23
Examination of witnesses
Richard Seaman, Stephen Kelly and Mark Andrews.
Q20 The Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee. This is our second evidence session in the short inquiry we are conducting into the proposals for the grey belt. My name is Daniel Moylan and I chair the committee. I will not introduce the other members of the committee at this stage, but I will call them by name when they wish to ask a question.
Today, we welcome as our witnesses and guests Richard Seaman, the corporate lead for planning at Calderdale Council; Stephen Kelly, joint director of planning and economic development at Greater Cambridge Shared Planning; and Mark Andrews, the head of planning, design and engagement services at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.
We are going to ask some questions. I ask you, with every respect, to seek to keep your answers reasonably crisp and to avoid repetition, in the sense that if one of your colleagues has given the answer you would give there is no need to repeat it. All the evidence is recorded and a transcription is made. It is not reinforced by being said twice, but, of course, you may want to emphasise something a colleague has said. I do not want to be overrestrictive, but repetition simply for its own sake does not add anything to the evidence base that we will consider when we come to draft our report.
Thank you very much for being here. Our first question is from Lord Bailey of Paddington.
Q21 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Good morning, panel. I will start with Stephen and, if there are any additional comments, everybody else can chip in. Is the proposed grey-belt definition and policy clear enough for your teams to implement the policy without delay?
Stephen Kelly: In some respects it is. We have undertaken a comprehensive green-belt study in Greater Cambridge. We have a clear understanding of all the land within the green belt and are able to identify and distinguish differences between low-quality land in the green belt and the higher-quality land that serves and is central to the purposes of green belt.
There are some definitional issues or qualifications to that around those who might deliberately degrade land in order to be able to diminish its purposes for the definition.
The other issue for us is around the purposes of green belt specific to a particular location. For Cambridge, the purposes are to respect the setting of the city. Matters of urbanisation and so forth that might come through grey-belt land are perhaps approached differently for places that may be reducing coalescence or keeping separation. There are matters of judgment that will become quite significant, depending on whether you are going through a local plan process, in which there is a proper means to arbitrate views, compared to, for example, the development management process, where there will be a lot of space for interpretation.
Richard Seaman: Following up the point about the development management process, there are particular issues with the two definitions. There is the definition of grey belt in the body of the NPPF and then there is the definition of land that makes a limited contribution to the purposes of the green belt. What concerns me is that the language could result in us becoming mired in legal challenges and a lot of discussions at appeals. There are certain bits of overlap across and within the definitions, such as the references to variations on previously developed land.
There are some issues with the wording. There is “not strongly perform”, “no or very little contribution”, “little contribution” and “contributes little”. All those words create a lot of potential for lawyers to argue at great length. I am very mindful that we are not just writing policy for planners like me, who live and breathe it every day; it has to be comprehensible to communities and to people who are making representations on local plans or planning applications. One thought I had was that some form of decision tree in the planning practice guidance might be a way to make it clearer. It worries me that a well-intentioned policy could effectively be lost in translation.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Mark, I will come to you with a slightly different question. Are there any specific aspects of the definition that you would like to see the Government reconsider?
Mark Andrews: To be honest, I would probably share some of the comments of my colleagues already on some of the definitions and the clarity that sits around it, especially the term, “limited contribution”. The focus tends to be more towards the five purposes of green belt without necessarily considering the context of the underlying premise of green belt in openness and permanence. It will be interesting to see that worked into the consideration a little more in how grey belt relates to the overall context of green belt.
I am sorry, could you repeat your question?
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Is there any particular part of the definition that you would like to see the Government reconsider? The answer could be no.
Mark Andrews: Generally, the wording around limited contribution is an area that definitely needs to be considered a little further. The idea and concept of further guidance to provide further definitions and information around the whole premise of grey belt is vital, as Richard set out, in providing clarity to users of the service and not just us as planners.
The Chair: We have had a certain amount of written evidence that we have not yet looked at properly, although I know it has arrived. Much of it is from individual planning officers. They say that this definition will not work. Not all of them are saying that, of course, but the comments are along the lines of, “This is badly defined”. Of course, one of the purposes of consultation is to improve definitions, so it is perfectly possible that, at the end of the process, the Government would say that they have heard the comments about poor definition and have come up with a sharper and better focused definition that is clear. Would that settle your concerns, or is there a more substantive objection to the policy that you want to articulate?
Richard Seaman: My view is that what the policy is trying to achieve is laudable. The problem is that a lot of this just comes down to how it is structured, how it is presented and the choice of words. It will cause enormous uncertainty and legal dispute.
The Chair: But the definition could be refined.
Richard Seaman: Absolutely. As I mentioned, it is things like the choice of words, where you have “little contribution”, “limited contribution” or “contributes little”. That might, on one level seem, innocuous—
The Chair: I completely understand that “limited”, “little” and so on are words that require a high amount of judgment and may open it up, but they could be removed or changed. If they were, you would have much less concern about the whole thing.
Richard Seaman: Yes.
Stephen Kelly: One needs to read some of the interpretation, as Richard has highlighted, in the round. Certainly, there are elements in the definition of grey belt that perhaps do not go far enough in offering clarity. One of our comments as the local planning authority was around the potential for the release of grey-belt land in its purest form to progressively erode the green belt and the purposes of the green belt. Within the definition, there is certainly a suggestion that consideration be given to adjoining parcels of land in determining whether the release makes a limited contribution to the five green-belt purposes. One can envisage a circumstance in which you end up with either severance or enclosure of adjoining land that, in turn, denudes that adjoining land. The definition as it stands just stops at references to paragraph 140 of the framework. It could do with some further clarification on potential erosion.
The Chair: You would want to be able to take the physical context into account more fully.
Stephen Kelly: Absolutely, particularly for releases on villages, or where you could see coalescence happening, where the release of potentially low-performing or even previously developed land would change the shape of the build pattern or the interplay between the different settlements around, such as to capture effectively quite high-quality and important green-belt land but so denude it from contributing to green-belt purposes that it undermined its own continued status.
The Chair: Specifically for you, Mr Kelly, you refer to concerns about those who deliberately degrade land. Do you have any evidence that this has been happening, or are you expressing a fear that it would happen if this definition and this policy went through?
Stephen Kelly: I do not have specific evidence, but one of the lessons that we have learned from, for example, biodiversity net gain and the processes around that is that the protocol and obligations had a backward look to ensure that deliberate attempts to denude the biodiversity of a particular site would not in themselves justify enhancement of biodiversity. I am conscious that a number of temporary uses that could take place on green-belt land, either under permitted development or in respect of operational works and construction works, might be seen as a foil to facilitate a subsequent change in the status of the land. Contemplating that within the NPPF might be a useful reflection for the policy authors.
Q22 Baroness Janke: My question is about opportunity and the concept of the grey belt. Would using the grey-belt definition identify new possible sites for development above and beyond those that you have already identified through the local plan process? That is open to the three of you. I would like to hear your comments.
Richard Seaman: Within Calderdale, we undertook a green-belt review to support our local plan that was adopted 18 months ago. That was a policy-off exercise. We did not carry out the green-belt review to identify housing sites but as a piece of evidence to support the housing sites.
I am mindful that, in the green belt, green-belt policy is still only one consideration with regard to land that you might release. There was land in Calderdale that we did not release that would fall under the category of grey belt. We did not release it for reasons around sustainability or flooding. We have a lot of brownfield land, mills in the Calder Valley and old industrial sites, that suffer very badly from flooding.
Conversely, we released what you might call high-performing green belt because it met wider sustainability considerations. There is grey-belt land within the green belt in Calderdale that could come forward, but it is often constrained. There can be issues of flooding, and there is a particular part of Calderdale where we took a decision not to release further land because of transport infrastructure. If you did a fresh green-belt review now and a fresh site assessment process, I am not sure that you would identify a lot more land. Obviously, as new infrastructure is delivered, you potentially could.
Baroness Janke: But not a great many additional opportunities for housing on the current basis.
Richard Seaman: It would be of a modest scale. In the next few years, I do not think it would bring forward major large-scale opportunities. It would maybe bring forward smaller-scale opportunities. It gives us something to think about for our pipeline of land in subsequent plan periods.
Stephen Kelly: From Cambridge’s perspective, we undertook a green-belt review. Over the last 25 years, we have released 1,800-plus hectares from the green belt to deliver over 10,000 houses and about 50,000 jobs. The normal planning process is as Richard highlights. The more recent changes in the NPPF, which remove the requirement to review green belts, were not something that we had followed in our plan-making process, partly because, in identifying the most sustainable way of developing a locality and talking to our communities about their priorities for defining those spatial principles means, that it is important. We have about 24,000 hectares of green belt and that is an important part of the debate locally.
We have promoted, and are already promoting, further releases from the green belt in Greater Cambridge, both for housing and particularly for commercial development around Addenbrooke’s Hospital, which is an international centre for life sciences. We have already given consideration to the expansion of the definition to require us to consider grey belt. Indeed, by and large, the grey-belt locations are more dispersed locations on the edges of our villages in the green belt, and are not the most sustainable locations for further growth.
Mark Andrews: To provide a bit of context for Solihull’s position, we submitted a local plan for examination in 2021 and, very recently, after a protracted period of examination, had to withdraw that plan due to a disagreement with the inspectors over, in effect, 1,700 homes on a previously developed land site. We had to balance that with the potential impact of having to replace those homes within the wider green belt at a time when, as a local authority, we had identified well over 500 hectares of land in our green belt, including land to facilitate the arrival of HS2 in the borough, which is the first station outside London, and mining contributions and everything else towards the wider West Midlands, through the duty to co-operate.
In that respect, our plan was based on a spatial strategy that our inspectors supported. Around 50 per cent of that land was previously developed and so, to a degree, could be considered grey belt under the current definitions that are before us. Indeed, we now have around 15 planning applications for the draft allocations within that plan. The applicants say to us that, in effect, many of those sites could be considered grey belt in principle if that was to be taken forward.
What I am trying to express is that the spatial strategy that we created as part of our local plan preparation focused first on previously developed land. It then looked into the green belt. We are two-thirds green belt as a local authority area; the other third is already existing urbanised area on the edge of Birmingham, primarily. Land supply is limited and restricted, and constrained in a lot of different ways. Our spatial strategy focused on brownfield and previously developed land, both in the urban area and then in the green-belt area.
One of the things we highlighted in our response to the consultation was whether, when you create a spatial strategy such as that, which is in conformity with the existing NPPF, the concept of grey belt adds anything to the wider context of where we are already. If we accept that that definition will get taken forward in a new NPPF, one of the things that will be very important—something we are certainly thinking about in restarting a new local plan—is the idea of green-belt reviews and green-belt assessments and being clear on how you use those. We would welcome national guidance on methodology for how you could utilise those, being mindful that an assessment would primarily deal with the purposes of a green-belt review and might bring in things such as flooding, ecology and so on. It is about being careful not to confuse the two terminologies in that respect.
Do we think that grey belt will deliver significantly more for us in Solihull than it does currently? I am not convinced, for the reasons I have set out in our spatial strategy, but it will be interesting to see how that definition plays through the system.
There is another thing I thought it would be helpful to highlight—apologies if this links back a little to the previous question. I watched with interest the panel last week with the RTPI and the Town and Country Planning Association. There was a lot of talk about the principle of sustainable development and ensuring that houses are delivered in the right location. That was something that struck me. It should not be houses for the sake of houses; it is about having the right houses in the right location, and being mindful of how they are delivered sustainably.
Colleagues have talked about the purposes of green belt and what is important for respective areas. I think that varies depending on what your green belt is based on. For us, a primary driver is the prevention of towns merging. We have Birmingham on one side of us and we have Coventry on the other side. In effect, Solihull provides the green belt that separates those two significant cities.
The Chair: But Birmingham and Solihull are merged where they meet.
Mark Andrews: The urban form of Solihull, yes. It sits on the eastern end of Birmingham.
The Chair: You can drive from one to the other without knowing.
Mark Andrews: You could, but 66 per cent of our borough is green belt. That area is, in effect, what is deemed the Meriden Gap. That gap sits between two of the country’s biggest cities. Maintaining and respecting the gap is quite important in preventing the merger of those two urban areas. One of the things we wrestle with in Solihull is respecting the gap. It is about making sure that it is maintained in an appropriate way while still being able to support growth in the villages that sit within it and on the edges of the respective urban areas as well. I wanted to highlight the importance of that to the borough. That relates to the point about how the purposes of green belt are set out within the definition and how they are considered as part of providing additional opportunities for housing.
Baroness Janke: Basically, what I am hearing from the three of you is that this new concept adds little opportunity to your existing processes. You have quite a lot of ways of looking at releasing the green belt, other than through introducing another class, of grey belt. Is that correct?
Mark Andrews: I think so. To repeat, I think our approach has always been a brownfield-first policy, and then looking at previously developed land opportunities that might be within the green belt, and then considering the opportunities in poorer-performing parcels to deliver growth in a sustainable way.
Stephen Kelly: I think context is important. All green belts are different, and they probably co-exist differently. Certainly in Cambridge, for example, we have taken an active decision to jump the green belt with new settlements. A number of the grey-belt sites, or indicative grey-belt sites, that we have explored are relatively small parcels on the edges of villages.
What we found in our last local plan process, where the plan took some time to adopt, was an opportunism that eroded the ability to focus delivery and housing development on our new settlements such as Northstowe, which you have probably heard of, and instead for landowners and the housebuilding industry to take the easy route, which is to develop small sites on the edges of villages with very low infrastructure lead times and costs. That erodes the sustainable development strategy, the public transport infrastructure and so on that we have earmarked to secure great connectivity between those new centres and new significant urban extensions.
Particularly relevant to Cambridge, Sir Oliver Letwin said that our green belt starts and stops with our local authority area. Market absorption rates and the actual number of people able to buy homes in Greater Cambridge is a rather fixed parameter. Unlike, for example, London or big metropolitan cities, where the selection of small sites that might come forward through grey belt would not impact deliverability on larger and more significant strategic locations, in Cambridge they will just scavenge from those sites in terms of the number of market purchases. In so doing, as we found in the period when we did not have a five-year land supply, that will not focus and will not locate or deliver new homes at scale on big strategic sites that are ultimately, as Richard highlighted, the most sustainable locations that we have determined with our communities for our local plans.
The Chair: All three of you have increased mandatory housing targets. How is that going to affect your approach to the grey-belt policy?
Richard Seaman: Our housing target under the proposed new methodology actually comes out at a very similar number to our local plan number, which is more than the old standard methodology. Possibly unusually, we are in a fairly fortunate position.
The Chair: It has increased but you have got there with your own efforts already.
Richard Seaman: We have effectively planned for the number of houses that we will need.
The Chair: It is not going to have an effect on you. What about Cambridge and Solihull?
Stephen Kelly: In Cambridge, the position is that we had previously identified, because of the extraordinary economic growth in the city, and significantly elevated for our new plan, a housing requirement based on the economic forecasts. In fact, the Government’s standard methodology is lower than the planning figure that we were using for the development of our joint local plan.
Mark Andrews: The proposed standard methodology increases our housing requirement by around 52 per cent, which is obviously quite a significant uplift for us in what is primarily a rural area that separates Birmingham from Coventry.
As to how the approach to grey belt will help us address some of that, as I previously outlined, our spatial strategy has always been one of focusing on previously developed land as best we can and then looking at sustainable opportunities within the green belt that are poorer performing. We are at an opportune stage at the moment in our plan-making process, whereby we have already commenced work on a new plan to try to drive forward as quickly as we can and fend off the risk of speculative development and so forth. Our focus will remain one of previously developed land first and then seeing where our evidence base takes us.
The Chair: In relation to Cambridge, you described developers as scavenging what would be grey-belt sites when you did not have a five-year land supply in place. Should that not act as an incentive to you to produce the five-year land supply?
Stephen Kelly: It might have been the wrong word to use for developers. The process was opportunistic.
The Chair: I am not concerned about the word “scavenging”. That was not what I was trying to raise.
Stephen Kelly: Often, the challenges of delivering a local plan are perhaps not fully understood. They are not always within the gift of the local planning authority. That was the reason why Greater Cambridge did not have a five-year land supply. For example, matters related to infrastructure capacity, which oftentimes rest with government, or to utility capacity, which rest with the statutory providers, cannot always be resolved.
The Greater Cambridge planning authority’s local plan process took a considerable number of years, partly because of the challenges of resolving some of those large and significant infrastructure and growth-related matters. Both the authorities that I represent, South Cambridgeshire and Cambridge City, have, over the last 25 years, been committed to sound development plan activity, but in a resource-scarce and constrained context. It was certainly not lack of will from the planning authorities to secure adopted plans; indeed, the plan that we had advanced four years earlier was eventually adopted. It was that associated infrastructure and related challenges—and indeed the examination process, where quite substantial challenge was made to the local plan itself by a range of interests—resulted in the delays that precipitated the problem.
Lord Mawson: There is lots of talk here about plans, but are you actually building the houses and communities that you want to build? What is happening in practice? Richard, it would be helpful to hear from you.
Richard Seaman: We adopted our plan 18 months ago. We had a legal challenge that took 12 months to resolve, during which everybody was not quite prepared to take the plunge. We are now in a situation where our pipeline of major housing schemes is pretty strong. We have two garden communities, the largest of which is 2,000 units. We have the first phase of housing on one of those in the development management process. We are getting very close to the point where we are going to start to deliver, but it is important not to underestimate the lead-in time and complexity, and issues around infrastructure, which colleagues talked about. Those are just things that you have to work with, which make it massively complex.
Stephen Kelly: For the last five years, we have exceeded the housing delivery test target for Greater Cambridge. We have overachieved quite significantly in the three previous years against that target. We currently have permission for over 20,000 houses and 10 million square feet of research and lab space granted in Cambridge, and are actively working with proposals. We have nine strategic-scale housing developments of over 1,000 houses in the Greater Cambridge area, all of them consented and almost all of them on site.
The challenges we face going forward with a further suite of growth proposals relate, fundamentally, to the availability of water to be able to accelerate delivery. I touched on market absorption rates. We found that some of the housebuilders with consents on two sites have chosen not necessarily to accelerate delivery on the second site while the first site is still continuing to build through.
The Chair: In relation to Calderdale, where you have a local plan, do you anticipate getting, or are you getting, applications for non-allocated sites during the plan period?
Richard Seaman: Within our numbers and housing supply, we assume about 90 windfall sites per year. Windfalls are part of our housing supply. Because we had many years without an up-to-date plan, and because Calderdale is very constrained, a lot of the easy pickings in windfalls have long since gone. The interest we are getting at the moment is very much on the allocated sites.
Q23 Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Before I ask my question, I put on the record that I have no interests relevant to this inquiry to declare.
Going on from the questions about local plans—you have all given some interesting answers on those—would you say that these changes on the grey belt mean that you have to substantially change your local plans and, in effect, start again with them?
Richard Seaman: Not in Calderdale’s case. Our green-belt review was not prepared with the notion of grey belt in mind because of timings, but we have a five-year housing supply. We failed the housing delivery test for a number of years, but I think things are heading in the right direction now. I do not think it puts us in a position where we would have to review the local plan at an earlier stage. I do not think it undermines the local plan at a strategic scale. It could result in individual proposals possibly coming forward in a piecemeal or speculative way that might not sit particularly comfortably with what the local plan is trying to achieve in sustainability.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Will you have battles over the definition of grey belt?
Richard Seaman: I am absolutely certain that that will happen.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Mr Kelly, do you want to say anything about Cambridge, and particularly in answer to that last point?
Stephen Kelly: Our previous local plan was in 2018, so it is quite old. Based on the work that we have previously done, I do not think we would be looking to re-examine significantly the current local plan that we have been working on, because we already had regard to the quality of green belt. Indeed, in our emerging local plan, we are proposing further green-belt releases, so we feel fairly confident about that. In areas such as Cambridge, where there is significant value in edge-of-Cambridge development, we will find quite a number of planning appeals, or indeed applicants seeking to promote development on the definition of grey belt.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Their definition.
Stephen Kelly: On their definition of grey belt. In fact, we are conscious that people are already preparing for that circumstance.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: Is that happening in Solihull, too?
Mark Andrews: Yes. The position we have with our local plan will probably mean that we will be at an opportune stage in being able to incorporate any sorts of changes that come forward. We have a green-belt review that we went through as part of our previous plan, and I suspect that, as part of our evidence base, we will update that. Part of that update will, I am sure, take account of any change in definitions around the grey-belt context.
Like colleagues, we do not have a five-year supply at the moment, so we are currently working with our site promoters of the sites that were proposed for allocation in our previous plan on very special circumstances cases that work within the planning applications that they have already put to us. That will, I hope, ease some of the pressure we might find on speculative development in the short to medium term. We have already received inquiries for pre-application advice around grey-belt opportunities, and I fully expect that we will have debates with applicants, developers and landowners about what is and is not grey belt.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: It will run and run, I suspect.
The Chair: Lord Mair will bring us back to some of the nitty-gritty of the definitions of green belt.
Q24 Lord Mair: The Government have proposed three requirements for grey-belt developments: specific expectations on affordable housing, infrastructure and green spaces. I want to ask all three of you about your views on the viability of those in your areas. I specifically want to ask a bit more about affordable housing. The requirement is that at least 50 per cent should be affordable housing, with “an appropriate proportion being social rent”, subject to viability. We have received written evidence that the viability of the 50 per cent affordable housing has been identified as a potential barrier to grey-belt development. In fact, we have received written evidence expressing scepticism about that target. Can I ask all three of you about that, starting with Calderdale?
Richard Seaman: When we prepared our local plan, we carried out a desktop viability exercise for every site allocation. The broad position in Calderdale, a former industrial area in West Yorkshire, is that brownfield land in general does not achieve benchmark land values. It is not viable without policy concessions or public subsidy. If you take relatively straightforward greenfield land in the strongest-performing market areas of Calderdale, 30 per cent affordable housing is viable. There is nowhere in Calderdale where you would deliver 50 per cent affordable housing without public subsidy.
Lord Mair: What about in Cambridge?
Stephen Kelly: Because of the higher values that exist in Cambridge, I am not sure that 50 per cent would render a development unaffordable, but it would be highly contingent on the other associated infrastructure costs. The expansion of the city of Cambridge is reaching a point where there are potentially significant additional infrastructure costs. What we have sought to try to do—particularly around transport and proximity to major junctions—in the context of how we fund strategic infrastructure development, and whether the additional development and the loading on it based solely on grey-belt land is likely to render sufficient receipts to be able to resolve that, I suppose poses a question. From a market perspective, I suspect that value uplift from a number of our grey-belt sites that are not largely or significantly contaminated is probably capable of delivering 50 per cent affordable.
Lord Mair: What about in Solihull?
Mark Andrews: Across our borough, we have quite a disparity in values; the difference between the north of the borough and the middle and south of the borough can be quite significant. At the moment, we have a policy position of 40 per cent affordable housing. In the first instance, an increase to 50 per cent may not seem significant, but it is coupled with a relatively high CIL charging schedule in place and related Section 106 contributions that will be required in site-specific circumstances, as well as meeting the other tests. We have not tested what a 50 per cent affordable housing figure would do; that was not part of the viability evidence that supported our plan. A lot of the anecdotal evidence we see on the viability pressures being talked about from applicants in the industry and developers we have spoken to would suggest that pushing that 40 per cent to 50 per cent could start to cause issues for us in wider infrastructure delivery.
Lord Mair: You were going to say something, Stephen.
Stephen Kelly: Can I make another point? The whole thrust of the Government’s narrative around grey belt presumes that residential is the only purpose that this grey-belt land will be put to. In Greater Cambridge, there is a very vibrant economy, and that means that residential is not the highest land value in Greater Cambridge. That falls on laboratory spaces, research institutions and so forth. In that context, there is a real skew in the golden rules from the NPPF to presume that the benefit from green-belt releases that are sought through the additionality of a grey-belt site release—the exceptional circumstances, in a sense, of the grey belt—is focused on residential development.
In Cambridge, commercial lab and research space is higher-value land than residential. It creates significant housing challenges through the population that it brings to the city. Looking at the golden rules and the proposals that are being suggested to my local planning authority for commercial lab development, it looks like a very low public benefit in addition that arises. There would be no requirement, as it is drafted, to contribute towards the delivery of affordable housing. I do not necessarily see why that could not be the case, but it relates it to housing development. Likewise, the delivery of necessary infrastructure is the same test as in any other planning application, having regard to the CIL requirements.
The delivery of green space from commercial development is, in a sense, part of the proposition these days for attracting employees and occupants. Distilled through the lens of commercial development, the release of grey-belt land seems remarkably generous to commercial development opportunities, and in Cambridge that is probably the favoured land release for all the pressure that our green belt will come under. We have already proposed a significant release around the biomedical campus, but further land around the perimeter of Cambridge is already being developed by commercial lab, science and digital institutions.
Lord Mair: Richard, you were going to say something about Calderdale.
Richard Seaman: Returning to the issue of viability, we have something of a viability double whammy in the sense that we do not have high land values but delivering development in Calderdale is relatively expensive. We have high infrastructure costs. If you have visited the Pennine areas, you will know that a lot of our land is very steep, and so a lot of civil engineering is involved to make sites developable. Viability is a very big issue for us.
Lord Mair: Would I be right in concluding from what the three of you have said that these three particular requirements—on affordable housing, infrastructure and green spaces—are actually applicable anyway to release of land on green belt, irrespective of whether it is grey belt or not? There is nothing particularly special about grey belt, is there?
Richard Seaman: I would argue that the appropriate mechanism to consider affordable housing percentages is through the local plan process, where there is an evidence base, it is supported by a strategic housing market assessment and by viability evidence, and then you set zones within your plan area, dependent on the market conditions. A one-size-fits-all 50 per cent would be very problematic in somewhere like Calderdale.
Lord Mair: Stephen and Mark, do you want to add to that?
Mark Andrews: I was just going to echo that point. With the disparity in values that we have across the borough, I feel that an affordable housing policy set within a local planning context feels the more appropriate way to do that, based on a locally informed evidence base, community engagement and that sort of thing, as well as having regard to local housing needs around types, tenures and so on.
Perhaps a bit more widely, I have a point about those three tests. I found it quite interesting that open space is then separated into its own additional paragraph in the draft NPPF, which almost feels to be elevating it a little in the infrastructure contributions that might be provided as part of those sorts of sites. The overall wording would benefit from something that specifically focuses on local policy and local infrastructure requirements as established within a local plan, similar to affordable housing requirements.
Lord Mair: There is the key phrase “subject to viability”, which of course has been described in a number of our written contributions as being a get-out clause. Is that fair?
Richard Seaman: You have to refer back to how viability is dealt with in the annexe, which suggests a singular approach to benchmark land values, as I understand it. The NPPF, or the practice guidance, would set the benchmark land value. If you look at green belt across our three boroughs, you find that the values will be very different. They can be different in Calderdale between two sites on opposite sides of the road. The annexe on viability needs to be looked at; I do not think it is sufficient just to say “subject to viability”.
Lord Mair: Stephen, do you have any more to add?
Stephen Kelly: Only a comment about the ability of local housing strategies to be able to adjust and respond to this, and in that broader vein the role of things such as local nature recovery strategies and the potential for them to be unravelled by piecemeal developments that seek to deliver open space as a consequence of the golden rules in places where there is the development of biodiversity net gain—my authority is not alone in this—habitat recreation opportunities and so forth. They are not necessarily complementary when trying to re-establish habitat and space on the edges of new settlements to promote increased public access. Those broader sustainability objectives and the golden rules may well lead to some slightly perverse outcomes in the delivery of wider green infrastructure and environmental objectives.
Q25 Viscount Hanworth: This is for Mark Andrews. I imagine that, in your area, there is plenty of former industrial land. How does that feature in your plans? Should your plans be affected or modified in any way in the light of the grey-belt proposals?
The Chair: In that respect, may I supplement something else you could take in when you are answering Viscount Hanworth? Are there any peculiar decontamination-type issues that will arise in the grey-belt sites, or are they just the same as other brownfield sites? I raise this because there has often been reference made to redundant petrol stations and things like that, which to my mind implies a high level of decontamination requirement. Is that an issue worth considering, or is it just the same as it would be for any other previously used site? Viscount Hanworth’s question is the key, but if you would throw decontamination into the answer it would be helpful.
Mark Andrews: As a borough, we do not have a significant amount of former industrial land. We have some old mining legacy sites and things like that towards the north of the borough, and one of those at the moment is caught up with the work with HS2. It is a site called Arden Cross, towards the north of the borough, near the M42. Once HS2 was identified as arriving in the borough, we worked jointly with HS2 and the respective landowners to develop the concept of an urban village in and around that site. That was one of the flagship schemes in our draft local plan. It is still a flagship opportunity for the borough, and is very much about creating a sustainable urban village around the arrival of HS2.
Generally speaking, as I outlined before, our overall spatial strategy is one of focusing on previously developed land wherever we can. I know from previous experience working in other urban authorities where there is a lot of disused industrial land and opportunities to redevelop it that it is about getting the balance right between releasing for housing previously developed land that was generally for employment use or retaining it for employment opportunities.
Viscount Hanworth: This is industrial land or ex-industrial land that is in the green belt.
Mark Andrews: Yes.
Viscount Hanworth: That is what is really of interest to us.
Mark Andrews: Yes. It is about getting the balance right between whether the land is most appropriate for housing or whether it is still most appropriate for commercial or employment opportunities. It is about working that up, I suppose, through a local plan.
For Solihull, it is not a significant issue. We have previously developed land within our green belt, and that has become the focal point of some of the sites we took forward in our previous plan and will undoubtedly be carried forward into our next.
To pick up your point, Chair, about the decontamination side of things, that will potentially be an issue for grey-belt sites, especially if they are sites that had not been considered under the previous framework. I suspect that the impact of that would be broadly similar to any other case we may have coming forward through a planning application. Where there may have been former industrial use on that site, there will be a need to undertake an appropriate assessment of land contamination.
Viscount Hanworth: Cambridge is different from Solihull—an urban core surrounded by a circumferential green belt but punctuated on a map by white spots. I am thinking of a research establishment in the life sciences that is vying for expansion and is located in an isolated country estate with listed buildings. How does your plan accommodate such cases? I could probably put a name on what I am trying to describe—Babraham. Is that an appropriate instance?
The Chair: Viscount Hanworth is a professor at the University of Cambridge.
Viscount Hanworth: I am not. I am not in the life sciences either. I am a mathematician at Leicester, but be that as it may.
Stephen Kelly: We have already contemplated, through green-belt releases that we were proposing, the expansion of that particular institution and removing further land that surrounds it—it is an island within the green belt—from the green belt as part of the local plan process. The point I would make is that most progressive planning authorities are acutely conscious of the sustainable development obligations, and councillors in Greater Cambridge share and understand the need from a national priority point of view.
Our draft local plan proposes to remove further land from the green belt to facilitate the internationally significant work that the Babraham Research Campus does, along with further releases from the green belt for the biomedical campus. There is an understanding that those releases, regardless of whether a grey-belt definition comes forward, are provided for within the current NPPF under the exceptional circumstances provision, which provides a really helpful way for working with communities to help them to understand and consider and evaluate that.
In Cambridge, coming back to the original question about viability, we do not have a significant amount of industrial land. Sites such as Cambridge airport have potential contamination issues from operating as an airport, but, as Mark indicated, within the realms of normal development control purposes those should not represent significant additional barriers to implementation. Whether grey belt would see additional releases from our local plan around those institutions is unlikely.
Viscount Hanworth: Do I understand that the designation “national significance” has a profound effect on your plans? Do you have to accommodate that in a way that is rather special?
Stephen Kelly: The councils that I work for are acutely conscious of the global significance of the institutions in Cambridge. The university benefited from a very substantial green-belt release to create Eddington. The expansion of the research and academic facilities at West Cambridge was a previous green-belt release at the University of Cambridge. Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Papworth institutes are releases from the green belt that happened at the turn of the century and have created Europe’s most significant life sciences campus.
The local planning authorities and local councils are responsible custodians of place. The conversation with our communities is based on the exceptional circumstances that justify releases, and those things are explored through the local plan process currently. I do not think Cambridge’s green belt has been an impediment to Cambridge’s success as a global innovation hub.
Viscount Hanworth: Does Richard Seaman have anything to add?
Richard Seaman: We have a significant industrial legacy in West Yorkshire. It is probably fair to say that dealing with contaminated sites in areas such as Calderdale is complex. I do not think it is any more complex in the grey belt than it is in other areas, but you are certainly dealing with remediation challenges. There are multiple layers of complexity in unlocking sites. You have not just the remediation of land but issues of flooding, which is particularly serious in the Calder Valley. You also have the topography that I talked about, and sites that often have very poor transport infrastructure. The bottom line is that, if you throw enough money at those issues, you can generally resolve them, but it comes back to what is or is not viable.
Viscount Hanworth: Am I right in thinking that issues of flooding have been, if not ignored, at least previously given insufficient weight?
Richard Seaman: There have been some very serious, quite devastating floods. Flood defences have been constructed and are being constructed in the Calder Valley, but that is not a silver bullet. It is still very challenging.
Viscount Hanworth: Some buildings have been erected on what one can describe as the Thames flood plain without much attention paid to that hazard.
Richard Seaman: The flooding that has occurred in West Yorkshire has been of existing towns. The centre of Hebden Bridge and the centre of Todmorden have all flooded in recent years, and those are historic centres. We have not, to my knowledge, built housing contrary to Environment Agency advice on flood plains.
Viscount Hanworth: Not in your area.
The Chair: I come to Lord Mawson now. I ask everyone to be a little bit crisper because time is pressing on and we want to finish by 12.15 pm. Please bear that in mind.
Q26 Lord Mawson: To what extent will the grey-belt proposals meaningfully change your local planning and development management practices around grey-belt development? You have said some things about this already. Will these changes result in a faster and greater delivery of planning consents on grey-belt land? To cut to the chase, is a lot of this discussion about grey belt actually, in practice, in danger of pumping more treacle into the system and making it more difficult to develop things? There is a lot of good intention, but will it slow down the building of housing?
The Chair: Andrew, you are running the perennial danger of answering the question before the witnesses have an opportunity to give their own view.
Richard Seaman: As I have intimated, there is a danger that development management processes get mired in argument and debate over the meaning of individual words, appeals and legal challenges. That is my concern. As we said earlier in the discussion, a lot of that could be addressed by crisp, precise wording that removes that uncertainty. Clearly, we will have to do work with our planning teams to provide training and guidance, and probably some work with our regular planning agents to try to build some sort of consensus and understanding.
Stephen Kelly: Will it accelerate housing delivery? From my perspective, it is unlikely in Cambridge, where we have a stock of existing permissions to be implemented. Will it divert the resources of policy teams that have local plans to prepare to become expert witnesses in appeals? Highly probably. Will it undermine community confidence and increase uncertainty in communities? Possibly. We purport to have a plan-led system. This is an insertion of something unrehearsed in the courts, and indeed through the planning appeal process. I anticipate the diversion of resources in planning authorities towards seeking to understand this. I agree with Richard’s point about greater clarity, more precision and guidance; it would be a positive if those were implemented.
Mark Andrews: I echo those points in the interest of time.
The Chair: Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer is joining us remotely.
Q27 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: You have all mentioned some of the unique challenges that your local authorities face when it comes to developing within your green belt. Are there any other challenges unique to your local authority that you have not mentioned? Do you think the provision of the exceptional circumstance will be sufficient to deal with those?
The Chair: Take it in turn, as is convenient for you.
Richard Seaman: I have probably covered the particular circumstances and constraints in Calderdale, so I will not add anything to what I have said.
Stephen Kelly: The only point I would make is to echo the comments about the purpose of the grey-belt release. There is a risk that, if it proceeds in a place such as Greater Cambridge, it will only intensify the disparity between housing delivery and commercial development that is driving up unaffordability in the city. Some form of provision within the golden rules should recognise the contribution that commercial development makes to housing need, potentially including obligations around affordable housing arising from commercial development or affordable housing need. That would certainly be a proposition that I suggest should be considered.
Mark Andrews: I re-emphasise the point I made earlier about the importance of the Meriden Gap to Solihull and the unique separation pressure between Birmingham and Coventry, and the role the Meriden Gap plays in helping sustain and maintain that. One of the genuine risks we see and have concerns about from a grey-belt perspective is potentially the piecemeal erosion of that through changes to national policy. I will leave it at that.
The Chair: I want to comment on the Meriden Gap, because I know the area to some extent. It is not as though it is all pleasant rural countryside; the M42 and the M45 go through it. The gap is a big motorway area as well, is it not? One has to acknowledge that.
Mark Andrews: It is not an—
Kelvin MacDonald: Area of outstanding beauty.
The Chair: Parts of it are no doubt very beautiful, and there are some lovely villages. I am not saying it is blighted, but there are now not natural but manmade barriers in that gap, which mean that it will never be closed.
Mark Andrews: The M42 runs largely through the middle of it, to a degree. Certainly within the borough it continues a little to the north, into North Warwickshire, and to the south, into Stratford and Warwick. We also have the issue of HS2, which, in effect, comes up through the middle of the Meriden Gap and runs in towards the Arden Cross site that I mentioned earlier, near the airport and the NEC. Those two significant infrastructure provisions themselves provide a unique pressure within what is a pressurised gap between two of the largest urban areas in the country.
I do not think we could ever sit here and say that every element of the Meriden Gap is pristine and beautiful in its landscape. It has those key infrastructure aspects, along with mining and quarrying issues that sit within it. It has other villages that are in washed-over green belt. For us, it is about managing development within it in a sustainable and controlled way that respects the environmental pressure and the wider designation, and the separation between the two principal urban areas. We feel the best way to manage that is through the local plan process, which we have been trying to do.
The Chair: Good. We come now to Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe, who also joins us remotely.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: It is good to meet you all and thank you for your very interesting contributions. We have touched on community engagement. I think Mr Kelly talked about the plans being comprehensible to local communities, and we have referred to maintaining confidence in local communities. Looking ahead, can you reflect on whether the grey-belt proposals will actually have an impact on the involvement of and views of your local community in planning decisions?
Stephen Kelly: In an area such as ours, where there are competing pressures for land and its purposes—be that infrastructure, housing or commercial development—as a local planning authority and as councils we have spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to restore the confidence of communities that were impacted by piecemeal development arising from the authority’s difficulties with the five-year land supply in the last decade.
Reflecting in Cambridge the Government’s currently stated ambitions for significant levels of growth, while trying to hold on to an internationally significant economy, is challenging. Our communities feel disfranchised and disempowered. We have tried to emphasise the importance of plan-led growth as a means of participation in the planning process. We have put a huge amount of effort into involving young people, trying to give them something to focus on and to feel that there is access to a fair process.
The risk of grey belt coming along is to slightly unravel that, particularly through the development management process. We could see small, potentially non-contributory sites to green-belt purposes, but nevertheless important sites for local communities, picked off through a process that nobody can predict or foresee.
My view is that, if there is to be grey belt, the proper process is through the development plan process rather than necessarily seeing it as a development management process that can supplement additional delivery. The consequences of that will be to further erode public confidence in the planning process as a means of managing long-term change in localities.
The Chair: Mr Seaman, will there be a nervous breakdown in Hebden Bridge?
Richard Seaman: Permanence is one of the fundamental characteristics of green belt. You should set your boundaries at the plan-making stage and then those boundaries should endure over the period of the plan. Releasing land from the green belt is highly sensitive, even through the local plan process, but it is at least very structured, with its successive processes of consultation, refinement and examination, and the inspector issuing their report. Even if people are ultimately unhappy with the outcome, there is a transparent process that would, you hope, maintain public confidence in the system.
If you have a situation where you are looking at a much more incrementalist approach to the release of green belt, through the development management system, there is a risk that it could affect public confidence.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Do you think that would be minimised by the emphasis that you have placed on refining the definitions so that they are much better understood?
Richard Seaman: To an extent, but the nature of public concern about development, and the binary positions that people have on development, mean that you could never entirely remove that. You can insulate yourself to a degree from the risk of legal challenge, and you can make those decisions easier to take, but the nature of the process is such that you will always have a significant level of public concern. With the definitions as they currently stand, it is possible for people to come to quite different conclusions on one parcel of land.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Mr Andrews, perhaps you could add your view.
Mark Andrews: I share the views of colleagues. One of the things I always try to do when I start to work on a local plan is work with communities and stakeholders on understanding exactly what green belt is, how you define it, how it is considered and assessed, and what it actually means. Sometimes that includes dispelling some of the myths about the green belt, such as the fact that it is not, as the Chair points out, always pristine landscape. The concept of grey belt could muddy those waters and bring confusion between the various definitions and how one relates to the other. It feels like an additional piece of policy. I do not know what the right phrase is but it is another technical term that potentially hinders community engagement and understanding of the plan-making process a little.
The Chair: In a place such as Solihull, is there not a huge difference in community interest between those who live in attractive villages in the green belt and the bulk of the population living in what I might call metropolitan Solihull—the people off Blossomfield Road or the Stratford Road or somewhere—who might have an intellectual attachment to the idea of the green belt but do not experience it very much? When we talk about communities, how much are we talking about specific vocal, small communities, as opposed to the generality of the population?
Mark Andrews: I think you are right. One of the things we have in the planning system as a whole is the challenge of trying to encourage more and more people to engage in the decisions that we take and the information that we publish and consult on. I am sure that, if you had every authority in the country here today, they would probably all say a similar thing about trying to maximise the level of engagement. In Solihull, we have a large number of parish councils. We have very active ward members, parish councils, neighbourhood forums and so on, which are very vocal within their community. They help promote the concerns and issues that are valuable to that community and how they need to be considered and thought about in the context of plan-making.
The Chair: I am sure that is right, but my point is slightly different. Those representing areas such as the attractive villages will have this very high up their list, whereas people and their local representatives in what I might call the larger, more populated part of Solihull might have it very much lower down their list in planning terms. I used to be a local councillor and I know that it is important to talk about local engagement and have local engagement. It is also important to recognise that, when one talks about communities, it is very often quite small, specific communities that are making the loudest noise about a particular planning application, whereas the job of a council is presumably to judge what is best for the community as a generality within its area.
I do not know Cambridge at all. I think I have been to Cambridge twice in my life, so I would not comment about anything specific. I would love to go more often. I know Calderdale quite well, and there are parts of your green belt on the map that have the character of the national park and deserve higher protection, in my view. The hilltops north of Hebden Bridge as you go up towards Haworth deserve higher protection than green belt. Maybe they also have it. It varies a lot.
It is the community issue. One can come away with the impression that communities are going to be deeply disturbed by the notion of a grey belt, but actually it is quite small and specific communities. Perhaps the Secretary of State, when she makes the decision, should be less concerned about these comments than if it was the entire population rising up in a state of anxiety. I do not know.
Stephen Kelly: You are right that, in any particular context, within the visible experience of villages and the city of Cambridge there will be a range of different views. What unites communities—the Greater Cambridge area has a population of about 300,000—is the confidence necessary to know that the infrastructure will be adequate and sufficient.
Part of the challenge from potentially significant green-belt releases under this agenda, particularly through the development management process, would be the implications for transport infrastructure, utility supply and access to community services, which can be planned rationally through a local planning process but which tend to be somewhat disrupted by piecemeal developments.
When we struggled with our five-year land supply, and schemes of 200 or so houses were being built in villages, although people understood the broader housing need and shared the view that it was necessary, the concerns were around whether infrastructure was coming forward and whether healthcare was being planned and disrupted in piecemeal ways by those interventions. That is a more unifying component of why confidence in the planning process and the plan-led system is an important part for broader communities.
The Chair: That is a very helpful reply. Lady Warwick, I jumped in.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: Thank you, Chair. That is fine.
The Chair: Our last question—I am sure we will try to deal with it as briefly as we can—is from Lord Greenhalgh.
Q28 Lord Greenhalgh: To what extent will the success of grey-belt development be contingent on your relationship with neighbouring authorities?
Richard Seaman: We in West Yorkshire have a mayoral combined authority and very strong working relationships reflecting the geography of the area. I do not think that the nature of grey-belt sites around the Huddersfield-Halifax-Bradford area will present a particular duty to co-operate issues over and above what we are managing at the moment.
Lord Greenhalgh: It is not a specific issue.
Richard Seaman: It is not a specific challenge for us.
Lord Greenhalgh: What about in Greater Cambridge?
Stephen Kelly: Because the Cambridge green belt is contained entirely in South Cambridgeshire and we have a shared planning service—the local plan and the planning process operate universally across the entirety of the area, with substantial land beyond the green belt—I do not envisage a significant problem.
Lord Greenhalgh: What about Solihull and the West Midlands?
Mark Andrews: Our green belt forms part of the wider green belt that sits around Birmingham and Coventry and flows in and around that area. Probably one of the main pressures we have wrestled with across those areas in recent years has been maximising the supply in some of the urban areas in managing unmet need within neighbouring authorities. Although I do not foresee the introduction of grey belt being a substantial game-changer in that respect, it may put pressure on maximising the supply and evidencing certain authorities maximising their supply. There may be a conflict or difference of opinion about how that supply might be maximised if there is a debate about what is or is not a grey-belt site.
Lord Greenhalgh: How will you work through those differences?
Mark Andrews: Probably in the same way as we would other duty to co-operate pressures that we have had in recent years. It is about co-operation and making that co-operation as effective and efficient as possible. It is about sharing evidence, and a consistency of the evidence base, as much as possible. Some of my earlier thoughts about consistency in guidance and methodology for green-belt reviews and things such as that would be welcome and supportive in that respect. It would be through ongoing co-operation at regional level.
The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. You are very welcome to submit any subsequent or consequential written evidence that you might want to add to what you have said today.
It has been suggested to me, perhaps a little naughtily, that one of the things you might like to send us would be a crisper definition of the grey belt. That is your exam question; you do not have to do it, but it would actually be quite helpful. As I said, we have received quite a lot of written evidence from planning professionals, who are generally antagonistic. When you try to tease out whether this is a substantive issue or a definitional issue, it is harder to do when you are dealing with written evidence because, although you can ask questions, the page does not answer back.
What you really want to say is that, if it is a definitional issue, give us a better definition. That is what the Government will be looking for, presumably, at the end of a consultation exercise. They will want to refine the definition. What would that look like? What could we suggest to the Government might be a better definition, if we can agree on that and think it is a sensible thing to do? Your help on that would be seriously valuable.
With that, thank you for the time that you have given us today and for coming to see us. We have found it extremely valuable.
