Countryside campaigners Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) are warning that a huge increase in housebuilding in the countryside around Birmingham threatens to sabotage urban regeneration, encourage more people to move out of urban areas, consume Green Belt land and destroy open green landscapes.
The Government is putting pressure on the West Midlands for a green field housing expansion. It could make the controversy over housebuilding as intense as it is in South East England, with the West Midlands becoming a new battleground for Government proposals to push through more housing development at all costs. The latest Government predictions of housing requirements could see 50% more land than currently planned being allocated for house building across the West Midlands over the next 25 years, with the figures more than doubling in some areas. That would be incompatible with the region's present emphasis on brownfield development and urban regeneration. The West Midlands Regional Assembly has been consulting West Midlands councils about the implications.
Some councils such as Shropshire and Herefordshire have told the Regional Assembly that they could not meet the higher figures without damage to the countryside and market towns. Other urban authorities are warning that they have limited building land, and that developers would abandon house building on derelict or under-used sites that need remediation if they were given cheap green field alternatives. But some councils in the region want to go along with the Government - Worcestershire County Council is contemplating expansions of Worcester and Redditch into the countryside and Coventry and Warwickshire seem willing to allocate large areas of Green Belt to let cities and towns expand outwards.
Towns such as Burton-on-Trent, Hereford, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Telford and Worcester, already targeted for development, would also be affected and some could double in size over twenty years. Others such as Lichfield, Warwick and Leamington which have been growing fast in recent years would have to keep on growing to fulfil the higher numbers, risking damage to their environmental quality.
CPRE says the Government's new household projections are of limited relevance to the West Midlands because they assume a continuation of past trends and policies, whereas the current West Midlands planning strategy aims to take the region in a new and more sustainable direction. The Government's fundamental premise, that building more houses will reduce prices, is misguided. CPRE are not convinced that the housebuilding industry would build at the much higher rate and believe developers could end up cherry picking the most profitable greenfield sites. The exodus of people from the city to the countryside would then accelerate, keeping prices unaffordable in rural areas and undermining efforts to make areas like East Birmingham, the Black Country and North Staffordshire more desirable places in which to live. This could lead to worsening quality of life, loss of countryside, increased traffic congestion, longer journeys to work and more pressure on natural resources. Overall, the extra houses and other development associated with them could consume up to 40 square miles of land over the next 25 years, most of it greenfield.
Peter Langley, Vice Chairman of West Midlands CPRE, said: "The West Midlands needs more affordable homes, but swamping the market with greenfield land and playing fast and loose with the region's long-established Green Belts won't achieve that: it's a form of environmental vandalism. The Regional Assembly must stick to its guns and resist Government pressure to open the floodgates to new housing. It should continue to work with local authorities to control the supply of new housing so this is kept within environmental limits, and to continue the focus on urban regeneration. The present strategy must be given time to work. It would be a terrible mistake to water it down."
