A transport plan for the West of England should be redrawn because it is based on a failed housing plan for the region, opponents say.

Pursuing the Joint Local Transport Plan (JLTP4) would see roads built to support large new housing developments proposed in the rejected West of England Joint Spatial Plan (JSP), they told a meeting of South Gloucestershire Council on February 12.

The council formally withdrew the joint housing plan at the meeting after government inspectors failed to find sufficient evidence to support 12 “strategic development locations” identified for 105,000 new homes in Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES) by 2036.

But the Conservative-led authority approved the joint transport plan and recommended its regional adoption, despite opposition from campaigners and local Liberal Democrat councillors.

Cabinet member for planning and transport, Steve Reade, said the area needed an “up-to-date” transport plan “regardless” of the failed joint housing plan.

“Although we have been producing them in parallel…the two are separate,” Cllr Reade said.

“This is more than building roads,” he said of the transport plan. “This is to facilitate multi-modal travel…to encourage people to get out of their cars.”

Council leader Toby Savage said the council was preparing its own new local housing plan, and would “likely” work with the West of England Combined Authority (Weca), Bristol City Council and B&NES Council to produce a new “mayoral” housing plan for the region, salvaging what it could from the JSP process.

The inspectors who threw out the JSP were “careful not to suggest” that any of the 12 major housing locations identified were actually “unsuitable”, Cllr Savage noted.

Five of them were in South Gloucestershire: in Thornbury, Buckover, Charfield, Coalpit Heath and Yate.

The joint transport plan proposes the construction of major road links such as a Coalpit Heath and Westerleigh bypass between Yate and Emersons Green and the east of  Bristol, and a Winterbourne and Frampton Cotterell bypass between Stoke Gifford and Iron Acton.

Liberal Democrat group leader Claire Young said: “If you start putting in those new roads…it will look like those developments are still being supported, that you’re not truly going back to the drawing board [on housing].”

“It will predetermine where the developments are going to go, because if you look back through history, new developments are put up to and around roads.” 

Cllr Young said the council had not listened to opponents of the JSP, among them the Liberal Democrats, and needed to learn from its mistakes and apply those lessons to the new housing plan.

Roger Hall from Thornbury Residents Against Poorly Planned Development (TRAPP’d) said: “Our recommendation is that the council throw the [transport plan] back at Weca and tell them to start again.

“[It] should be based solely on existing or committed housing with an aim to give us the biggest bang for our buck towards the goal of carbon neutrality by 2030. 

“This would force any new proposed SDLs (strategic development locations) to be self-funded in terms of necessary transport, which in turn would skew the plan towards spatial locations that require the least commuter content or can most easily slot into existing or planned public transport offerings.”

Liberal Democrat councillor John O’Neill said the transport plan was still “inextricably linked” to the JSP because the new local plan was two to four years away.

“It would be better to withdraw the JLTP4 rather than use it as a stop-gap until a strategic housing assessment has been completed that identifies sustainable locations,” he said.

Speculative planning applications for more than 1,200 homes in Charfield were already being processed by the council, he warned.

Cllr Savage said: “We absolutely want to have a plan in place that means that we will actually be able to fight off those speculative challenges when we have a policy vacuum.

“I think it’s important today that we just draw a line under what has happened over the last few years and move forward with a new approach.”