Keep Britain healthy – protect our green spaces

May 12 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

I REALISED the problem as soon as my wife asked why on earth was I muttering and grinding my teeth so vigorously.

Then I knew I’d have to break the only New Year’s resolution that I can remember making. Namely banging on about the threat to the Green Belt in this column.

But I’m sorry, I can’t hold back any longer. I fully realise the possible charge of hypocrisy, as this column itself constitutes a built-up area, completely covered without so much of a blade of grass sprouting out between the stony opinions and the cracks in my arguments.

These few pitiful column inches of densely inhabited sentences, paragraphs and subordinate clauses leave no room even for the most basic of starter sentences. But they are nothing compared to the 30,000 acres of so-called permanent Green Belt that have been lost over the last decade. Protected areas around towns specifically designated to stop urban sprawl have gone under some 45,000 homes – an area the size of the city of Bath. An irony when the latest figures show that 40% of the newly completed flats in Liverpool lie empty.

Returning to the national situation, this building frenzy is merely the beginning, not the end, as the Government aims to build 3m more homes by 2020, which will inevitably remove more of the Green Belt.

Latest findings by the Campaign to Protect Rural England reveal that, since 1997, more than 2,700 acres a year is gobbled up by development, causing “serious erosion”. Yet the Green Belt is regarded as one of the most successful European planning schemes and was set up from the 1930s to the 1950s, now covering some 13% of the country.

If ever politicians want a real answer to their oft-heard plea that people are disengaged from politics, we need look no further than the example of Gordon Brown, who pledged to “robustly” defend the Green Belt, only for its disappearance to accelerate during the Labour Party’s tenure.

Worse still is the quango Nature England that we, the tax-payer, bankroll to allegedly protect the environment. This perfidious organisation has described the Green Belt as “outdated” and called for it to be converted into “something that adds value.” No, I have not the foggiest what such blethering means either, other than that it is for the chop, of course.

A designated enemy of this column is Gordon Brown’s favourite economist Kate Barker, an officious bureaucrat who produced reports about carving up the Green Belt, backed by other suspiciously concurring reports. Their invidious concept is that wedges of development will be allowed to be built around trunk routes.

This is like discredited pre-war strip development that stretches along arterial roads, blocking views of the landscape, but only much bigger and, therefore, far worse. The post-war Town and Country Planning Act (which included Green Belts) halted this waste of land.

In an utterly despicable, undemocratic move, the Government has also stripped local authorities of planning controls and given them to unelected regional boards, which is a shift widely seen as preparation for Green Belt development.

This is all about money, of course, to appease squealing developers making a fast buck while the nation suffers losing rural areas forever. The CPRE also warns that a depression will mean the Government acquiescing further to developers to stimulate the economy at all costs.

Because what has not changed over the last 70 years is that, once lost, countryside never comes back.

It always struck me that the huge popularity of the National Parks – another piece of planning legislation concomitant with the Green Belts – means that we need more of them. Rather than urbanising yet more countryside, we should be looking at the adaptable features of the rural landscape and apply as much as we can to areas that need upgrading. Of course, we can hardly introduce dramatic scenery where there is none, but the brownfield grot-spots could certainly do with a pastoral make-over.

There’s one other certainty: no hope is offered whatsoever by the Government. Of the CPRE survey results, planning minister Iain Wright was blunt in his dismissal: “This analysis is flawed and one-sided.”

Brilliant.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk