CPRE Shropshire
Protecting Shropshire
New Year 2008 Ushers in a New Planning Era
A New Year dawns and many of the rules in planning have changed. Again! Soon large wind farms and ugly power lines will be much harder to oppose. So will airport expansion and coal fired power stations, even though the government has imposed a new legal commitment to reduce carbon emissions. The unloved regional assemblies are to abolished and replaced by more representative Leaders Boards, but excessive demands for housing and economic development will still dominate the regional agenda.
First up is the Planning Act 2008. The government has grown frustrated with the growing ability of campaign groups, including CPRE, to protest against large scale developments, delaying and modifying them, sometimes defeating them. The political answer is a new national policy for infrastructure. It brings into being a suite of National Policy Statements (NPS), which will set out the government's strategy on energy, aviation, rail and road, water and waste. Many of these will be cobbled together from existing government policy statements, including the 2003 Aviation White Paper which gave the go ahead for environmentally destructive aviation expansion. After scrutiny in the Commons and Lords, each NPS will guide infrastructure development across England, and to a lesser extent in Wales. Decisions on specific proposals will be made by a government appointed Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC). Local authorities, the public and environmental groups will only have limited right to be heard. The IPC will award planning permission, and give consent for compulsory purchase, closure of footpaths, loss of common land and approval to build in green belts.
In Shropshire the IPC will decide on wind farms of over 50mw (around 20 turbines), any replacement for Ironbridge power station and the proposed mid-Wales to Shrewsbury 400kv overhead power line. The incinerators proposed for Telford and Shrewsbury will however still be decided locally.
The world's first Climate Change Act has also received Royal Assent. It’s a bill that CPRE supports. It commits the UK to an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and creates a Climate Change Budget set by a new Committee on Climate Change. The Committee has already decreed a necessary but challenging cut in emissions of at least 34% by 2020. This will have a major impact on planning, with developments being required to emit less carbon in construction and over the lifetime of the buildings. Renewable energy will be required on a large scale, so we should expect many more applications for wind farms. But by the time you read this the government may have already approved the third runway at Heathrow and the coal fired Kingsnorth power station in direct conflict with the Climate Change Budget.
The third package of legislation is the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, which is still ploughing its way through parliament. It will abolish the Regional Assemblies, and replace them with Local Authority Leaders' Boards. The new Boards will work with the Regional Development Agencies to develop a single unified regional economic and planning strategy, but the RDA will have the whip hand. The Bill also places a new duty on local authorities to promote economic development. The signs are that the new Unitary Council will interpret this as a go-ahead to plan for low paid jobs in giant tin sheds on the edge of Shrewsbury and our market towns.
These changes have many implications for our work at CPRE Shropshire but we can meet the challenges. Planning rules have changed many times over the eighty years since CPRE was founded but we have never lost sight of our core values of protecting landscapes and rural communities, values that have proved more sustainable than the government's latest fashions in planning.
Andy Boddington
The Planning Act 2008
Unitary Planning Consultation | Regional Planning | Housing | Towns | Litter | Clutter | Tranquillity | Wind Farms | AONB
CPRE Shropshire, 11 Chestnut Grove, Ludlow, Shropshire SY8 1TJ
07771 801681. cpre@cpreshropshire.org.uk
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