then the developer comes back and says, “we can't afford to do that, can we cancel the affordable housing?” And they get away with it! It shouldn't be allowed. If 30% should be affordable, then let that be delivered as 30% affordable.
You’d also like new housing developments to incorporate solar panels on new builds?
HW: Somerset Council is in UK100, a group of 100+ councils committed to pre-empt future changes to planning and adopt measures for the transition to clean air. So they could adopt the recommendation of solar panels on all new builds but they haven't. None of the new houses in Yeovil, and there are many, are being built with solar panels. Why not? Because the NPPF, the National Policy Planning Framework, says they're not required. The Council could adopt solar tomorrow in advance of the law, or the NPPF, changing. It’s insane when you think that we are still losing good, high-quality farmland to solar panels. There's another one that's just been approved at West Coker on the fields opposite to Leonardo because it's allegedly going to power Leonardo, but that's good quality farmland. We've seen food prices go through the roof and if you look at the amount of food that is flown in for freshness we could grow it here if we went back to a more seasonal model. If you work out the climate change footprint to get some of these fruit and vegetables to supermarkets - it's not good.
What other campaigns are firing you up?
HW: A lot of our time is spent with what we call inappropriate or wrong place, wrong time planning. Another area we've been extremely successful is litter picking. A pet hate of mine is litter - everywhere you go there's litter thrown out of car windows, for example. We put together a project almost four years ago to sign up volunteers who would be willing to keep their local patch litter-free. We present them with a handheld litter picker, safety gloves, a high visibility jacket and a litter bag. We've now signed up 290 of these litter pickers throughout Somerset. One benefit was that during Covid a lot of schoolchildren were struggling with the Duke of Edinburgh scheme because they couldn't get a suitable project. Litter picking for CPRE enabled them to do their volunteering, even in the depths of lockdown. And now we’ve signed up five SEND schools to be engaged in supplying data about the source of litter, monitoring what and where it is being picked up. The students are now “citizen scientists” contributing valuable data as well as making their local environments cleaner, better places for everyone.
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Short but interesting interview with Hugh Williams.