The Liberal Democrat decision yesterday to vote to oppose Government reforms of the planning system designed to make it easier for developers are a welcome boost to the continued battle to protect our green spaces.
The Government’s reform proposals are likely to allow developers to ride roughshod over communities by easing the requirement on developers to provide affordable homes and removing some planning powers from councils.
The argument behind the policy is that it would cut through red tape and encourage more building to stimulate growth. This sounds fine in principle, but as Bradford East MP David Ward told the Lib Dem conference, there are already 400,000 homes across the country with planning permission waiting to be built.
Reforming the planning system will have no impact on these schemes getting started, and will instead lead to even more applications being made on our precious green fields.
With all these outstanding applications, as well as the hundreds of empty and disused sites identified around Bradford through the T&A Save Our Green Spaces campaign, the Government would surely be better off finding ways to kick start existing schemes and bring other derelict land back into use.
It may be that the bloody nose the Lib Dems has inflicted on their senior Conservative partners in the Coalition may give ministers pause for thought on the proposed reform.
The right thing to do now would be for the Government to go back to the drawing board and look again at its policy on new development. Sadly, that is unlikely to happen, and instead, all who want to protect our ever- dwindling green spaces must continue to oppose this unwise and rash reform.
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