Agenda item

Heston Attwell presented the ‘Protect Bengeo Field landscape and return it to Green Belt’ petition.

The Executive Member for Planning and Growth responded to the petition.

“Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this petition. I appreciate the strength of feeling that the community has about the part of Bengeo Field which forms the second phase of the HERT4 District Plan site allocation and your strong wish to return it to Green Belt.

As you know, the site was taken out of the Green Belt and allocated for development when the District Plan was adopted in 2018. National Planning Policy sets out that Green Belt boundaries should only be altered where exceptional circumstances are fully evidenced and justified, through the preparation or updating of Local – or in this case – District Plans, Neighbourhood Plans or similar.

At the time, the District Plan Inspector considered whether exceptional circumstances existed to justify the proposed revisions to the Green Belt boundary. They concluded that all options for locating development had been explored: brownfield land had been assessed and prioritised; significantly higher densities in urban areas had been discounted because of the harm to local character; and a much larger range of smaller sites in the Green Belt was also discounted because they could not bring forward the infrastructure necessary to support the quality of development required in our district.

The Inspector concluded that the studies carried out were comprehensive and demonstrated that, in the absence of any reasonable alternative, the release of Green Belt land for development was needed for the District Plan period and beyond to provide land for homes.
 

Housing need was, and continues to be, acute in EH and the supply and suitability of land outside the Green Belt is constrained. Without the release of land from the Green Belt, there would simply not be enough available to provide sufficient homes to meet the needs of people within East Herts. As such, the Inspector was satisfied that exceptional circumstances did exist to justify the District Plan strategy for delivering homes, including the release of land from the Green Belt.

In respect of the housing allocations in Hertford, including part of Bengeo Field, the Inspector concluded the sites were better located than the reasonable alternatives in terms of protecting the historic character of the town, access to facilities and deliverability. So she considered them to be sustainable options for housing.

The Inspector did, however, make a modification to Policy HERT4 to require a defined and recognisable boundary to the landscape, necessary to mitigate impacts on the Green Belt in accordance with the National Planning Policy Framework.

Of course, at that time, the outcome of the minerals planning application (PL\0776\16) was not known, as the District Plan was adopted in October 2018 and the Secretary of State did not dismiss the planning application appeal until 4^th April 2019.  It should also be recognised that the HERT4 site allocation lay outside, and has never formed any part of, the minerals application/appeal site area and was not intended to do so.

Furthermore, it should be noted that paragraph 428 of the Inspector’s Report to the minerals application Public Inquiry stated that “There is no convincing evidence that the implementation of the appeal scheme is necessary to enable future housing to comply with HERT4”, so they were not questioning the appropriateness of the allocation itself.

Significant community participation and stakeholder engagement was involved in the production of the District Plan. The Council consulted extensively at each stage of the District Plan’s preparation, and so it is not correct to say that the Green Belt designation was changed without any public consultation. The Council takes the views of the community very seriously, but at the same time is committed to meeting its housing need within the district. This has meant that some difficult decisions have had to be made.

The Council is duty bound to consider all planning applications that are submitted to it and if a decision is not forthcoming, then the applicant could appeal against non-determination. This would then take the decision out of the Local Planning Authority’s hands and straight to the Planning Inspectorate. Therefore, to maintain local democracy decisions on planning the Council should not delay the determination of any planning application by putting it on hold.

Similarly, the Council cannot consider amending designations by reinstating the Green Belt outside of a District Plan-making process, and whilst the Council has agreed that the District Plan should be updated, this will take several years and in the meantime planning applications will continue to be decided in line with the District Plan 2018.

Thank you again for the opportunity to respond to your concerns but, as I have set out, the decision to remove the site from the Green Belt was consulted upon by EHDC and fully considered by the District Plan Inspector so the Council is not in a position to pause or suspend planning decisions on the part of Bengeo Field included in the HERT4 allocation. It will therefore be up to the Council’s Development Management Committee to consider the current application in line with both national and local planning policies.”

As the local ward councillor, Councillor Daar spoke in response to the petition. She said that this area of Bengeo was her favourite area and the views were amazing. She said that when the quarry was proposed on this land, Bengeo residents fought hard to overturn the decision but the land was still taken out of the green belt. She said that the unique nature of Bengeo would be destroyed if housing was built on the land and felt that if the landowner had consulted residents before putting the land forward for development, a compromise could have been found. She said there was a strong argument for returning the land back to green belt.