Deputy Leader of Stockport Council, Cllr Mark Roberts, has spoken out at the latest guidance from the government over the latest legal guidance over the newly coined term ‘grey belt’. The new classification will require councils across the country to reassess their Green Belt land and force them to release much of it for development to meet Labour’s massively increased housing targets.
“With this developers’ charter to concrete over the Green Belt, Labour have decided to simply rename much-valued Green Belt as the ‘grey belt’ and hope that residents will shrug their shoulders. It isn’t just previously developed land, as they had originally promised.
“The Labour government are so hell-bent on concreting over our green spaces that they are even proposing changes to the statutory consultees for planning. This includes removing Sport England from the list, who have consistently advocated for the protection of our open spaces where sports are played, despite us facing a national obesity crisis.
“Our greenspaces give us a huge improvement to our quality of life, as well as critical ecological benefits, regardless of what a London-based Labour government arbitrarily decides should be its label.”
The guidance was given as an update to the government’s National Planning Policy Framework. Councils expected the clarification to be given late last year, it was then promised in January but it still didn’t arrive until two months later, leaving far less time now to draw up our Local Plan.
“Labour’s heavy-handed approach to planning has caused chaos in councils up and down the country, alongside joy in the offices of developers. We have now been forced to rip up the plan we devised last summer because the government has doubled our housing target and tied our hands behind our back. They have completely changed the game. It is sad to see that Labour have fallen into the same trap as the previous Conservative government – they now sit squarely on the side of developers, not residents.
“Our draft Local Plan was a brownfield first solution that would have built the much-needed homes where they were needed in Stockport. Labour have cast that aside and are instead trying to give developers free reign to build on the most profitable land available. This means green spaces will be bulldozed, whereas the eyesores that are brownfield sites will remain untouched for generations. They have disregarded local voices and rigged the game in favour of developers. They have called their planning work a ‘comprehensive modernisation of Green Belt’, but it feels more like a national review and contraction of Green Belt by the back door.”
