Stop plans to release more countryside for new development
Please sign the Charter and write to your MP by the deadline - Wednesday 9 October... Go to:http://e-activist.com/ea-The Government wants to introduce new planning guidance* that will put pressure on local councils to release more countryside and Green Belt for development. The Government are hoping that trying to increase housing in this way will lower the cost of housing but all our evidence shows this won't happen.
Countryside under threat from 650,000 new homes
Our latest research shows at least 500,000 new homes planned for greenfield sites. This could result in the loss of 150sq Km of irreplaceable countryside. Once it's gone, it's gone forever. Destruction on this scale is totally unnecessary when there are enough suitable brownfield sites for around 1.5 million homes. In the past year the number of houses proposed in the Green Belt has doubled to 150,000. We are concerned that the new guidance, in particular the so-called ‘affordability’ test, will make this threat much worse. The new guidance also promotes driving and parking in town centres. Planning should be prioritising public transport, walking and cycling, which make more efficient use of space.CPRE's charter to save our countryside is asking for previously developed brownfield sites to be developed first, which will help protect the countryside and regenerate our towns and cities. Please sign now - over 11,000 so far! https://e-activist.com/ea-
Giving communities a fair say
We are also concerned that the planning guidance doesn't give enough weight to draft local and neighbourhood plans. We're calling for a fair say for communities in our charter and are urging changes to the guidance to reflect this.Help us make our charter demands a reality
Together we can improve the final planning guidance so that we can protect the countryside, give communities a fair say and get the housing the country needs in the right places.But we must act quickly, as we only have until Wednesday 9 October to give our views. Please write to your local MP urging them to raise these concerns with Eric Pickles MP, the Secretary of State.
Write to your MP today - go to http://e-activist.com/ea-
* Information from the Government: https://www.gov.uk/government/
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The Independent, 30.9.2013http://www.independent.co.uk/
The developers’ charter spells doom for our green spaces This plan shows the government’s view of landscape as a commodity
The government is probably not quaking in its collective boots at the news that several leading authors, including Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson and Benjamin Zephaniah, are supporting a campaign to save Britain’s countryside from ill-directed development. The briskly urban view of these matters in Whitehall remains the same under the Coalition as it was under Labour, the only difference being that the current administration likes to utter warm words before sending in the bulldozers.
There is now one inescapable rule of development. Money talks. Whether planning to build a new supermarket or executive houses on a greenfield site, businesses are happy to deploy their financial muscle to batter local councils and residents into submission, while exploiting the planning system in precisely the way they accuse their opponents of doing. Localism, heralded as the chance for communities to control their own development plans, has delivered the opposite. Last year David Cameron promised that villages would not have “a great big housing estate plonked down from above”; since then, across the land, that is, almost to the letter, what has happened.
In that sense at least, the government’s new idea of biodiversity offsetting is consistent. The plans, currently at consultation stage (make your views known on the Defra website), would create new habitats, enhance existing ones and improve the environment – or so the government claims. In reality, they will do the opposite, putting the financial interests of developers and landowners before the landscape and those who use it.
The temptation is to worry most about what the authors, supporting the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s charter, call “the matchless beauty of England”: the plan, if adopted, would open national parks to development. The real threat, though, will be to the ordinary but much-loved green spaces within and surrounding cities, towns and villages, which until now have been protected by planning law which recognises their benefit to humans and the environment.
Biodiversity offsetting provides developers with the perfect business solution. To build over these areas, they would have to buy a lease on another piece of land designated as being suitable for environmental enhancement, and then pay the landowner a regular sum for its upkeep. It is a bonanza, in other words for developers and landowners. Builders will cash in. The value of land will soar in areas where offsetting is encouraged. On the other hand, people will have lost their parks or their favourite walks. Any area of “enhanced biodiversity” will be miles away – indeed it may not even be open to the public.
As for the environment, few initiatives illustrate more clearly the government’s view of landscape as commodity. Defra have blithely concluded that there will be no net loss to biodiversity and a net gain to nature. The peculiar assumption behind this claim is that landscape and habitat which has taken centuries to evolve can be created in an entirely new setting – that plants, insects and birds can be imported as if they were being introduced into a suburban garden for a TV makeover programme.
There is nothing wrong with companies being forced to invest in biodiversity to make up for the environmental cost of their activities but, if the pay-off is that they are then allowed to develop previously protected areas, it will be another government betrayal. The environment, and the human need for beauty and contact with nature will once again have been sacrificed to the greed of big business.
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