For months, the Burntwood Action Group (BAG) and local residents have been sounding the alarm over the sudden, aggressive surge of speculative housing applications threatening our green spaces. We were told by the political leadership at Lichfield District Council (LDC) that this was simply an unfortunate, unavoidable consequence of shifting national targets.

This week, the curtain was officially pulled back.

The extraordinary Overview & Scrutiny (O&S) Committee meeting on 16 June 2026 revealed that the 30-month collapse of our emerging Local Plan wasn’t an act of God—it was a direct result of internal mismanagement, procurement failures, and ignored warnings.

Here is the unvarnished truth of what went down in the council chamber, who stood up for Burntwood, and how BAG is turning up the heat to protect our town.

The Three Disclosures LDC Didn’t Want You to Hear

The official transcript and testimony from senior officers exposed three staggering systemic failures within the council’s executive arm:

1. The 13-Month Internal Audit Delay

The political leadership claimed that the district’s housing land supply crisis hit them entirely “overnight.” The record now proves this is a fiction.

The Chair of the Audit Committee revealed that LDC’s own Internal Audit department explicitly flagged the impending collapse of our five-year housing land supply as a high-priority corporate risk back in January 2025. Yet, executive leadership sat on that warning for 13 months before finally logging it on the corporate risk register in February 2026. The council went to sleep on a major policy vulnerability, leaving Burntwood completely exposed to predatory developers.

2. The “Worst Bunch” Procurement Failure

A core reason for the devastating 30-month Local Plan delay is the absence of vital evidence-base frameworks. Senior policy officers admitted on the record that this delay was compounded because the council completely flubbed its initial contract tendering for the mandatory Grey Belt Evidence Studies.

Management admitted that the private consultant submissions received during the joint-authority procurement process were of such unacceptably poor quality that they were described as the “worst bunch.” Instead of managing the project tightly, the council had to scrap the framework and restart the tendering process from scratch.

The Community’s View: Our green buffers and best and most versatile agricultural land should not pay the ultimate price via permanent concreting just because the local authority cannot manage its basic consultant paperwork.

3. The “3% Myth” and Developer Backchannels

Cabinet Member for Spatial Strategy, Alex Farrell, attempted to downplay the planning pressure on Burntwood by claiming the town has only absorbed “2 or 3%” of recent district-wide housing. In the same meeting, he openly admitted to holding regular, private dialogues with Bloor Homes because of ongoing developments.

When a politician routinely consults behind closed doors with a multi-billion-pound developer while simultaneously minimising the historical housing burden placed on our residents, the community has every right to question whose interests are truly being served.

Standing Up for Burntwood: Praise for Councillor Darren Ennis

While the Cabinet Member appeared content to let the “circling hawks” land on our fields, Councillor Darren Ennis stepped up to deliver a masterclass in robust democratic scrutiny.

Darren refused to accept the standard corporate line, using localised intelligence to completely dismantle the council’s creative mathematics. He reminded the room that Chasetown alone has been forced to absorb nearly 900 new houses in just the last 5 years, proving that Burntwood has already taken more than its fair share of development.

Darren hammered the Cabinet twice on their total failure to implement interim land protection policies during this 30-month gap, forcing the critical admission that the 2015 Local Plan has been significantly weakened by the council’s collapsing numbers.

Thanks to the persistence of Darren and the committee, the meeting didn’t end in a quiet rubber-stamping. They successfully passed a formal, legally binding recommendation forcing the council to complete a comprehensive Infrastructure Delivery Plan (IDP) before the local authority is restructured in 2028.

How BAG Is Capitalising on This Failure

If LDC’s political leadership chooses to take a back seat, the Burntwood Action Group will gladly drive the defense. We are not treating this policy vacuum as a defeat; we are treating it as our ultimate leverage.

Using the precise institutional admissions forced onto the record this week, our Strategic Policy Team has officially filed five heavy, standalone technical legal objections directly onto Gillian Pinna-Morrell’s active case file for the Coulter Lane application (25/01485/OUTM).

We have placed the planning department on formal notice across five distinct fronts:

• Unlawful Infrastructure Baselines: Proving the council cannot lawfully calculate or secure Section 106 mitigation packages while operating on a defunct, five-year-old Infrastructure Delivery Plan.
• Expired School Capacity Data: Exposing that statutory education requests are anchored to obsolete, uncoordinated mitigation models.
• Transboundary Highway Failures: Forcing the authority to face High Court liability if they allow separate developer “silos” to ignore a 1,055-home concurrent traffic collapse.
• Affordable Housing Tenure Exploitation: Dismantling Bloor’s “affordable benefit” shield by exposing their Discounted Market Sales (DMS) framework as a corporate cost-saving loophole that completely abandons priority local waiting lists.
• Notice of Statutory Misdirection: Formally warning the case officer that landmark High Court precedent (Gladman) dictates the non-housing environmental and spatial boundaries of our 2015 Local Plan remain active and legally binding—meaning any attempt to ignore them constitutes a fatal error of law.

What Happens Next?

We have formally demanded the council’s entire Local Plan evidence base as a whole. The days of closed doors, creative math, and administrative evasion are officially over.

BAG has proven that we have the data, the legal precedents, and the community backing to go toe-to-toe with both the local authority and multi-billion-pound developers. We are tracking every timeline, auditing every footnote, and defending every acre of our green buffer.

To Lichfield District Council and Bloor Homes: This will not make us go away. We are just turning up the heat.