The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) says that there are plans in the pipeline to build more than 700,000 houses in the countryside, including 200,000 on the Green Belt.
The government’s planning reforms have failed to prioritise urban areas for housing developments, the CPRE says. As a result, the countryside is “under siege”.
The CPRE’s report, Community Control or Countryside Chaos? analyses the impact of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) on the countryside in the two years since it was adopted. The research has found that the reforms are forcing local councils in all parts of the country to accept major developments against their will.
It says that sites already earmarked for housing are being left undeveloped while councils are under increasing pressure to allocate land for future development.
This pressure has significantly slowed the rate at which local plans are being adopted, meaning councils are powerless to decide what land should be developed in the best interests of local communities. The report also says that only a quarter of local authorities propose to prioritise brownfield sites over greenfield because the NPPF does not give enough support for them to do so.
CPRE’s research shows that more than two thirds of appeals for major housing have gone in favour of developers in the last year. Councils are increasingly reluctant to defend an appeal due to the risk of incurring costs, which can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds if they lose.
CPRE chief executive Shaun Spiers said: “This report provides firm evidence from across England that the Government’s planning reforms are not achieving their stated aims. Far from community control of local development, we are seeing councils under pressure to disregard local democracy to meet top-down targets.
“Local authorities are having to agree fanciful housing numbers and allocate huge areas of greenfield land to meet them. Where they lack an up to date plan, the countryside is up for grabs and many villages feel under siege from developers. But tragically the result is not more housing, and certainly not more affordable housing – just more aggro and less green space.”
He added: “The government urgently needs to rethink its planning policies.”
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