Brownfield Development and Green Belt

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing this important debate.

It is vital that we protect the green belt because it brings huge benefits to people’s health and wellbeing, and has a major role in supporting wildlife habitats, allowing nature to flourish and mitigating the effects of climate change. I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) in pointing out that that is important for everybody, regardless of how much wealth they enjoy.

It is vital that we build the houses that people so desperately need on brownfield sites. We need to build truly affordable homes on brownfield sites that have high insulation values, and heat pumps and solar panels as standard, so that people can enjoy the benefits of moving into a high-quality home that is cheap to heat. Who would not want to do that?

The last “State of brownfield” report by CPRE, the countryside charity, published in November last year, found that the number of new homes that could be built on brownfield land has reached record levels, with more than half a million homes with planning permission waiting to be built. It revealed that

“over 1.2 million homes could be built on 23,000 sites covering more than 27,000 hectares of previously developed land.”

However, it also highlighted that despite that,

“development of the highest quality farmland has soared 1,000-fold in 10 years”.

As Tom Fyans, the interim chief executive of CPRE, said:

“You know the system is broken when hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people and families are on social housing waiting lists, many in rural areas. Meanwhile, across the country, tens of thousands of hectares of prime brownfield sites are sitting there waiting to be redeveloped.”

There is work to be done to ensure that the development that can take place on brownfield sites does indeed take place there.

The Secretary of State has said that as part of a “brownfield first” approach, Homes England, the Government’s housing and delivery arm, is spending millions on acquiring sites in urban areas to regenerate new housing, but it is no good acquiring the land if it then sits unused. It has been noted that there are often barriers to developing brownfield sites, one of which is the need for remediating works. Will the Minister outline whether she thinks the Government are doing enough to help local authorities to ensure that brownfield sites in their areas are viable for homes to be built on? Have the Government made any assessment of the amount of brownfield sites in the country that could be suitable for housing, but where significant remediation is necessary before development can take place?

Another CPRE report from 2021 pointed out that 793 applications were submitted for building on green belt land between 2009-10 and 2019-20, of which 337—just over 42%—were approved. That resulted in the building of more than 50,000 housing units on the green belt in that time, so for all the Government’s talk about protecting the green belt, it is clear much stronger protections are needed. The Government know that people care passionately about this. We need action now to make it easier for development to take place on brownfield sites and we need much stronger protection for the green belt. Without that, developers will simply carry on pushing to build on green belt sites.

With the absence of such protections, it is perhaps no wonder that developers feel emboldened when it comes to submitting applications for housing on green belt land. In my constituency, Wirral West, 61.9% of the land is green belt. It is a very beautiful part of the world and is clearly attractive to developers, given that in recent months we have seen four planning applications from Leverhulme Estates for homes on land in Barnston, Irby and Pensby. All were refused by Wirral Council last autumn, following a determined campaign against the proposals by local residents. I attended and addressed two public meetings—one at Greasby Community Centre and one outdoors in the village—in support of the many people in my constituency who oppose the destruction of the green belt. People will not forgive politicians who destroy the things that they love.

People in Wirral West value the green belt extremely highly, and they have made it very clear that they do not want to see it built on. I fully support them in this. Leverhulme Estates has appealed against Wirral Council’s decision to refuse these applications, and the appeals are now in progress. There is to be a public inquiry, which is distressing for local people, who want the local green belt to be preserved. A further application from Leverhulme Estates, for up to 240 homes in Greasby, is due to be decided by Wirral Council this evening, and the officer recommendation is to refuse that application as well. It was reported in the Wirral Globe last week that 6,000 people have signed petitions against the application, further demonstrating the strength of feeling in Wirral West, and wider Wirral, against development on the green belt. I have previously called on Leverhulme Estates to abandon its plans to build homes on the green belt in Wirral West, and I do so again.

Wirral’s local plan is currently going through its inspection process, but the plan, which was submitted to the Secretary of State in October last year, states:

“Sufficient brownfield land and opportunities exist within the urban areas of the Borough to ensure that objectively assessed housing and employment needs can be met over the plan period. The Council has therefore concluded that the exceptional circumstances to justify alterations to the Green Belt boundaries...do not exist in Wirral.”

Local people are extremely concerned about the actions of Leverhulme Estates and a series of other developers that are actively challenging that position.

[Jon Trickett]

Has my hon. Friend had a similar experience to ours, where the houses built on the green belt are often not accessible financially to local people? It adds insult to the injury of losing green belt land when their children or grandchildren cannot afford to live in the houses that are being built.

[Margaret Greenwood]

My hon. Friend points to a serious problem that we see in constituencies up and down the country. Developers want to build homes on Wirral West’s precious green belt, while local residents want to preserve it for the benefits its brings to health and wellbeing, as well as for environmental reasons. I stand with local residents in their fight to protect the green belt.

Brownfield land is not a static resource. Over time, some brownfield land leaves local authority registers as it is reused and new brownfield land enters the register as it becomes available. It continues to be a renewable resource, and every effort should be made to ensure that it is used to the greatest possible effect.

The Government should bring forward much stronger protection for the green belt as a matter of urgency. We need to see policy that drives the development of brownfield sites to build the truly affordable, zero-carbon homes the country so desperately needs.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing an incredibly important debate, as the other place continues its deliberations over the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. I worked alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on many amendments. We will start to see some big wins in protecting the countryside from development on green belt, open countryside and greenfield sites, which will push the Government much more towards their stated aim of brownfield development.

I will start by trying to define what we are talking about. It is not just the green belt. That is a technical term. The green belt is vital to many constituencies, but in mine, we have very little technical green belt. What we have is 335 square miles of open countryside. Ninety per cent of the land in the constituency that I am fortunate enough to represent in this place is agricultural.

I echo the points made by the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet when I say that it is important to remember when we debate these matters that there is a point to the countryside. It is not just there to be pretty and beautiful, although it is both of those things. It is not just there for people to enjoy for leisure: to walk, camp and do all of the things we enjoy the countryside for. It has specific purposes. First, obviously, to produce the food and drink that we all enjoy eating and drinking. It is part of the vital backbone to our national economy. It is also important to things such as water management, allowing drainage to run, rivers to flow and chalk streams to be vibrant and active. The more we build over open countryside, green belt and agricultural land, the greater the risk there is to those things.

I will give a couple of examples from my own constituency. When the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill was in Committee, I used the village of Ickford as an example when speaking to some of the amendments on flooding. The village is small and close to the Oxfordshire border with Buckinghamshire. Deanfield Homes has almost finished building nearly 90 homes on a site there —a site that has always been known to flood. It is on the flood plain of the River Thame.

Throughout the planning process, every excuse under the sun was accepted. Every clever scheme that was introduced for clever drainage solutions, or whatever it might be, was proposed and ultimately accepted by the Planning Inspectorate. Of course there are no surprises in the fact that that land continues to flood to this day, to the extent that the developers have even raised the level at which they are building the houses, with the fancy graphics used on the marketing materials even showing enormous slopes in the back gardens to allow water to run off, which of course goes into the existing and older properties in that village.

Only this week, I heard from a concerned constituent in the village of Haddenham, which has seen considerable development over recent decades, who reported a development at the back of their house on The Clays, off Churchway. The drainage pond that was put in as the developers started to dig foundations has been way above its natural level for some time. The amount of concrete that is going into those foundations is forcing the water towards their cul-de-sac, which is surrounded by walls made out of a cob unique to Buckinghamshire called wychert that, if it gets wet, quickly falls down.

We therefore have to ensure that we encourage the development of the houses and commercial properties that we need on brownfield and regeneration sites; I very much appreciate the soundbite that my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills came up with, namely “the regeneration generation”. It is important that we are cautious about the impact that development on the countryside has on flooding.

The big issue, of course, is food security. The more we build over our countryside—our farmland and prime agricultural land—the lower our self-sufficiency in food will drop. We are already down to about 60%. Of course we will never hit 100%, because there are lots of things that we like to eat and drink that cannot be grown in this country. Nevertheless, the more we build over our agricultural land, the more reliance we will have on imports, which is crazy.

I was pleased when, off the back of an amendment that I tabled to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, the Government and the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities agreed to put into the consultation on the new NPPF a reference that food production can be “considered” in the planning process for the first time. That is important and I urge the Minister to ensure that that change makes it through to the final NPPF. More than that, however, I urge her to ensure that planning authorities up and down the land are given a clear instruction that that is now available to them and they can use it.

A big flaw in the current NPPF—the previous NPPF, if we can call it that—is that the best and most versatile agricultural land was often walked all over and ignored by planning authorities and indeed the Planning Inspectorate. It would therefore be much appreciated by my constituents if the Minister could give some assurances in her response about the pressure that the Government will apply to planning authorities and the Planning Inspectorate on the provisions that will hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, be in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act and the new NPPF.

My last point is about consistency within the Planning Inspectorate, because if we are to achieve the ambition of the homes, commercial properties and solar panels that we need being on brownfield sites, or on rooftops in the latter case, rather than across our fields, we will need consistency in the planning process. I have a perverse case that has come to light regarding land—open countryside —that was always believed to be protected as a buffer zone next to the town of Princes Risborough in my constituency. Despite two previous decisions by the Planning Inspectorate saying that the land should be protected, a third planning inspector has now granted retrospective permission to a number of plots that have been developed on the site, so the residents of the hamlet of Ascot and the nearby hamlet of Meadle are up in arms. We need consistency from the Planning Inspectorate when it considers such matters and—if it can be achieved through the Minister’s good offices—we need that clarity to be pushed down, not only to planning authorities but to the Planning Inspectorate.

The facts speak for themselves. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) and others have mentioned, the plots are out there on brownfield land. The CPRE’s data is pretty clear: there is space for 1.2 million homes. The Government’s manifesto talked of an ambition to build 300,000 houses, whereas brownfield development can deliver 1.2 million without touching a blade of grass on the green belt—precious agricultural land, open countryside, nature reserves and so much more. I urge the Government to be bold in their ambition to move towards brownfield development.

[Margaret Greenwood]

The hon. Member has made the case very clearly. Does he agree that we need a much more positive way to talk about brownfield development? Wirral Council’s plans for the Wirral, which is a peninsula, involve the development of the east side of the borough, which has brownfield sites with fantastic views of the Liverpool city skyline. Brownfield sites can be incredibly exciting urban developments that people will want to live in, but we need the political drive to make sure that they happen. The design of many brownfield sites can be very attractive for people.

[Greg Smith]

I fundamentally agree with that proposition. Lots of brownfield sites offer spectacular views—whether of a skyline or out towards the countryside. The big challenge is political ambition, but we also need recognition within the tax system through the infrastructure levy to ensure that prospective developers do not look at a brownfield site and a comparator in the green belt or open countryside and say, “It is far cheaper for us to develop the countryside.” If we had a sliding scale to make it cost-neutral to the developer, so that they paid far less in the infrastructure levy or another form of taxation to develop a brownfield site, that would be a quick political win to get us to the brownfield development that I think all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken in the debate want to see.