Sustainable urban development must begin with better planning. Building in the floodplains of rivers never was a good idea, and now the Agency has stepped up its commitment to discouraging such development. Jean Venables is taking the lead on behalf of the Agency, and her committee of chairs of the regional flood defence committee is working very hard to win the hearts and minds of local planning policy-makers and development control officers.
It can be seen in the planning changes set in train by the Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley, and his planning chief, John Delafons, during the dreaded "Barratt Homes and hypermarkets" era of 1986-89. This is a countryside of bungalows along the Cornish coast, of golf courses on the Cotswold heights, of wind turbines on Bodmin Moor. It sees Mr Prescott's executive homes in every green belt and Nick Raynsford's advertising hoardings in every meadow. Landowners claim to love country, yet they are the first to seek building permits from a Government still pursuing "predict and provide" housing policies. Britons are currently being offered a countryside which, at the present rate, will have shrunk to the national parks and the National Trust by the end of the century.
Anyone who doubts this prediction should take a drive round Cirencester in the Cotswolds. It faces the same fate as any town in southern England. The encircling farmland gives way first to sports fields and army training sites. These are sold to Tesco and Somerfields and to factories and housing estates. The sports clubs move on to colonise the next ring of fields and the process can start again. Each colony diminishes the "environmental value" of the next. This way old Cirencester will be left as a hole in the doughnut of a Cotswold San Diego. Is this what Gloucestershire people want? Market demand is unequivocal.
From farmland to housing estate is from Pounds 2,000 to Pounds 200,000 an acre. This may thrill Mr Prescott's rural development lobby. It is lethal to countryside conservation, as would be a permit in a town to demolish any old building if already overshadowed by a new one. The key to protecting countryside is not to assist in its salami-slice erosion but to redirect the efforts of the rural community towards its conservation. For that to happen, the planning machine must be used to direct value to existing settlements and "brownfield" sites. |
