Struggles from below

In Wales, the average citizen uses almost three times their share of the world's resources. Aiming to address this imbalance, a groundbreaking scheme launched in 2011 allows people to bypass tight planning laws to pivot to an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. Words by Oliver Gordon.

It’s a cold winter morning in deepest rural Wales and Cassandra Lishman steels herself to face dawn’s frosty bite. She wakes up her 17-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter and leaves the insulated warmth of their cobwood roundhouse to go tend to the animals. She feeds the dogs and lets the chickens out of the coop, and then ambles up the hill to smash the ice that has formed overnight in the sheep's drinking trough. Her daughter takes hay and feed to the horses, and her son lights a fire to kickstart the house’s solar thermal heating. 

A customer is picking up an order of willow this morning, so Cassandra bundles the branches her son cut yesterday into ten kilogram parcels and drags them down the drive for collection. She’s also got an Etsy order for a willow heart, so she soaks some twigs in gelid water and sacrifices sensation in her fingers to fashion the malleable wood into shape, before heading off to the nearest post office.

In the afternoon, she harvests leeks and other winter vegetables from the garden for dinner, and cuts up a batch of pumpkins to put in the freezer—to make space she takes out some redcurrants and starts the week-long process of making redcurrant jelly. That takes her to sundown, the end of her working day.

In the summer, there'll be hours more work to fit in: in the garden, managing the willow copse, running willow-crafts workshops, building cobwood outhouses. “Then there’s the maintenance of all the fencing, which is constant,” she says, with a deep sigh. “This life isn’t for the faint-hearted.”

In Wales, the average citizen uses almost three times their share of the world's resources. But Cassandra and her family are part of a groundbreaking scheme launched by the Welsh government in 2011 aiming to address that imbalance; allowing people to bypass tight planning laws to move to a protected area to live an ecologically sustainable lifestyle.

So far 46 individual smallholdings have signed up to the One Planet Development Policy (OPD) and its predecessor, Pembrokeshire’s policy 52, which require smallholders to build eco-homes and work the land they sit on. The policy aims to combat an array of problems: from rising temperatures to soil degradation, rural depopulation, a rampant housing crisis, and wasteful global supply chains. But at its most basic level, it’s an experiment to prove that, by limiting consumption and using resources wisely, ecologically responsible—and economically sustainable—development is possible, even in pristine environments.

Rare exemptions from strict planning laws 

“It was a bold and creative policy when it was introduced,” recalls Dr. Neil Harris, senior lecturer in statutory planning at Cardiff University. “You can’t build new homes in the open countryside, it’s a big no-no in the planning world—so it went against the grain. In Britain, there’s been a strongly protectionist approach to the countryside since World War II. It’s considered a place for recreation and food production, but not a place to live. It’s an attempt to protect nature from sprawl. Other European countries have similar containment policies.”

 The OPD policy in Wales allows rare exceptions to those stringent restrictions as long as the applicants can prove they can live within a set of defined environmental limits. To qualify for the scheme, there are four requirements: each household must use only their global fair share of resources, which has been calculated by the government as equivalent to 2.4 hectares of land. Applicants must show that within five years, this land can fulfill 65% of their basic needs, including food, water, energy and waste. They must come up with a zero-carbon house design using locally sourced and sustainable materials. And they must set up a land-based enterprise to pay the sort of bills—internet, clothes, council tax—that can't be met with a subsistence lifestyle.

Cassandra’s smallholding, Plas Helyg, where she lives with her husband and two children, is nestled in bucolic Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales. It’s part of the Lammas eco-village, a 70-acre site that had previously been earning £3,000 a year from sheep grazing but now serves as home to nine OPD households. The Lammas received planning permission in 2009 under the county’s Policy 52 for low-impact living, which was subsequently scaled up into the national OPD policy.

Plas Helyg gets all its electricity from its own solar array and the village’s shared hydro power. The lion’s share of the household’s heating comes from burning its own wood and the hot water comes from solar. Around 30% of the family’s food comes from their land; they grow vegetables and fruit, and keep chickens for eggs and sheep for meat and wool. All their water comes from a local spring.

The household’s land-based enterprise involves growing willow, and the family coppice around 2,500 trees each year in order to make baskets and sculptures or sell cuttings and bundles. For extra money, Cassandra holds willow-craft workshops for the local adult learning association, Learning Pembrokshire.

From a regulatory perspective, someone applying for OPD planning permission needs to first prove their smallholding will come within the OPD limits within five years. From that point, the household must prove its maintaining those standards by completing annual monitoring reports for the local council.

“In the annual report, we record how much food we’ve produced, how much willow we’ve sold, how many workshops I’ve done, etc,” Cassandra explains. “We estimate how much firewood, water and electricity we’ve used for the year. We record all the animals’ costs as well, and our transport costs and biodiversity actions (I’m a compulsive tree planter!). And at the end of that we provide two figures, using general market prices, for how much we’ve produced and how much we’ve consumed.” According to Cassandra, for a family of four, those “basic needs” amount to around £10,000 a year; meaning an OPD household would need to produce equivalent to £6,500 either “of or from the land”.

Low-impact, low-cost development 

Wales has had a strong sustainability agenda for over a decade now. In 2015, the government launched the Well Being of Future Generations Act, which required public bodies to think about the long-term impacts of their decisions. And in 2019, Environment Minister Lesley Griffiths declared a climate emergency.

“There can be tension between affordable living and sustainability, but in the OPD we have an exemplar of low-impact, low-cost development. That’s exactly the kind of thing we want to support,” says Julie James, Minister for Housing and Local Government.

For Cassandra, the ‘why’ is a little more complex. She was partly driven toward OPD by a “deep green philosophy” that derived from an agricultural upbringing in rural Connecticut and a subsequent degree in environmental science. The other factor was that her eldest son was born with a rare neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams Syndrome, which drove Cassandra and her husband Nigel to seek out a tight-knit community to help with their son’s social integration. Having moved their family yurt around different communes in Wales for a number of years, they had a chance meeting with Simon and Jasmine Dale from the Lammas and everything fell into place. “It sounded like the right balance between enough space and enough community,” Cassandra recalls.

Although its numbers remain small, the OPD policy is widely lauded as a success. It’s allowed a number of committed individuals to pivot to a more planet-friendly existence in a relatively affordable manner—Plas Helyg cost £30,000 all in. “There was never a particular statistical target for the policy,” says James. “You wouldn’t expect a rash of them all over the place as, by design, they were meant to be exceptions to the rules.”

But the policy hasn’t been without its critics. There has sometimes been a tension between the OPD newcomers and the incumbent locals of the area. In November, councillors in Carmarthenshire called for the OPD to be reviewed and potentially put on hold, citing resentment among locals who were finding it difficult to obtain planning permission to build homes on their land for their families. “Some of the early planning approvals for OPD smallholdings were at appeal, which suggests a degree of local political resistance to the policy,” adds Harris. 

“But generally these tensions have been solvable,” says James. And as the policy has gone on, there’s been an increasing acceptance of it. The OPD community has done a lot of outreach—lead by its volunteer advocacy group, the One Planet Council—to demonstrate their low impact, and to show that their new produce and services could provide a boost to local economies. “That’s won most people over,” says Harris.

Cassandra remembers the initial distrust of the Preseli Hills residents when the Lammas first arrived. “It’s  a very Welsh speaking area and there was a feeling we would dilute the local culture and language. There was also a sort of fear of gypsies: they thought our children would be stealing and our dogs running wild. But that completely disappeared in a year or two. It really helped that our children went to the local school and learnt Welsh.”

Driving change in Welsh housing policy

Looking forward, Harris sees a couple of potential challenges lying ahead for the policy. Firstly, a large portion of the 46 OPD smallholdings are approaching the end of their five-year build-up phase, “so it’ll be interesting to see what the councils will do with the households that haven’t been able to come within the limits,” he ponders. Also, he points out that OPD is a policy rather than legislative initiative, which means it could easily be taken out of planning policy if an incoming government isn’t in favour of it. 

But for now, the policy is “absolutely here to stay,” says James, and the current government is looking to apply some of the things it’s learnt from the programme to its wider housing plans. OPD has been part of the inspiration for the Innovative Housing Programme, where the government provides grants and loans to de-risk novel sustainable-building methodologies so that people can invest and scale them up. The government then uses the most successful methods in its standard social-housing construction and retrofitting.

The government also recently changed Welsh development policy to stipulate that all new developments on public land must consist of 50% social housing and 50% from a mixture of tenures, including cooperative housing, community land trusts (CLTs), and shared equity schemes. “There’s nothing to stop us doing a One Planet development as part of a CLT or a cooperative model,” James says excitedly. (CLTs are community-run, nonprofit landholding organisations that help low-income buyers obtain homes.) “Those kinds of affordable housing finance models would make the OPD lifestyle available to a wider segment of the population. There’s a CLT in Solva, Pembrokshire that’s doing just that.” 

Equally, the policy sets a perfect template for other small countries that have general constraints on development in their countryside, posits Harris. In England, the counties of Dartmoor and Cornwall are using the OPD framework to put in place similar initiatives, and countries such as Ireland and New Zealand are exploring the policy’s potential.  

For Cassandra, her OPD life has been a tough but fulfilling experience. She remembers the hardship of moving, with a 14-year-old disabled son and two small children, to an empty field with nothing to their name—no electricity, no shelter but an old BT engineering truck and a small yurt, and having to collect water with a wheelbarrow from a local tap. But would she do any of it differently? Not a chance.

“Once you’ve lived like this, there’s no going back. I love living close to the elements, I love living with the sun and the water as my electricity, I love growing my own food and trees, and being in touch with the earth. It’s such a nourishing and joyful existence.”

This article is being co-published by US-based solutions journalism magazine Reasons to Cheerful.