Our general secretary, Kate Ashbrook, considers the implications of the government’s apparent obsession with growth.
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In the late 1940s, when the country was on its knees after the second world war, the Labour government nevertheless found room for vital legislation beyond the economic emergency: the National Health Service Act 1946, the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949.
Our economy is pretty dire today. The government should emulate its predecessor and invest in social goods.
Cliché
Instead, we have the clichéd slogan that growth must override everything else. On 29 January Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer, gratuitously accused those who want to see the right development in the right place as ‘blockers’, and said that developers should stop having to worry about ‘bats’ and ‘newts’, proxies for the value of nature.
The revised national planning policy framework gives us no confidence that the government intends to protect green spaces. Our proposal that developers should be compelled to designate new town and village greens in their plans—to protect open spaces and give people rights there—has aroused no ministerial interest.
How does all this growth-and-development noise chime with the recent welcome pledges from government?
To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of royal assent of the 1949 act, government promised, among other things, stronger laws and guidance for national parks and national landscapes, to widen the public’s access to nature. And at christmas we learnt that the government will repeal the pernicious 2031 cut-off for claiming historic paths—all good stuff.
Now we have a consultation on a land-use framework. In 2022 we gave evidence to a house of lords’ committee on land use in England, and called for public access to be at the heart of land-use policy. A positive report ensued but was buried.
The headline this time is ‘to protect the most productive agricultural land and boost food security’. This will presumably appease disaffected farmers, but the framework must be comprehensive; it must not sideline public access but ensure that it is maximised, along with nature and natural beauty.
Comely
To achieve change we need legislation—a new National Parks and Access to the Countryside Bill perhaps. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs must fight for parliamentary time (we understand it has no slot in this session), and demonstrate that to achieve growth we need a happy, healthy population and a comely environment resistant to climate crisis.
That means that people must have safe, good-quality access close to home as well as in the wider countryside, so that they can understand nature and want to fight for it—just as the Labour government recognised in the 1940s.
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