Greenbelt Development

Again just a brief blog to share some figures with you about the UK Governments attempts to meet their manifesto statement of being the greenest government ever.

As many appreciate land not built on carries out essential functions for everyone in Britain for example it provides food, pollinators*, flood mitigation, carbon storage, cooling of urban areas etc etc.

Living on a crowded island you know that there is not much room and therefore to lose the functions of green land in all it's form is actually to increase management costs to the taxpayer in to the future and probably in perpetuity in terms of flood management, health, climate mitigation and so on.

People keep saying there is a housing shortage but I have NEVER seen any statistics on this, but the Government bought what the private developers have said and claimed. Greenbelt land will always be a developers choice. Greenbelt connects with urban services and therefore it is cheaper to build on and is attractive to market as it sits in a semi-rural area, which is a huge irony.

So to the stats:

In 2009-2010 there were 2,258 planning permissions granted for housing on greenbelt land.

2014-15 that figure on greenbelt loss rose to 11,977 (for some reason, probably greed led, developers are getting approvals but not building as construction is flat in the UK).

Government say building on greenbelt should be in 'exceptional circumstance'.

Government will say local authorities have the decision making power as to where homes should be built through Neighbourhood Plans, but let's be honest here, Neighbourhood Plans are just a cover for ill consider decisions forced by the building and construction lobby.

Government said the most treasured and protected land will be restricted when it comes to new build. North Wessex Downs area of Outstanding Natural Beauty has proposals for 1,400 new homes for example.

Much of the data here comes from File on 4 but the most telling quote comes from Hugh Ellis, Head of Policy at the Town and Country Planning Association who is quoted as saying 'I think overall planning can be best described as being very broken [and since 1945] planning has [not] been as demoralised, as underfunded and lacking in strategic guidance as it is now'. He suggests Government take no strategic stance, nor leadership in planning.

We effectively live in an era of willingly uncontrolled and profit led development.

*You will also note that the UK Government, the greenest ever, is allowing crops that kill pollinators to be planted in Autumn 2015.

New Environmental Contracts

A brief blog, an observation on our present Government Manifesto promise:

"over the next five years, we will put in place strong protections for our natural landscapes" and "we will protect the green belt, and maintain national protection for [statutory protected areas] and other environmental designations.

The reality must be being planned for after HS2 as there will be the direct loss to 27 Ancient Woodlands (an other environmental designation) and indirect damage to 21 other ancient woods (total of 48 lost or damaged).

They should be held more responsible for their manifesto promises. Governments seem very keen to have 'new contracts' with business. Well, isn't it time the environment sector had a new contract with Government?

The Times, behind the times, but catching up is good. Тајмс, иза времена, али сустиже је добро.

Be Sure to Understand:

This land above has no value socially, culturally, environmentally or aesthetically.

It can, nay must, be forsaken and destroyed for housing and offices.

You have no right to oppose or appeal.

Once developed the UK will PROGRESS!

Once developed it will have a value and you'll be grateful for the banks may smile down upon you!

The noble Times news paper finally awoke to the risks of biodiversity offsetting over the last few days. Glad they could join us. Better late than never. Biodiversity Offsetting is coming to a green field near you and journalists have awoken. 

Of course Owen Patterson was straight out there saying that it would be highly unlikely that Ancient Woodland would be destroyed for development. Well lets take in to consideration:

1. This Government is already deconstructing planning control, so how would they know?

2. The vanity project HS2 will be destroying tens of ancient woodlands.

3. Back in the summer the Government sanctioned 32ha of Ancient Woodland destruction at Oaken Wood in Kent.

4. The Government has said nothing about the proposed motorway service station at Junction 35 of the M1 in Sheffield that would destroy an Ancient Woodland. 

Sorry Owen, your platitudes do not wash, at all. You can not be trusted with the environment, and even if you could be trusted just protecting Ancient Woodland is not good enough. With so many empty properties and brownfield sites there is no excuse for any greenfield loss in any circumstances.

Lord Wilson reckons 92% of the UK is not developed so a loss here, a loss there is not significant. So the implication is that it is fine that developers can roll ahead until the only green space left is SSSI and AONB.....is that a UK you want?

Yet still the Lobbying Bill progresses. Just in case you do want to say what is right for you and your part of the UK the Government will gag you in any case. The Lobbying Bill quite shamelessly seeks to stop those nasty charities and campaign groups from lobbying MP's, yet treats private lobbyist differently, those private sector lobbyist involved in destroying your environment, or involved in the arms trade, or involved in tobacco or alcohol that costs the Governments purse so so so much. These companies can buy in anti-democratic lobbying firms and still access Government, yet Cancer Research, RSPB, RSPCC etc (with all their nasty ways and political bias) would not be able to Lobby! 

The Government seem to think that it's the charities and campaigners who are spending the £2 billion/year on lobby-firms and not the private sector. Really. Enough of my words, what does Bishop of Oxford Lord Harries say of the bill? 

"profoundly undermining the very fabric of our democracy". 

Angela Eagle calls it 'sinister' and I agree.

The Conservative Government Manifesto said “Vote blue, go green” and this was their environmental mantra back in 2010. The manifesto said they had the

“responsibility to be the greenest government in our history”.

The Government has sought to reform the planning structures that have been developed through the wisdom of time, introduced the vile hypocrisy of biodiversity offsetting and now wants to gag the complainants - hectares upon hectares of greenbelt is threatened with infested rancid development, there are protest groups springing up like Japanese knotweed across the country, many lose the fight or will to fight through lack of legal and professional strength and the continuing name calling of opponents. They have no hope in the future.

All my years of environment enhancement is for nothing.

Does the Environment have any meaning to Politicians - No! - Да ли има било какво значење животне средине политичарима - Не!

The Government and it's spineless co-voters of all parties are playing a game that is humiliating us all, they are laughing at us. one example. HS2 Environmental Statement 50,000 pages, 8 weeks to read, digest, understand and comment. Compared with the much needed in depth consultation for tractor speed limits at a weighty 24 pages in two documents which has 12 weeks consultation. I have tried to resist being course, but actually this Government and it;'s co-voters don't give a toss what you think and even less than that when it comes to the environment, landscape and society. So long as over-paid executives can have an extra 40 mins to finish Sudoku Extreme over a cafe and cinnamon swirl to hell with any other consideration. Enough for now, but there is more yet!

Austerity - The Osbourne Way

George Osbourne today announcing £11.5 billion of cuts mainly focused on your local Government while also forcing through parliament
a Bill which authorises preparatory expenditure on a railway (HS2 - London's Train or the Private Sectors 1st Class Charter) without specifying further detail of the route and a limit on expenditure.

How austere is that?

Your local services are being cut to pay for a vanity project for London.


For the detail: http://www.dodsmonitoring.com/downloads/Bills2013/High_Speed_Rail_(Preparations)_Bill.pdf


STOP PRESS a day after writing this the predicted expenditure on HS2 jumped by £10 billion (again!). Good austerity measures! Strange that it is almost how much your local government are losing....

Myth Busting on Housing Supply - Мит пући због стамбене понуде

Yet another bit of fun and games from the development sector, oh it's so difficult for them in the times of global recession.

The UK Government has been very keen to inform us how inefficient local authorities are and how their planning bureaucracy has made life oh so difficult for developers.

In the press this week we learnt that actually local authorities have been progressing planning applications for housing, but the developers have then not developed the land!!

Behind this is quite a naughty game developers are playing with our greenbelts.

We are constantly told by political parties who are lobbied by the developers that there is a shortage of housing supply so we MUST build more. Government have as a consequence of this mis-information deregulated the planning process to the point of a rubber stamp exercise as the presumption to develop now holds sway. Thus more applications are expected from the development sector and some are developed, the rest are 'land banked' as assets, because the local authority rubber stamp places a real financial premium on that land. While the land is banked it is locked from other (perhaps better uses) and becomes under-utilised, neglected and unmanaged. Nevertheless the development companies still have a piece of land to develop or sell on with inflated prices. Land becomes an over-inflated asset for the company shareholders to speculate on. This artificially high value is also viewed as an asset by accountants thereby enabling developers to look in better business shape than they are. Land values in the accounting systems should be valued on their present state (ie underused/derelict) rather than on the speculative value of land holding development hope-value.

The land remains locked, feeding the myth that land supply is too low for the alleged housing needs of the country, the more scarce land becomes the higher value it has and this in turn perpetuates the myth that there is not enough land to build on. This then leads developers to say land supply is short and it's all the local authorities fault while they sit on hectares of land creating a future enhanced value for their shareholders.

Ludicrous. All housing applications should be put on immediate hold while Government assesses the extent of land banking by development companies.

 

Highly technical MS Visio flow chart of what the rascals are up to.

How will you feel when the developer comes to a green belt like yours and says it is our moral duty (see previous blogs) to allow housing to ruin our green inheritance? How much will it annoy you that when they will rail road through their planning application with scant regard for local choice and democracy that they then sit on the land for 10 years as a grossly inflated asset, blighting the land but speculating on its falsified hope-value?

Not so good I suspect.

By the way, in my blog Localism and the Developer (below) the council voted through the proposals that were so vehemently opposed by local people. The local paper even held a vote and 82% voted against the proposals, yet the council approved the proposal, even having the impertinence and arrogance to say that they saw the papers poll as unrepresentative! They probably saw the march as unrepresentative too and all those objection letters. Councillors failed their duty to serve the people who voted them in to power. Developers continue to own local democracy, not you or I. It is most vexatious!

Have we sold our souls? Consevation (dis)credits. Да ли смо продали наше душе? Цонсеватион (не) кредита

Apologies for the lack of posts. Moved house again and consequently busy, and before you ask I didn't buy one on a desecrated greenfield site, I bought a recycled shop that's a 150 years old that used to be a cobblers and corsitiers. We are recycling in the housing market. Builders are renovating some parts of the house, so in mid recession we support local business and the local economy.

Since the 21st April I have been keen to blog, for there is sinister news afoot from the world of 'development'.

On that Sunday the Times published a story entitled 'Developers can pay to rip up nature'. For many years the environment sector has striven with tenacity and intellect to demonstrate to Government and others that nature has an economic value whether that be an inferred value or a direct functional value. In the past we have used this argument to justify funding for the delivery of environmental work. The Newlands Project strongly demonstrated that non-environmentalists can see that the green environment can assist in development and economics. The North West Regional Development Agency would not have spent £50 million with the Forestry Commission and Community Forests without a realisation that the environment had a role to play in inward investment and image of a region.

It now seems we danced with the devil.

The devil, in the guise of the UK Government, is now heading for an interpretation of these values as an environmental offset for development. The direction now seems to be that any development could happen so long as a developer puts money aside for 'conservation credit' - a thorough juxtaposition if ever there was one! The proposals for the biodiversity off-setting suggests habitats can be disemboweled from locations and established on farm land elsewhere. I am sure the farmers who lose production as a consequence will be falling over themselves to give land away from food production to conservation....

Furthermore there seems to have been zero consideration to domestic food security and land supply under this proposal.

Some conservation groups are now desperately back tracking by saying it is difficult to put meaningful values on conservation assets, yet we have used this to fund environment work in the past! The problem lies in the fact that we have waltzed with Beelzebub and now we pay. It is however just another ruse for Government and Developers to avoid planning and sustainable development issues. As said before little boxes for us to live in must be built at all costs, apparently.

So how will this con-trick work, well Government reckon they can assign generic values to meadows, woodlands and the like so, according to the Times, a meadow maybe worth £10,000/ha and a woodland £40,000ha and a developer will have to quantify how much of these habitats they will destroy and make a payment to the laughably named Environment Bank as the leading broker in this scam. I am looking forward to seeing how these valuations take place. A scrub woodland on the edge of London must have a different value from and Ancient Woodland Site on the HS2 route of destruction. Who will assess this, who will agree, will the developers negotiate it downwards to a low value in any case?

Indeed the rows have started already, I dare anyone to logically put a value to Nightingale habitat who works in the development sector or indeed the environment sector. The Kent Wildlife Trust have one heck of a job on their hands in attempting to credit the conservation value of Lodge Hill (see http://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/what-we-do/planning/lodge-hill). More here too: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/29/nightingales-lodge-hill-mod-site. The ignorance of non-environmentalists knows no bounds, the council says it can move Nightingales to any new woodland created out of the Conservation Con Credits, however that new woodland will be too young to provide the correct habitat and how do you tell a small brained avian that it needs to redirect the post!

Sadly I think we have lost, the Environment sector did engage the devil and this is our payback. Fools we have been, conned by Con' Credits.

It's so sad, but I hope this at least leaves you smiling and warm (unusually - thanks to the Daily Mail, it's not often you'll read me write those words!):

'That was wonderful, darling. Did the earth move for you too?'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332433/Mac--The-Governments-housing-policy.html#ixzz2WBzvQcte

Also reference: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2331847/Houses-better-green-fields-Ministers-explosive-claim-unveils-new-plans-concrete-countryside.html

STOP PRESS

It seems DEFRA will consult on these proposals from 18th July. I also hear that the drive will be about making the planning process quicker (ie to favour developers) and that developers will only have to mitigate for loss associated directly with their development, the inference being there will be loss of habitat from historical misuse of natural resources, therefore one can assume a previously damaged ancient woodland will not be treated as such even though it may still be a wood....one to think about - will developers target damaged conservation assets for new build? The scheme is also likely to be national, ie it assumes loss of woodland in Aberdeen may be compensated for by habitat work in Penzance!

As I have seen Marc Naura write Conservation Credits are morally wrong, in that it suggests damaging ecology and habitats is fine as long as you do something (anything) good elsewhere! As Marc rightly says this will lead developers to show scant if any regard for ecology.

Also I wonder what percentage brokers will take from this scam.

I bet developers won't be bothered to find mitigation sites and the money sits in the interest accounts of the brokers and Government.

It is not good, not good at all.