The important thing for me is this campaign has had an effect and a good result.
I suspect that the Chancellor was asking business for things he could do to get the economy moving and they all listed the now-defunct planning regime as their top problem. Add in a grievous undersupply of affordable housing and a stagnant housing market, and it makes sense that a new planning framework would 'prioritise growth'. The failure was for the Government to take its eye off the countryside concern, and then to lash out when that failure was exposed.
As the title of this article suggests (with full credit to George Orwell) the quickest way for Clark and co to dig themselves out of the hole they had dug was to concede defeat, and it is no mean feat that they did so yesterday in a manner that has drawn praise from most quarters.
However the countryside must not go back to being ignored. According to figures from the Rural Shops Alliance, rural shops are closing at a rate of around 33 per month across the UK, with around 12% of independent shops closing in 2010 alone. Rural primary schools are closing at the rate of one a month because of a lack of affordable housing for families, and around 900 rural pubs closed last year. Figures from the Countryside Alliance found that rural drivers are paying over 4p more per litre at the pump than those in urban areas, and the cost of commuting to work adds at least an extra £17 onto the family bills each month. Rates of fuel poverty are much higher in the countryside and the average broadband speed pails in comparison to Britain's towns and cities.
Getting our planning laws right was a big issue to ensure we protect our green spaces. But the countryside is not just pretty fields and forests; it is a living, breathing environment and the people who live there need to be listened to on all the issues, not just those that make prime time.
Planning minister Greg Clark has said there should be a presumption against the building of more out-of-town shopping centres, and insisted the green belt would continue to be protected, as he announced the biggest shakeup of the planning system for more than half a century.
The National Planning Policy Framework replaces more than 1,000 pages of planning rules put in place by successive governments with a single, 50-page document intended to simplify the system and kickstart more housebuilding and other development to create jobs.
The new guidelines, which came into force immediately, are built around a "presumption in favour of sustainable development", which planners are told should balance the needs of the environment, economic sustainability, social needs, good governance and sound science.
In concessions to opponents of last year's draft document, the new framework stipulates that brownfield sites should usually be developed before greenfield sites, and town centres before out-of-town sites. It recognises the "intrinsic value and beauty" of the wider countryside, specifically protects playing fields, and bars "garden grabbing" for development.
:thumbup: Happy days :thumbup:
Hands Off Our Land: campaigners hail a 'good day for anyone who cares about the countryside'
Campaigners have welcomed the Government’s decision to water down planning reforms that threatened unrestrained building across swathes of the English countryside.
Groups including the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England expressed relief that ministers had listened to their concerns after months of argument.
Bloody unions, I shit them :sad:
I believe this is just one more step on the road to privatisation, giving them a chance to look profitable to any buyer.
School playing fields will be given special protection against being sold off for housing developments, after ministers agreed to water down their controversial planning reforms.
A new city could be built in the Midlands alongside the controversial High Speed 2 rail line as part of a drive to tackle the country’s housing shortage.
The transport project’s chief engineer said up to 100,000 homes could be built on green belt land.
The beauty of our landscapes,
the particular cultures and traditions that rural life
sustains – for me, our countryside is what makes
Britain great.
Here here, lets hope he means it and does his best to see it right
The UK’s 1,900 rural petrol stations could be “completely wiped out” in a decade by rising fuel prices, experts have warned.
The price of petrol hit record highs last week, with the cost of filling a large family car with unleaded petrol reaching almost £100. The price is set to rise even further in August when the Government increases fuel duty.
Brian Madderson, the chairman of RMI Petrol, the forecourt association, said that hundreds of rural forecourts a year could be forced to close due to the rises.
This is because while supermarket-owned petrol stations in towns and cities can afford to absorb the price rises or even offer price cuts, small independently-owned rural petrol stations can not.
Petrol in the countryside is already up to 8 pence a litre more expensive than in towns because of the high cost of having it delivered.
Mr Madderson estimated that up to 250 rural forecourts could be driven out of business by the high cost of petrol each year between now and 2022.
Shame really
A simple stat for you to start: there are four mentions of 'rural' in the Budget document released by the Treasury today and 13 for 'cities'.
Although there is absolutely nothing empirical to derive from that fact, it does serve to highlight that the budget George Osborne delivered today was not one for the countryside.
Sure there were a few fillips thrown to the rural economy to keep it ticking over - extending mobile coverage to 60,000 rural homes and revealing the location of the Rural Growth Networks announced at the Autumn Statement last year - but overall it's clear that the chancellor was focussed primarily on urban growth.
In some cases that focus becomes faintly ludicrous. In December 2011 the Countryside Alliance conducted research on the pace of the Government's £500 million rural broadband roll-out. Using FOI requests we established that the four pilot areas announced by George Osborne in his first pre-budget report in 2010 had barely received any cash from the Treasury for their broadband projects, and certainly hadn't started producing faster connections for residents.
Now, 18 months on from that announcement, rather than tackling the snail pace of the roll-out in the countryside, George Osborne has instead found £100 million to make the very decent speed of broadband in 10 UK cities 'ultra-fast'.
Yet again, the Chancellor decided to set new planning regulations as a tool for 'growth', rather than as a sensible simplification of a set of rules that had grown out of control. The revised 'National Planning Policy Framework' will be announced next Tuesday, but (as I wrote here last week) it seems that the much-hated and totally unnecessary 'presumption in favour of sustainable development' is here to stay.
But the most painful and ill-judged strike at the heart of the rural economy is the Chancellor's decision not to reverse the planned fuel rise in August. Countryside Alliance research in February found that drivers filling up in rural petrol stations are already paying on average 4p more than their urban counterparts for every litre, sometimes rising as high as seven or eight pence in certain areas. To not prevent that cost from rising even further basically wipes out the savings from other initiatives such as raising the personal tax allowance in one fell swoop.
The countryside is used to having its problems ignored - for 13 years a Labour Government whose MPs were almost exclusively concentrated in urban areas did just that at budget after pre-budget. But people in rural areas can legitimately have hoped for a little more from the Coalition today.
