Letter: We Need To Defend Our Green Belt

Published on: 2 Oct, 2013
Updated on: 2 Oct, 2013

From Mark Payne

Our precious green belt is set to be milked as a cash cow by big business with no regard for what the community is saying. The recent council newsletter has unashamedly been written to soften us up to frittering away our countryside by suggesting that some of the green belt is actually not that nice.

The green belt we are campaigning to defend is:

an area of outstanding natural beauty;
of great landscape value;
high quality farmland.

Obviously, the reason for having green belt in the first place was to preserve green spaces for our children and focus the attention of developers onto brownfield sites.

Obviously, it is cheaper and more profitable to cover our green fields with concrete and lamp posts.

Obviously, a more determined council would step up to the challenge of first redeveloping our existing town centre brownfield sites.

The reason for all this development? Well Surrey county needs more houses and more sites for travellers to park their caravans. So guess what, the county authorities have decided to build most of the counties requirement for houses and traveller sites in Guildford.

More houses mean more congestion on the A3 Guildford bottleneck, more competition for places at our local schools, more strain on our hospital.

Is this what Guildford really wants?

Responses to Letter: We Need To Defend Our Green Belt

Jim Allen Reply

October 3, 2013 at 11:57 pm

Well what can one say? The green belt analysis provided by the council is a mix of strange assumptions and a mighty queer approach. For example: an ancient woodland and road is not regarded as a strong boundary to the green belt while a newly planted commercial tree plantation and hedges are and; walking routes to facilities, necessary for a site to be deemed viable can go where there are no footpaths across private land or to ‘clearways’. Who would want to walk to a ‘clearway’ where traffic cannot even stop?.

The whole document reeks of Eh! ‘Ow come! and Why? So time to write to the council and strongly suggest a new assessment is done with no bias, using a standard throughout for all sites which actually reflects what is, not what might be. I’m sure planning policy managers will be pleased to explain the anomalies.