At the end of May last year, over the Bank Holiday weekend, a group of travellers began to develop land they own on the Henley Road near Norton Lindsey. They had neither received nor applied for planning permission to do so. They applied for that planning permission retrospectively and the matter came before a Planning Inspector for determination this week. Despite pursuing enforcement action against the owners of this land initially, at the last minute Warwick District Council (the planning authority) effectively withdrew its substantive opposition to planning permission being granted for a travellers site at this location, with up to 24 static and travelling caravans. Conservative Councillors for the area Jan Matecki and Peter Phillips disagreed with the Council’s change of position, as did I, and the 3 of us were present at the hearing before the Planning Inspector to make representations against the grant of planning permission.
I supported submissions made by Councillor Matecki around the unsustainability of the site due to its distance from local amenities and lack of footways to allow travel options not involving cars, and around the need for considerable visibility from the entrance to the site due to the speed of traffic on Henley Road.
Beyond that, I focussed on the acceptance by Warwick District Council (WDC) that the site in question was what can now be designated as Grey Belt land. The current Labour Government has introduced this concept as a subset of Green Belt land, on which development may be more acceptable than in the rest of the Green Belt, but in the revised version of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which guides local decision making on planning, the concept has expanded dramatically since it was first described. In the House of Commons in July 2024, the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said that “we will release lower quality grey belt sites, disused car parks and garages, and ugly wasteland”, then “the land we are talking about – grey belt, which we will define in the NPPF consultation – is not agricultural land; it is disused garages and things of that nature”. To be clear, the site in question on Henley Road is not a disused garage or car park, or ugly wasteland, and it is agricultural land.
However, what the revised NPPF then produced by the Government actually said about grey belt land was that it was land which does not ‘strongly contribute’ to three of the central purposes of the Green Belt, namely checking the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas; preventing neighbouring towns merging into one another and preserving the setting and special character of historic towns. This site is said to do none of these things and is therefore grey belt and can be more easily developed. It can immediately be seen that this is a definition which is likely to make development more likely, not just on the site subject to this application, but also on many more sites in the Green Belt and potentially in a large proportion of the existing Green Belt. It is a definition which goes well beyond ‘disused car parks or garages’, or ‘ugly wasteland’ and is the reason why planning decisions made now, as the concept is in its infancy, are worth arguing about.
The point that I made to the Planning Inspector in this case was that, under the revised NPPF, even if a site is considered grey belt land, it must also be true that development on it would not ‘fundamentally undermine the purposes (taken together) of the remaining Green Belt across the area of the [Local] Plan’ (NPPF paragraph 155(a)). I believe that allowing development of this site would do precisely that.
The ‘purposes of the remaining Green Belt’ referred to are all five central purposes of the Green Belt, not just the three I mentioned earlier in the definition of grey belt land in the NPPF. The remaining two central purposes of the Green Belt are to assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment and to assist in urban regeneration by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land. Both of these purposes are fundamentally undermined if planning applications like this one are granted, because doing so will encourage further similar applications in the Green Belt. The granting of those applications will have a cumulative effect on the countryside and, of course, if sites are being developed more easily in the countryside and in the Green Belt, as developers generally prefer, derelict urban sites are not being developed instead and urban regeneration is undermined.
Granting planning applications like this one is likely to have that negative effect on the rest of the Green Belt in two ways. First, it will set precedents that local planning authorities are likely to follow. This is already evident in the planning application for the Henley Road site. WDC has abandoned its objection to the sustainability of that site based on a different Planning Inspector’s decision in relation to a different site elsewhere in the District. Precedent has already made WDC more likely to accept planning applications for Green Belt land and the granting of more such applications can only increase that effect.
Secondly, granting this planning application is bound to increase the number of similar applications made, with extensive impact on the Green Belt and its purposes. Indeed, some applicants may be encouraged by the granting of this application, retrospective as it is, to behave as I believe these applicants have done, and deliberately and cynically breach the planning rules by developing a site first (over a Bank Holiday weekend when they knew any enforcement action would be delayed) and asking for permission to do so later. If it becomes routine that there are no negative consequences for applicants who develop without permission and are then given that permission retrospectively anyway, we cannot be surprised if more applicants take that course. That will be clearly and fundamentally detrimental to the Green Belt and to the integrity of our whole system of planning laws.
The granting of this planning application would be profoundly troubling and the impact that it and likely future applications will have on our area, following the Government’s deliberate weakening of Green Belt protections, is more troubling still.
