Planning and House Building

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

People in Wirral West care passionately about the environment and the green belt and green spaces that make Wirral West such a beautiful place. They care, too, about nurturing wildlife habitats and addressing the urgent issue of climate change. In some areas, flooding is an issue that really brings that urgency home. There are numerous campaigns to protect green belt and green spaces, including campaigns against proposals to build a golf resort in Hoylake, against building on ancient glebe land in Rectory Road in West Kirby and against the development on green belt right across Wirral West. I fully support my constituents in those campaigns.

Currently, people have a legal right to oppose specific developments when individual detailed development applications are submitted, but this Government seek to do away with all of that. The Government’s White Paper is a developers’ charter. It sweeps away the right of local people to challenge developments on their doorstep, tearing up democratic rights that have been there for over half a century. The Government have plenty of rhetoric about putting local communities at the heart of the new planning system, but they have failed to deliver—in fact, worse than that, they are taking rights away.

Instead of improving local accountability, this Government seek to take away the voice of local people. Constituents have written to me with their concerns that, under the Government’s proposals, while local people will have a say about whether their areas will be growth, renewal or protected zones, once those zones are set in place, they will have no say at all on individual developments. I share their serious concerns. As the Wildlife Trusts have pointed out,

“public engagement in planning tends to be when individual detailed development applications are submitted and the impact that these will have on local people, infrastructure and nature becomes clearer. Under the new system, public engagement at this point would not be possible.”

We on the Labour Benches oppose this attempt to prevent local people from formally objecting to inappropriate developments in their neighbourhood. We want to see local people given a bigger say on the development of their neighbourhoods, not less.

The Government have said that their reforms will ensure that

“Valued green spaces and Green Belt will continue to be protected for future generations, with the reforms allowing for more building on brownfield land.”

However, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England has warned that the Government’s proposals

“would weaken protection of green space designated for growth or renewal, and offer no additional safeguards for those earmarked for protection.”

According to the CPRE, the Government’s proposals give

“no consideration to the importance of undesignated green spaces near to where people live.”

There is no guarantee on protecting existing green spaces and green-belt land.

The Government’s proposals risk delivering a dystopian nightmare in the heart of our communities, with no regard to the consequences for the environment, flood risk, climate change or quality of life. Let us be clear: our country desperately needs new homes, and it needs those developments to be on sustainable and brownfield sites. The “Planning for the Future” consultation document refers to driving up the provision of affordable homes, but the Royal Institute of British Architects has described the Government’s proposals as “shameful”, adding that they will

“do almost nothing to guarantee the delivery of affordable, well-designed and sustainable homes.”

RIBA says that the proposals

“could also lead to the creation of the next generation of slum housing.”

Could there be any more indictment of the Government’s proposals? The Government must respond to the outcry from people right across the country and drop these reckless proposals.