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Please note that as part of the recent CLA restructuring the counties of the East Midlands region have been divided between the new CLA East region and the new Midlands region. Consequently, existing news releases from the East Midlands are now only available on this website as archived articles. Members based in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire are now part of CLA East and should go to CLA East News for releases in their region. And members in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland are now part of the Midlands and should go to Midlands News for releases in their region. Rural watchdog says report won’t protect Green Belts Rural watchdog, the CLA, says a report on Green Belts published by Natural England and the Campaign to Protect Rural England could do more harm than good. The organisation says the report is wrongly premised and appears to be suggesting that established planning policy on Green Belts should be used to achieve environmental aims by the back door. They're concerned that the suggestions will instead have a detrimental effect.
CLA East Midlands rural expert, Andrew Shirley, said: "Planning policy for Green Belts is set out by the Government and as this report states there are five purposes of Green Belt designation, each stemming from the fundamental aim of Green Belt policy which is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open.
"The aims of Green Belt policy do include references to 'safeguarding the countryside', but that is to protect from encroachment and is not to provide landscape and/or environmental protection.
"The quality of the landscape is not relevant to the inclusion of land within a Green Belt or its continued protection. It is the purposes of including land which is of paramount importance, and these purposes take precedence over other land use objectives."
The Derbyshire based expert added that the suggestions in the report threatened to weaken Green Belt policy because landscape and nature conservation issues were better dealt with by other policies rather than by the insensitive "presumption against" approach that is mandatory in GB policy decisions.
It would imply that areas which do not offer such assets need not have Green Belt protection, whereas many have no landscape, nature conservation or heritage value. There were mixed messages in that while renewable energy is cited as a benefit, one or other authors of the report might well oppose a bio fuel energy plant in a Green Belt.
Finally, Mr Shirley said the CLA is disappointed that Natural England, a government funded and supported agency, had associated itself with a report involving one outside organisation but hadn't offered other organisations the opportunity to co-operate in producing a balancing report. |
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