Local councils are required to set their housing and job targets in local ‘plans’, within the National Planning Policy Framework.

I recently read in a Planning, Strategy and Design website that allocation of suitable land for housing and employment development through the development plan process ‘represents an excellent opportunity for landowners to unlock the potential of their sites through the development plan process.’

‘By having land included as a site allocation for a particular use, it makes it much more likely to achieve a successful planning application as the principle of development would already have been secured.’ (Plainview)

To me this is horrific! I believe that greenfield sites should be excluded from any such allocation.

It is not just or sensible, when we are watching our countryside and urban green spaces being destroyed at an alarming rate, to allocate greenfield sites for development. This arrangement holds for years into the future after it is made, simply to fill in a quota to meet housing/employment development targets. Development targets and the methods to achieve them are currently completely at odds with protecting our natural environment.

Who benefits from this? Developers, local authorities (meeting their targets), landowners.

And who suffers?

Local people: who see more traffic, experience more pollution, who watch their local green spaces disappear. They suffer more stress, depression, anxiety as a result, because the gift which walking in these spaces grants them, a reprieve from these negative experiences, is taken away. They are not able to see the wildlife near to where they live, as they once were. It is a depressing picture, and one which is painted far too often.

Wildlife: we should be learning from previous mistakes where we favoured money over our natural environment and mental health but it appears that in many planning situations we are not. We live in a symbiotic relationship with nature which we are forgetting when we destroy these places. In the case of Highmoor Farm, the nearby heath will also suffer for the removal of much of its farmland - these places do not exist in isolation. 

It might seem impossible to generalise about greenfield sites. But the general principle remains for all. We cannot treat these like a commodity any longer, if we are not going to see our natural environment eroded to the point that we are risking our own future. We must pay more attention to brownfield sites and stopping developers from getting around the serious consideration of these sites for development as a first stop.

Developers seeking larger margins, councils needing to meet their targets and landowners looking to make money from their land: combined, these too often win out over the good of all.

We now have more than 6,000 signatures on this petition. Thanks for all your efforts. Please keep drawing attention to this as much as you can. Changing the view on Highmoor Farm will help to change the view on many similar sites.