Government Planning Policy is often a political football; and guessing the direction of the bounce is an art. Monday July 29 saw me typically wrong footed, and with over a weeks hindsight I know it was not just the end of the warm weather that got to me.
The day had started off well – a visit to countryside site with local politicians making up the Planning Committee. On the way there had been occasional mutters about a hot coach trip to visit a farm for a wholly uncontroversial scheme. The proposal was for a small anaerobic digestion plant, with CHP, on a dairy farm. There had been no objections, but I wanted the politicians to become familiar with the technology. Mainland Europe sees AD as an ideal solution for agricultural wastes. Germany already has 2,500 operational plants, with a further 3,000 planned.
Back to Derbyshire. At 10.30 am the farmer was pointing out where the various components of the scheme would be located. The main AD tanks would replace an open air slurry lagoon. All of the construction was located tight to the exiting farm buildings, so there was little visual impact, and the farmer happily counted out on his fingers the advantages. It would cut smells for locals (there was a barn conversion about 100m away), generate electricity, produce an odour free fertilizer and avoid the need for that slurry lagoon.
Technology
12 noon back at County Hall and the Committee approved the application. Every hand was raised in support. The local politicians had actually enjoyed the visit, and had been particularly impressed by the enthusiasm from the 80 year old farmer for this new technology. On top of the benefits for his business, they saw the clear strategic gains not least in reducing the climate change impact of this major, but normally unseen waste stream.
We must not forget that all too often, waste applications are in the problem category of local politics. When you are faced with 15,000 -20,000 objections to a scheme, it is difficult to think in the abstracts of European waste policy. On-farm AD was a welcome winwin decision. It helped a business, moved waste up the hierarchy and it reduced odour problems. I was happy, as I felt that for the next raft of small, on-farm AD applications I would perhaps not even need to always take them on site visits.
My satisfaction was somewhat short-lived. At 2.00 pm I received an email from CLG containing the draft updated waste planning policy. This is intended to replace the existing Planning Policy Statement 10, and to sit alongside the proposed new Waste Management Plan for England, published earlier this month by Defra.
Much of the draft is good sense, or repeats previous guidelines in a different font. It places a welcome increased emphasis on the prevention and recycling of waste. The introduction even says planning policy should complement the draft Waste Management Plan for England, which sets out work towards a zero waste economy. It also sets the traditional waste planning axiom; deliver sufficient opportunities for new waste management facilities of the right type, in the right place and at the right time.
Detail
Of course the devil is in the detail. Where this bites is in what it says about Green Belts and waste management. This will obviously include both AD plants and the slurry lagoons they can replace. The draft removes a former policy of giving proper weight towards locational needs and wider environmental and economic benefits when considering applications in such areas. The draft is unusually unambiguous; “This means that, under national policy, these planning considerations should not be given more significant weight when compared to others when planning applications are decided for waste facilities in the green belt,”. This, unfortunately, risks setting the bar too high to allow many waste developments to be approved.
Eric Pickles appears to have taken his new role as Green Belt defender to a new level of public prominence. While he cant quite manage to maintain rational controls over greenfield housing development or Green Belt opencast coal sites, waste planning has copped the brunt.
The Daily Express and Mail have campaigned long and hard against the Green Belt destruction. But they have made the normal mistake of conflation; when they refer to Green Belt they actually mean open countryside. Most of the headlines about concreting over green and pleasant land slip into using the term Green Belt as though it relates to anything which isnt a city or the suburbs. There is also a double contrived dualism; if a development takes place on a Green Belt site, it surely cannot be a sustainable choice.
Sustainable development
Conversely, if development can be directed to a brownfield site it is, by default, sustainable.
What strikes most about upping of the ante on Green Belt protection is that it is little more than sop for the press in the South East. The coalition need to be seen to give a little on planning reform to demonstrate their green credentials. We should not forget the forces aligned against them; far from the usual suspects of anti fracking or incineration activists. The Daily Telegraph, National Trust and the Womens Institute have all come out with strong anti-planning reform rhetoric.
Mr. Pickles has used the PPS10 review opportunity to come the strong man, and has taken this a stage further; PPS10 effectively embeds this wrong-thinking by creating a new transubstantiation for the world of planning. In the effort to throw a life belt into the sea of public opinion, we now have Green Belt as an almost religious proxy. The bread of Green Belt represents the body and soul of sustainable development. To be clear all tests of new planning policy must be measured against what protection they afford to the Green Belt.
I do not believe this is hyperbole on my part. Green Belt protection is now sustainable development policy. Catholicism have symbolised the change from bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ. Pickles uses Green Belt to absolve his deregulation of planning by protecting the Green Belt. The church has its Pope in Pickles, with his arguments that waste facilities, including slurry pits, should not be built on Green Belt land. He even has his own synod; a new All Party Parliamentary Green Belt Group dedicated just to this issue.
Effectively Green Belt is now seen as the holy areas of England in other words anything else is fair game, but this special protection needs to not to be justified, challenged or even questioned.
Lets go back to the farm based AD Plant. What did the politicians think about this proposed plant? Was that it was slap bang in the middle of the beautiful Derbyshire Country side? No it was that it was a fantastically sustainable solution. It addressed climate change, zero waste and odour impacts. They, like the rest of Europe saw the advantages of certain types of appropriately scaled waste infrastructure in the countryside, and heaven forbid, potentially on Green Belt sites.
Rural economy
This Green Belt as the body of a sustainability misses the point. In the rush to find a public display of a commitment to green issues, I suppose ministers will see stopping waste uses in parts of the countryside as being an acceptable cost. My main argument is that minsters should not fall into the trap that the press has fell into. Open countryside does not always equate with Green Belt. Rural parts of the country are economically active, and even the Archers will need to see waste issues dealt with properly.
The outcomes of PPS10 review could be make for uncomfortable ministerial reading. Farming communities will find it harder and moreover expensive to move to a sustainable, zero waste economy. Derbyshires politicians will not have the pleasure of all being able to support as many more winwin waste applications. Maybe its because I am not pandering to the national press, but I do not think that the loss of Green Belt opportunities for waste is acceptable collateral damage for proving ones green credentials.
So from 10.30am I was anticipating AD to be a big future issue in a rural county like Derbyshire. I perhaps foolishly felt that I was delivering joined up government European policy down to local decision making. It even has a degree of (shudder) cross central government integration after all CLG gave us the planning policy, and DEFRA offer financial support for on farm AD solutions. Or is that going to change as well?
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