Ben Stafford: How we can protect the countryside and help it prosper

Planning shapes our cities and towns, villages and countryside, but many approach it warily and wearily, fearful of being sucked into a time-consuming and confusing fog of process and complicated case law.

So perhaps the Government is onto something in consulting on a new, slimmed down National Planning Policy Framework to replace the much longer body of planning policy built up over more than sixty years.

Indeed Ministers, led in characteristically robust style by Eric Pickles, the man in the Cabinet responsible for planning, say existing planning guidance and policy have become bloated and impenetrable, containing more words than the complete works of Shakespeare and that, in cutting this guidance from 1,000 pages to 52, they will make the system simpler, swifter and easier to understand.

So far so sensible, I hear you cry. Well, it’s certainly hard to argue that there’s no scope to simplify planning and make it easier for people to understand, and 1,000 is a lot of pages.

But perhaps Ministers should have paused before praying in aid the works of Shakespeare in attacking the current length of planning guidance. After all, there’s a lot of good stuff in Shakespeare’s plays, and chopping them down into a tragi-comic historical novella would, I’d suggest, reduce their literary merit.

So too with planning. Well, okay, I’ll concede that a theatrical adaptation of Planning Policy Statement 7 (Sustainable Development in Rural Areas) would probably not pack out the West Yorkshire Playhouse or the Alhambra, but bear with me. For planning, shorter is probably better, but the danger of slashing too vigorously is that you cut out the purpose for which it was originally constructed.

And what is that purpose? Good planning weighs the different needs and desires we have as a society – for economic growth and new housing, for shops, schools and offices, and for the protection of our environment – and ensures they are properly balanced, and that land is developed (or not developed) in the public interest.

As a relatively small island nation, we don’t have vast amounts of land in this country – even in Yorkshire, where we can still enjoy the wild open spaces and stunning landscapes of the Dales and the North York Moors, you are never far from a major town or city. In other parts of the country, particularly in the south, land is at a real premium (serves them right for living there, you might say!).

But the other thing that is noticeable is our relative lack of urban sprawl. Go to parts of Ireland and it seems there’s barely a field without a house or barn in it. And in America, the city of Houston in Texas spreads across almost as big an area of land as London, even though London has almost four times as many inhabitants.

This hasn’t happened by accident. Our planning system has allowed us to develop our towns, cities and villages to provide the housing, jobs and leisure facilities we need, while also protecting large areas of countryside, often close to those towns and cities as in Yorkshire, for all to enjoy.

But not everyone likes planning. In his Budget in March, the Chancellor George Osborne described it, unfairly, as ‘a chronic obstacle to growth’, and said he wanted to see a default ‘yes’ to development proposals. In tough economic times, when all political eyes are on getting the economy moving, any perceived brake on development is frowned upon in the corridors of power.

In this context, the new, super-skinny National Planning Policy Framework no longer looks quite so appealing. True, it contains some good proposals, including for long-deferred action to tackle intrusive light pollution, and it underlines the Government’s commitment to ongoing protection of designated countryside like National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

But what about the rest? Much of our most loved countryside, and a lot that is closest to our towns and cities, does not enjoy such protection. Will it be open season on such areas; a race to see who can develop them quickest? Worryingly, the Government has also removed the clear national emphasis on re-using previously developed sites before building on green fields.

This policy helped increase the level of new development on such sites from 56 per cent in 1997 to around 80 per cent by 2009, meaning large areas of countryside were protected from development, and towns and cities were regenerated at the same time. The worry now is that, once the economy begins to recover, the pressure from development will fall disproportionately on our countryside.

We need economic growth. But we also, for our health, wellbeing and for its own intrinsic value, need to protect the countryside that we are lucky enough still to be able to enjoy in its rich abundance and beauty. Good planning lets us do both.

At the Campaign to Protect Rural England, we are campaigning to ensure that the final National Planning Policy Framework is as good for the countryside as it is for the economy. You can support us by visiting www.cpre.org.uk.

Ben stafford, from Leeds, is head of campaigns at the Campaign to Protect Rural England