Planning System Reforms: Wild Belt Designation

Jo Gideon Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) on securing this important debate. I will be brief and focus my contribution on public transport and the inclusion of waterways in any wild belt.

I have had excellent meetings with Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, which is a force of nature in itself. I know from its briefing that wild belt could happily overlap with other designations, such as national park and SSSI. However, we perhaps need further clarity on what wild belt designation would mean for mothballed and protected transport routes. A wild belt that can be enjoyed by people reconnecting with nature is surely one that needs to be connected to public transport corridors.

My bid, along with colleagues, to reopen the Stoke to Leek line is compelling precisely because of the transformative opportunity it presents to reconnect urban communities with the wider countryside. It will involve clearing quite a lot of vegetation and decades-old trees on the old mothballed line, but the net socioeconomic benefit will be substantial, on top of the environmental benefit of modal shift from road to rail.

I also want to see Etruria station reopened and built back better as an interchange with local buses and, crucially, with the existing blue-green corridor of the Trent-Mersey canal, which is on the national cycle network. I want to go further. My reverse Beeching bid for Etruria includes exploring the rewilding of Fowlea brook as a new blue-green corridor running through Etruria valley. The brook runs through concrete channels and culverts, and it still suffers the effects of centuries of heavy industry, even though it need not and should not.

The Environment Agency is already investing in flood protection in the brook by increasing its capacity in Stoke town, but I want the ambition of rewilding Fowlea brook to match what we are delivering on the River Trent. I said in my maiden speech that we need “more Trent in Stoke-on-Trent” and I am delighted that we are getting on and doing that. The Sunrise project has reintroduced meanders, canopy shade and spawning grounds to the Trent. The BBC’s “Countryfile” was hugely impressed with Trentside walks. Trentside walks will undoubtedly make Stoke-on-Trent an even better place to live, visit and study.

We could have a wild belt walk all along the urban Trent, levelling us up and even exceeding the ambition shown by central London’s Thames path. Causley brook and tributary brooks through Bentilee and Eaton Park could be superb trout-spawning grounds and walking routes, with a few interventions, and the route along Foxley brook through Abbey Hulton could be a much more attractive blue-green walking route if it were rewilded out of concrete and restored to the glory that attracted the abbey’s monks to the confluence of the Foxley and the Trent in the first place. In short, a focus on blue-green routes would mean rewilding for nature, for residents and for the leisure tourism economy. Waterways should be a priority.