Campaigners warn greenbelt assessment is a ‘house of cards’

The new way of assessing greenbelt between Marlow and Bourne End is a ‘house of cards’, a campaign group has warned – threatening to kill it off in ‘death by a thousand cuts’.

Buckinghamshire Council is currently working on its new local plan – the document that guides what can be built where across Bucks up to around 2040.

It requires a Green Belt Assessment (GBA), looking at how important different pieces of greenbelt are, to help decide what land might be suitable for development.

Campaign group Save Marlow’s Greenbelt (SMG) says the new GBA is flawed when looking at Little Marlow, between Marlow and Bourne End.

The site is not currently being considered for housing allocation in the Local Plan – but nonetheless, re-examining the quality of its greenbelt unsettles the campaigners.

Sam Kershaw, director of SMG, said the GBA has divided greenbelt segments into ‘excessively small portions’ that obscure and reduce their value.

There are now five times more assessment areas across Bucks than there were 10 years ago, he said.

“This tactic has caused an artificial weakening of the greenbelt,” he said. “It will change the county forever.”

Concerns hinge around the official ‘purposes of the greenbelt’. These include checking unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas and preventing neighbouring towns from merging.

According to the Bucks assessment, land around Little Marlow and towards Bourne End is not strongly contributing to these purposes.

But SMG says the ‘granular’ approach to the assessment causes issues. The ‘arbitrary and excessive’ subdividing ignores the reliance of each area on each other, the group thinks.

Every piece of land is being judged as less important because it is assumed the rest will stay open and undeveloped, their report claims – but there is no such guarantee.

“The result is a chain of mutual dependency, in which no link in the chain is independently secure. It creates a house of cards,” SMG wrote.

In addition, no material change to the land has occurred since 2016 to justify treating each subdivided piece differently, SMG thinks.

For these and other reasons, the campaigners contend that the assessment is based on ‘unsound reasoning’ with ‘unexplained inconsistencies’.

“We believe that the intention to manufacture greybelt so that the council can … fulfil its obligation to allow 95,000 new homes,” SMG wrote.

Responding, Steven Broadbent, leader of Buckinghamshire Council said that Government guidance issued in February requires councils to break up larger areas of land into smaller sections for GBAs.

“Although the countryside between Marlow and Bourne End hasn’t changed, the national rules have,” he said.

“The Government now places strong emphasis on identifying grey belt land, so we have had to update the way we assess greenbelt areas to reflect this new approach. 

“If we do not follow national guidance, the Local Plan could be challenged, which would increase the risk of unplanned or speculative development.”

He added: “The council continues to challenge the expectation that Buckinghamshire should accommodate 95,000 new homes without a clear understanding that the infrastructure needed to support this level of growth will also be funded.”