Land Use Planning Working Group
Chair: Paul Miner, Campaign to Protect Rural England
Vice Chair: Lee Bruce, Woodland Trust
Secretary: Kate Hand
The Land Use Planning Working Group acts to conserve the natural and historic environment, by working to improve the national planning system for the benefit of biodiversity and landscape. The group seeks to ensure the implementation of environmentally-benign national planning policy and the improvement of existing policies, and monitors progress of the eco-towns agenda.
Update from the group: January 2012
National Planning Policy Framework
The Land Use Planning Group met with Ruth Stanier, Deputy Director, and other officials at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on 11 January to express their concerns over the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). The key concerns raised at the meeting were the inconsistencies in the definition of Sustainable Development in the NPPF; the lack of a sequential approach for dealing with brownfield sites and contradictions between the NPPF and the Natural Environment White Paper. Link will be meeting with the Minister for Planning, Greg Clark MP, to further discuss the NPPF on 8 February.
Revocation of Regional Strategies
Also this month, Link submitted its response to the consultations on the Revocation of Regional Strategies. The response outlined why the Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) performed on the proposed revocations were fundamentally flawed. The key reasons included:
- The SEAs were carried out too late in the process to inform decision making.
- The SEAs are poor quality, with little analysis of alternatives and misleading assertions that planning reform will overcome any problems caused by the revocation of regional strategies.
- The SEAs rely heavily on the NPPF, which is not yet published and therefore subject to change.
- The SEAs assume that local authorities will protect their local environments better than regional strategies did without providing any evidence to back this up.
Link has recommended that key environmental policies should be saved during a transitional period, thereby giving local authorities the chance to incorporate these policies into their local plans.
Link Land Use Planning Working Group meeting
On 19 January the Land Use Planning Working Group held a meeting to discuss the regional strategy consultation, the group’s work plan for 2012 and best practice guidance on planning.
All Party Parliamentary Group on Biodiversity
Together with the Biodiversity Working Group, the Land Use Planning Group submitted written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)’s inquiry on biodiversity and planning in December.
Greenest Planning Ever coalition
The evaluation of Link’s Greenest Planning Ever coalition has been finalised following a meeting held on 12 December 2011. The group celebrated their work and discussed the valuable lessons learnt from this successful coalition.