CONCRETE AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

CWACC’s ducking and diving again and has today published a series of ‘Local Development Framework Core Strategy Topic Papers’ for consultation purposes. There are 19 of them and the first one which yours truly got his grubby mitts on is 25 pages long. Realizing that we are now in the ‘busy summer holiday’ period (what planet are they on ..... minor planet 6236, Mallard?), CWACC has generously allowed three weeks for comments to be submitted. And guess what, the subject’s important. The topic papers are supposed ‘to identify the important issues and questions for the Core Strategy to address’ and the Core Strategy is to be the ‘main Local Development Framework Document which will cover a 15 year period up to 2026’ and replace the existing Local Plan (which sets out planning and development policy). Got it?

Anyway, the 25-page job is on ‘Biodiversity, Landscape and Open Space’ and it's purpose is to ‘explore the issues surrounding green infrastructure'. In case you’re interested, ‘green infrastructure is the network of green spaces, wildlife sites and greenway linkages which unite town and country.’ So, it's just the bits which are neither town nor country but which are the bits in between and it’s only those bits that CWACC seems to want to protect from development. Obviously it’s not the countryside because they’ve gone one step further than John Prescott did in Planning Policy Statement 7 (2004). JP decided that things like Sites of Biological Importance and Areas of Nature Conservation Value (which don’t have statutory designations) could be protected by ‘criteria-based planning policies’ and that ‘rigid local designations .... may unduly restrict acceptable sustainable development’. Yeah, right, plonking a housing estate in the middle of an ancient hay meadow is sustainable. I digress because CWACC’s interpretation is that ‘local landscape designations are not supported unless it can be justified that criteria-based policies will not be effective’. Anybody got any ideas as to whose criteria will be applied and who will decide what isn’t going to be justified?

The consolation is that housing estates built on former Sites of Biological Importance will have been designed appropriately, ‘guided’ by the non-statutory designation of the land on which they’ve been built. Newt pebble-dashing perhaps?

Just to bring you down again, have a think about the above in the context of West Cheshire’s designation in July 2008 as one of 20 new ‘Growth Points’ in England. That’s not growth in the context of plants (Green Infrastructure in CWACC-speak), it's one of the sites chosen to realize the Government’s ‘initiative’ (sic.) to build 3,000,000 more new homes before 2020. We’ll all have to disappear up our own Aarseth (minor planet 9836) because there won’t be anything of the Earth left at this rate.

Theoghinus Nuttors, 24 July 2009.