When Eric Pickles recently visited Cheltenham he
spelled out that new housing and the Greenbelt don’t mix. Campaigners hoping to
protect the green fields around our town hoped this gave added weight to their
arguments that housing need should not trump Greenbelt designation.
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| Campaigners including me at Land West of Farm Lane in Shurdington, next to Leckhampton |
However, the Council officers drafting the Joint
Core Strategy (JCS), a plan that will see huge swathes of countryside around Cheltenham
built on, say Mr Pickle’s comments change nothing. We ‘need’ 30,000 odd homes
to be built in Cheltenham, Gloucester and Tewkesbury, they say. Although this ‘objectively
assessed’ number varies depends on who is calculating it.
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| Farm Lane - the left of the picture is in Cheltenham Borough, the right hand side out of shot is in Tewkesbury Borough aka SD2 or Land West of Farm Lane |
Mr Pickle’s words are as clear as mud until you
consider that councils are allowed to redefine the boundaries of the Greenbelt
in their area to meet local housing need.
Once removed from the Greenbelt, beautiful green fields, farmed for
generations and much valued by those living nearby become an undeveloped
building site.
And undeveloped building sites and housing do
mix. At least to Mr Pickles and his chums who see house building as the panacea
for our continued economic woes. In the face of huge cuts in grant funding from
central government, local councils are being incentivised to encourage new
development because of the money given to them for each new home built, the New
Homes Bonus (NHB).
However the NHB is not much of an actual bonus.
With core funding being slashed, it has become a necessity for councils to meet
their revenue spending commitments. But the NHB isn’t given in perpetuity; it
is only given each year for six years, after that time the big black hole at
the centre of most council’s budgets is still there.
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| Protest at Tewkesbury Borough Council when a previous application to develop land West of Farm Lane went to their planning committee |
All across the country, in order to protect the
front line services their residents expect, local councils are beckoning house
builders with fluttering eyelids to come and build their brave new housing
estates on our languishing and unloved fields. Except in most places, including
here in Cheltenham the fields in question are not languishing, nor are they
unloved.
And where does that leave beautiful
Leckhampton? Fields under threat in that sunny part of Cheltenham are not
Greenbelt but Whiteland, land not allocated for any particular purpose. Most of
it is within Cheltenham Borough Council boundary and has been under threat from
developers for years. One of the fields, known as Land West of Farm Lane used
to be in Cheltenham until 1974 when it transferred to Tewkesbury Borough
Council.
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| View to Leckhampton Hill AONB from Shurdington Road - taken with my phone and no filter applied |
Tewkesbury Councillors took it upon themselves
to allocate it for nearly 400 houses in their local plan a few years ago and
that allocation has been brought into the JCS which earmarks the wider area of
the Leckhampton fields for over 1,100 houses.
It is a real problem for Cheltenham Borough
Council that in most parts of our town we are developed right up to our
administrative boundary. There is not enough land within Cheltenham’s boundary
to meet all of the housing which experts calculate we need to provide. The only
way we can find land to accommodate this growth is on adjoining land in
Tewkesbury Borough which means a re-jig of the Greenbelt boundary. Irritatingly
without the now much hated JCS we would have even less say in any development planned
to take place right across the road from our boundary.
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| Cows at Lott Meadow, Kidnappers Lane |
And Leckhampton fields? This is certain to be a
key issue in the run up to the general election, as it was in the last. In the
run up to the 2010 general election residents living in The Lanes area had visits
from would be ministers who said how terrible the Labour government supported South
West Regional Spatial Strategy (SW RSS) was and how when in government it would
be gone.
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| \View to Leckhampton Hill from Shurdington Road |
And so it has, in name only. What we have
inherited in the JCS is not much different to what the universally loathed SW
RSS was trying to foist upon us.
Trying to resist the development of our
Greenbelt and green fields has been like trying to grab a running stream of
water; a seemingly impossible task. By trotting out tokenistic sound bites,
Eric Pickles is either revealing his total lack of knowledge of what his
government is deliberately trying to achieve or by the detail omitted in his
sound bites, treating all of us with any interest in the future of the fields
around this town with contempt.
