Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, whether the Government has any plans to widen the duty to cooperate to include a requirement for councils to consider together the long-term strategic function of the Green Belt and not proceed only on a site by site basis.

Many areas of Green Belt cross local authority boundaries, and the creation or alteration of Green Belt has always been a strategic matter on which all local authorities involved liaise and work together. The National Planning Policy Framework clearly expects local authorities to ensure that Green Belt is consistent with the Local Plans of adjoining areas, and that Green Belt land continues to fulfil the purposes of Green Belt.

In the Housing White Paper, Fixing our broken housing market, we proposed that a local authority should be able to adjust a Green Belt boundary only when it can show that it has examined all other reasonable options for meeting identified development needs. These options are:

• making effective use of suitable brownfield sites and the opportunities offered by estate regeneration

• the potential offered by land which is currently underused, including surplus public sector land where appropriate

• optimising the proposed density of development

• exploring whether other authorities can help to meet some of the identified development requirement

My Department has been analysing the consultation responses on this proposed clarification, and will announce our conclusions as soon as possible in 2018, when we will also issue a revised National Planning Policy Framework.