13 June 2022
Robin Bishop writes:
Today the LGBC is holding its AGM, reconstituting itself as a Community Interest Company (CIC) and re-launching its website. These are necessary steps to enable us to oppose more threats of development in the Green Belt than ever – often proposed in draft Local Plans.
Meanwhile, the Government’s Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (LURB) is working its way through Parliament. There are frustrating inconsistencies between Government and Council policies and decisions made by the Planning Inspectorate in parts of the Green Belt. The LURB is our best hope for bringing coherence to the planning system and reinforcing protection of the Green Belt. But it contains some worrying flaws. Several have been recently identified by Theresa Villiers MP, a staunch advocate of the Green Belt:
“It does not rein in the planning inspectorate, it has no new protections for greenfield sites, and it does not reduce or disapply housing targets.
"The Bill has a welcome focus on better design, but this does not resolve the problems which I and my colleagues have been raising. Loss of precious green space remains problematic, even if what is built on it is well designed. A block of flats is still a block of flats, no matter how tastefully it is presented. And in one very important respect, the Bill worsens the problems I have been highlighting on the erosion of local control over planning.
"Clauses 83 and 84 of the Bill empower the Secretary of State to set Development Management Policies at a national level which will over-ride policies in local plans. This is a major change in planning policy because it departs from the long-held planning principle that primacy should be given to locally elected councillors making decisions on the basis of an approved local plan.
"This change is a survivor from the flawed Planning for the Future White Paper. It amounts to a power-grab by the centre and I am calling for it to be dropped. The Secretary of State has hinted that he accepts the need for some rebalancing of the relationship between councils and the planning inspectorate, so that local decisions are given greater weight.
"We need to scrap the mandatory housing targets which have done so much to undermine those powers. I will be urging Ministers to use this Bill as an opportunity to bring an end to the practice whereby predatory developers can use these targets, and the five-year land supply obligations they impose, to inflict overdevelopment on unwilling communities.
"If they go under the bulldozer, our green fields are lost forever. If suburban areas like my Chipping Barnet constituency are built over by high rise blocks of flats, they are damaged and changed forever. Ministers are clear that they are willing to listen. So I very much hope that before the LUR Bill completes its way through Parliament, we will see it amended and strengthened so that we clip the wings of an increasingly over-mighty planning inspectorate, we restore the primacy of local decision-making, and we safeguard the places in which our constituents live.”