I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of brownfield development and protecting the green belt.
I thank right hon. and hon. Members, from both sides of the House, for being here today to support my debate. I appreciate that this is a Thursday afternoon just before a recess, and by-elections are going on across the country. I am sure that Members have many pressing commitments in their diary, so I am impressed by the number of colleagues here to support me today. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on her recent appointment to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities; I am pretty certain that she knows a little bit about the topic that I will be speaking to today.
It gives me great pleasure to open this debate on our green belt. The national planning policy framework states:
“The Government attaches great importance to Green Belts.”
I very much hope that that is the case. The recent new clause 21 to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill—so ably put forward by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), who is with us today in Westminster Hall, and by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), who is unable to be with us today, to strengthen the green belt’s protection against speculative development—would certainly help the Government with that stated objective.
However, CPRE, the countryside charity, rightly identifies that
“the Green Belt has never before faced such serious threat as large sections of land disappear under new developments.”
It is worth remembering the purpose of the green belt in our communities. It serves five purposes: to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas; to prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another; to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment; to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and to assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land. Despite the fact that we have those protections in place, however, they too often count for very little with developers who seek to drive a coach and horses through planning policies to take what is the easy answer for them but the unpalatable option for so many of our constituents.
In my own constituency in the west midlands, we were previously part of a consortium with three neighbouring local authorities to produce our local plan, known as the “Black Country Plan”. It proposed, across the borough of Walsall, a staggering 7,100 homes, of which 5,500 were proposed for my constituency of Aldridge-Brownhills, primarily on green-belt sites. Nearly every one of the proposed sites broke the central link of one of the five purposes of our green belt—that is, to prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another. Indeed, one of the central themes throughout the consultation process, which came up time and again from my constituents, was their objection to having our community subsumed to become a suburb of a Greater Birmingham. After the first round of consultation on the proposed plan, which more than 7,000 households from my constituency opposed, the answer, at stage 2 of the process, was not to take on board the comments of constituents such as mine in Aldridge-Brownhills; it was to come back with more proposals for yet more housing on even more green-belt sites.