Contribution
My Lords, I am very glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and to support my noble friend Lady Hodgson in her Amendment 215. I will focus on villages.
The Committee will recall that the National Planning Policy Framework sets out the purposes of the green-belt policy, one of which—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, may not entirely agree that it is working—is to restrict the sprawl of large built-up areas. That essentially is where the London green belt really came from. Having absorbed Hampstead Heath, Dulwich Village and Wimbledon and so on, the question was: how far is this all going to go?
Let us accept that but what is interesting is that the NPPF goes on in paragraph 143(b) to say that another purpose is
“to prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another”;
“towns” is the key word here. Separately, and I note it because otherwise the Minister would be on my case to refer to it, paragraph 150 says:
“If it is necessary to restrict development in a village primarily because of the important contribution which the open character of the village makes to the openness of the Green Belt, the village should be included in the Green Belt”.
I submit that that is essentially about the character of that village from landscape and related points of view, rather than anything to do with its relationship to any other settlement, or its history.
We tend to focus on the National Planning Policy Framework, but we should bear in mind that it was followed in February this year by further guidance, which in three respects looked at those purposes and tried to categorise the contributions to the purposes in various respects. It is interesting that one of the three purposes is about urban sprawl. It says that
“villages should not be considered large built-up areas”,
which seems obvious, but the point is that the guidance selects villages to be excluded from this purpose. Under “Preventing neighbourhood towns merging”, it goes on to say “towns, not villages”. In the third purpose, relating to the setting of historic towns, it says:
“This purpose relates to historic towns, not villages”.
What have historic villages done to make themselves so unpopular from this point of view? Why are historic villages not important in the same way as historic towns—and, for that matter, historic cities?
Ministers, including the Minister responding to this debate, will not recall previous debates in which I was very supportive of green-belt reviews. We had a green-belt review in Cambridge and, if we had not had one nearly 20 years ago, we would not have the Cambridge Biomedical Campus that we have today—we gave up green-belt land. I declare an interest in that I was Member of Parliament there, so I had to represent both sides of the argument, and I am currently chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, so I have skin in that game too. Nearly 20 years ago, we gave up a significant part of the green belt to enable that to happen. Subsequently, a planning application came through for development to the west side of the Trumpington Road, which would have built on to Grantchester Meadows. We resisted that, because it was not necessary to take the development across the Trumpington Road and nor was it necessary for the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The central point is that Cambridge would not be regarded as a large built-up area for this purpose, but it would have reached out and this would have meant the coalescence of Cambridge with Grantchester, a historic village. The same could apply to somewhere such as Bladon, in relation to Oxford.
This is about the coalescence of settlements and a recognition that the historic setting of a historic city, town or village should be protected. Can Ministers agree to continue to look at the definitions of towns and villages, and the way villages are being excluded from any protections, whereas towns are included? This is not an immaterial issue; it has been the subject of a number of appeals to inspectors and they have more or less said—I paraphrase—“Okay, this is a village. It is not a town and therefore it does not have protection”. There are circumstances in which villages should have protection; they have an openness of character and contribute to the green belt for landscape purposes, but in specific instances the nature of that village as a settlement should be recognised in relation to its historic role.