Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Keep your hands off cherished landscapes
Proposals to introduce looser planning controls in national parks have alarmed Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger, as he tells as he tells Defra Secretary Ranil Jayawardena.
DEAR Ranil You may be aware - though equally you may not, and I will not find that at all surprising that my constituency embraces roughly two-thirds of Exmoor national park.
It is an area of considerable beauty and the smallest, though arguably the most topographically diverse, of all our parks. And one which presents all kinds of challenges, many of them arising from the difficulties of reconciling conflicting interests: the need to conserve a world-class landscape on the one hand and on the other stimulating a thriving economy so that people who were born and brought up there can find employment rather than drifting away to towns and cities.
These issues, of course, are common to all national parks, as are the challenges of encouraging tourism without allowing the tourists’ impact to impinge on the environment which they have all come to admire; and the need for the authorities to work closely and harmoniously with farmers who at the end of the day are the people who actually do the graft and look after the landscape.
So I was somewhat intrigued to read this week that local authorities will be able to apply for investment zones in national parks, thus ‘benefitting’ from liberalised planning laws and accelerated development, particularly of housing.
I sincerely hope that no such application will be forthcoming from any national park authority. Presumably some civil servant has figured that a lot of people would like to live in a national park and therefore providing more homes to enable them to do so would be a good idea. But it is nothing of the kind.
If there is to be new housing then it should be appropriately scaled and designed to meet a local need – in nearly every case that being defined as low-cost housing restricted to local families.
Embarking on the construction of even modest, open-market housing developments risks not merely an unacceptable degradation of the environment; it will simply fuel the rise in property prices in national parks which has left thousands of less well-off local families with no hope of ever owning their own home.
I may whinge now and then about the restrictive attitude of Exmoor national park’s planners and it is an undisputable fact that they have made some pretty crass decisions in recent years (including a celebrated case where their refusal of consent for a modern farm building risked putting the farmer out of business completely, and another where they objected to an ‘inappropriate’ shepherd’s hut in an area grazed by some 40,000 sheep) but by and large they have kept those conflicting interests broadly in balance.
What we actually need in national parks is not inward investment so much as bottom-up investment to enable those who live there to derive the maximum benefit from the parks’ natural assets.
We should be supporting enterprises which promote low-key environmental tourism because aside from bringing in money it helps to bridge the still too-wide gap that exists in this country between town and country.
We should be encouraging farmers and landowners to derive maximum benefit from what they produce by adding value on their side of the gate rather than letting others do so.
That means not merely rearing and selling cattle and sheep but turning them into meat products for direct and online selling: not merely growing trees but crafting garden furniture or other timber-based products. And there are plenty of other examples.
There is a steady and growing public appetite for local foods and craft products: anything, in short with a bit of identity. And it is entirely possible to expand their production within national parks without having the slightest detectable impact on any of our much-cherished landscapes.
Yours ever Ian