26 Jan 2024
Campaigners are urging St Albans councillors to remove key Green Belt sites from the draft Local Plan before it’s too late.
Members of Team CLASH, Keep Chiswell Green and Greenbelt are insisting changes to the National Planning Policy Framework provide the perfect opportunity to amend the plan.
The revised NPPF, which was published on December 19, states at paragraph 61: “The outcome of the standard method is an advisory starting point for establishing a housing requirement.”
Paragraph 145 states: “Once established, there is no requirement for Green Belt boundaries to be reviewed or changed when plans are being prepared or updated… Authorities may choose to review and alter Green Belt boundaries where exceptional circumstances are fully evidenced and justified.”
Gee Smedley from Team CLASH, fighting to save the Green Belt in north St Albans from development, said changes to the NPPF meant a substantial shift in policy to further enhance Green Belt protections, and there are no very special circumstances requiring SADC to allow inappropriate and harmful development on Green Belt land.”
She explained: “If there is a redrawing of Green Belt for development purposes, this should be done with full consultation and approval via a Local Plan process, never in the context of a single planning application.
“From now, there would be little reason going forward to not be aware of these huge changes to Green Belt protection, described by a leading planning barrister as ‘the most significant since the post-war extension of the Green Belt policy’. This is the first time since Green Belt policy was introduced that there has been no requirement to statutorily review the Green Belt during Local Plan making cycles.
“We are deeply concerned that some councillors are not fully aware of the new position on Green Belt protection as laid out in the new NPPF. The Local Plan is formulating at a fast pace, but this must be a ‘sound’ plan if it is to pass the Planning Inspector’s assessments by June 2025. There is consensus building that SADC are already failing to put forward a sound Local Plan by generally ignoring the Green Belt constraint and looking to deliver unsustainable amounts of development without the infrastructure needed and without giving appropriate weight to the protection of Green Belt.
“Most of the land which is earmarked for Green Belt release is agricultural land (or capable of being so) in unsustainable locations, with no evidence base to support the release, this will not meet the criteria for the soundness test. So we ask, why is the council pursuing a strategy that will see substantial harm to Green Belt in areas that will affect residents and the environment the most and not adapting to the new NPPF, which would avoid this?”
Paul King from Greenbelt said: “At planning policy and climate committee meetings in the autumn, [council leader] Chris White repeatedly said that if there were changes to either the standard method of calculating housing need or the revised NPPF, he would take these into account and change the draft Local Plan to reflect this.
“Based on his previous statements, that should mean that sites included in the Regulation 18 process that are in the Green Belt, can now be removed from the draft Local Plan, and if not, the decision must be fully justified.
“If he has any inclination to save the Green Belt around the district, as he claimed in the autumn, he now needs to act and have these Green Belt sites removed from the draft Local Plan.”
Shirani Ledger-McCarthy from KCG added: “[SADC spatial planning manager] Chris Briggs promised councillors at the last planning, policy and climate committee meeting that they would remove all the Green Belt sites if the revised NPPF allowed them to, which it does.”
It is worth noting that changes to the draft Local Plan can only be made at the Regulation 18 consultation stage, which has now concluded, so SADC would have to revert to this position to make any amendments.
It is possible that they may try to avoid doing this because of the warning received last year from the Department of Levelling up, Housing and Communities about St Albans’ “persistent failure” to deliver a Local Plan. Secretary of State Michael Gove directed SADC to revise their Local Development Scheme [the timetable for delivery of a Local Plan] within 12 weeks of the publication of the revised NPPF.
However Mr Gove’s letter only says they have to submit their timetable by the stipulated date, nothing else, so arguably SADC has no reason to push ahead with building 15,096 houses – destroying 2,000 acres of Green Belt – when they don’t have to.
