Government plans 'putting countryside under major threat'

MORE than four-fifths of the countryside around Burton will be at ‘increased risk of development’ unless the Government alters its proposed changes to the planning system, campaigners have warned.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said most rural landscape in Burton, South Derbyshire and North-West Leicestershire would be vulnerable because ministers’ draft guidelines no longer recognised the importance ‘of the wider countryside, including undesignated areas’.

“What it means for these local communities is landscapes which they may have assumed to have been protected and they may have assumed nobody would have wanted to build on are going to be more at risk as a consequence of these planning reforms,” said spokesman Jack Neill-Hall.

In a new report, the CPRE said the issue had been brought into sharp relief because the Government’s proposed changes to the planning system — known as the draft National Planning Policy Framework — overturned decades of English policy by no longer recognising the ‘intrinsic value’ of the wider countryside.

Its research had found that — specifically protected areas aside — 85 per cent of the countryside in Burton would be vulnerable because it was ‘unprotected’, while the proportion was 84 per cent in North West Leicestershire and 81 per cent in South Derbyshire.

“If we are to avoid damaging the character of rural areas by making it easier for inappropriate, speculative building to take place, decision makers must be encouraged to take account of the intrinsic value of the wider countryside when considering development proposals,” said Fiona Howie, the CPRE’s head of planning.

“The imminent changes to the planning system should ensure it is not only the specially designated areas that are valued.”

Barry Edwards, chairman of Rolleston Parish Council, which has joined forces with neighbouring parish councils serving Tutbury, Barton under Needwood, Abbots Bromley and Rocester to lobby against development of the countryside, backed the CPRE’s line.

“East Staffordshire (borough council) has still got a local plan, which has expired in as much it was only up to 2011, but it did save one policy — to prevent coalescence of Rolleston, Tutbury, Anslow and Burton.

“Now we’ve got a school (the proposed St Modwen’s Catholic Primary School, off Tutbury Road) and 325 houses (on the same site) being proposed for land supposedly protected from that.”