There aren’t many wild natural wetlands in the Yorkshire Dales. Limestone scenery has a strong tendency to leak and much of the water runs underground. That makes most of the upland scenery difficult to negotiate for migrating birds and increases the value of the few remaining wetlands that cling on in the lowlands surrounding the Dales.
So when it came to writing its local plan, the relevant local authority which is Craven District Council, listed one of those precious sites as a piece of Green Space that needed protection.
Walking around the site of the Hellifield Flashes I could quickly see why. Glancing across the first of three entirely natural ponds there were thousands of water birds taking advantage of the rare expanse of safe open water. They are not alone. Great crested newts occupy the site and it is also home to a significant population of eels. A species which is currently rare but which once proliferated beyond anyone’s ability to count in most of our waterways to the point where locally sourced jellied eels became a staple food for those living along the Thames.
Yet, despite the initial efforts of the council to protect the site, all this natural abundance is now threatened. It turns out that wonderful wild natural ponds are the kind of place where developers like to put tourist cabins so that the residents of the leisure complex can enjoy the delights of the countryside without having to walk too far from the spa and the restaurant.
A series of different outline proposals came into Craven planners aiming to build 300 lodges, a hotel and parking for over 250 vehicles. All of them met with a storm of local objections from people who pointed out that you don’t get a lot of over wintering birds landing on a pond in the middle of a major leisure centre and great crested newts and other wildlife don’t take well to being provided with alternative ‘equivalent’ locations.
So the developer switched tactics. Instead of persisting with an application that was being fiercely resisted it occurred to them that recent planning laws provide them with a much easier and more reliable way of achieving what they want. A developer who wants to build on a designated Green Space simply challenges the local council at the hearing on its Local Plan and if they employ a good enough consultant at a hefty enough fee they stand a good chance of succeeding.
That is exactly what happened. A planning inspector sent out by the Department for the Environment to ensure that Craven’s local plan met the incredibly tough tests set by national government responded to the developer’s arguments by ruling that Craven Council cannot list the whole of the Hellifield flashes as a Green Space. Or at least it can’t if it wants to get its Local Plan approved and stand any chance of exercising some small degree of control over what gets built.
This leaves Hellifield Flashes at the mercy of developers and virtually guarantees that a planning application for some form of hotel and leisure centre will get approved. The local council can’t put a strong enough Green Space designation in place to protect the site. That means any application to develop the site won’t be able to be turned down on the grounds that it is a single coherent natural resource. That makes it really hard to find grounds for refusal.
The local planning committee operates under rules that make it phenomenally costly for the Council to turn down any application that might be viewed as complying with the heavily pro-development legislation. Any time an application to develop is approved there is no right for local citizens to appeal against the decision. Any time one is turned down the developer can appeal and can win costs if they can illustrate that rules that contain a presumption in favour of development have not been followed reasonably.
This leaves local councils scared to reject developments because they fear the costs of losing an appeal. Objectors, such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, are put in an even worse position. They find themselves trying to wade through page after page of complex planning documents and then relying on the expertise of volunteers to put forward the views of those who wish to protect precious natural habitats. It is an unequal battle in which trained planning experts and clever lawyers backed up by deep pockets are pitched against people who would rather be walking the Dales than reading legal documents in the hope that they might be able to protect them.
Up and down the country ordinary people who care about valuable wildlife sites face similar problems. Our planning laws were deliberately changed by David Cameron’s government to make it easier to get developments through. They have been loosened further since with equally conscious intent. Those laws have to go and proper protection needs putting back into planning law.
Because at the moment a Local Plan doesn’t really mean what it says on the tin. What is called the Local Plan actually means the Plan for development that the national government allows you to have. And that can be a very different thing indeed.