An action group has hit back at the failure of the council planners to follow its own guidelines regarding a controversial application for houses in Raglan.

The Raglan Village Action Group (RVAG) claims it has "incontrovertible evidence" that the county planning department is "wrong and unjustified" in ignoring its own 10 year plan for housing in the county.

It follows the embarrassing apology by Monmouthshire County Council’s (MCC) head of planing Mark Hand after incorrect figures were used to support the approval of two outline applications to build up to 130 homes near Church Road in Caldicot, and 111 homes south of Monmouth Road in Raglan, which were backed by councillors on 6th November last year. The council opted to support both decisions after ’appropriate’ weight to granting housing developments on land outside its Local Development Plan (LDP) was accepted.

This change in policy, based on a lack of a five-year housing land supply, was pushed through on 22nd September - but it has emerged that planning chiefs supplied councillors with incorrect data.

Councillors were told that by the LDP’s expiry in 2021, the council was projected to be 961 houses short of its targets when it was 504.

Similarly, the report said the authority was 337 affordable homes behind its targets when the actual figure was 38.

RVAG say that MCC claim the new housing site allocations are the "only way" to address the housing land supply shortage, but RVAG suggests that council planners have failed to advise councillors on the obvious issue of speeding up delivery of the thousands of housing plots already identified in the MCC housing plan.  Of special note is the fact that when the LDP was adopted in February 2014, MCC owned more than 700 of the 4,500 plots, and yet five years later, the council has failed to deliver one house completion.

A group spokesman said: "On the emotive issue of affordable housing, MCC has failed to voluntarily increase the percentage of affordable housing on any of its own sites, including one for 45 houses in Raglan.

"It is these failures that have caused MCC to unnecessarily allocate more and more housing land outside of its own current LDP (in advance of the new already commenced replacement LDP) with all the reputational damage to MCC and its planning service that has ensued. These failures have also led to rural  communities such as Raglan being asked to pick up the pieces with environmentally damaging new housing sites to help Monmouthshire’s planning department get out of a problem largely of its own making."

RVAG acknowledges that Welsh Government has called-in MCC’s "questionable planning decision", but hopes that if the planning committee reconsiders the Raglan planning application for 111 houses and resolves to refuse it in the light of the new information, "then the huge public cost of a call-in hearing inquiry can be avoided".

This means both the Caldicot and Raglan applications must go back to the planning committee. The Church Farm scheme, which was fiercely opposed by a resident’s group in Caldicot,went before councillors on 5th March with officers recommending the committee’s original approval is maintained.

But the Raglan scheme is not currently in the council’s hands, having been called in by the Welsh Government, though it will return to the planning committee in the coming months.