So has the green belt done its job?

IT'S got to be worth some kind of celebration. If not a bottle of bubbly then at least half a can of Heineken dug out from the back of the fridge.

Green belts are 50 years old today. It was then that Duncan Sandys, the Conservative housing minister, issued the planning circular (no 42/1955) which made it possible for local authorities to designate swatches of green land around our major cities which should remain free of development.

The idea was to restrict unrestrained urban sprawl, and to protect the individuality of smaller towns and villages near to larger urban centres.

The obvious question is: have they worked? And, perhaps more to the point, will they continue to work in the future?

The answer to the first question seems to be, almost certainly, yes.

It is hard to speculate about what York might have looked like today if there had never been a green belt, says Martin Grainger, principal development officer with City of York Council.

But it is likely that the green 'wedges' which slice into the city, acting as its lungs and allowing the different areas of York - Heworth, Acomb, The Groves - each to keep their own character, would have been badly eroded by now, even if they hadn't gone altogether. Those 'wedges' are areas such as Rawcliffe Ings, Bootham Stray, Monkgate Stray, Walmgate Stray and Micklegate Stray, vital areas of countryside that penetrate almost into the heart of York.

How awful to think of them covered with anonymous urban sprawl.

The green belt has also protected the towns and villages that surround York, says Dave Caulfield, the council's head of city development. Without the green belt, areas such as Copmanthorpe, Bishopthorpe and Haxby could have been swallowed up by development.

You only have to look about you in York, says Dave, to see the beneficial effect the green belt has had.

"It must have worked," he said. "If you let the punter in the street vote for whether they think York's special character is there or not, I think they would say yes."

So York has much to thank its green belt for. Which is ironic because, strictly speaking, we don't have one.

The York local plan, which would have detailed the boundaries of the green belt and so made clear which parcels of land in York were available to be built on and which were not, has never been formally adopted.

York's green belt - broadly, a swathe of greenfield land within a six mile radius of the city centre - receives the protection it has under the North Yorkshire strategic plan and regional planning guidelines.

These, however, do not fix the fine details of green belt boundaries - meaning there could potentially be grey areas about which it was unclear whether they were considered green belt or not.

So does the fact the York local plan has never been adopted weaken the protection the green belt provides?

No, insists Martin Grainger. The York local plan may never have been adopted, but a great deal of work has been done on it, and there is a draft local plan in place which city planners use to determine planning applications in the same way they would have had it been formally adopted.

The protection a green belt gives against over-development is that on land that has been designated green belt, there is a "presumption against" development.

That contrasts sharply with non-green belt land, where there is a presumption in favour. "It turns the situation on its head," said Martin. However, green belt does not provide absolute protection.

Certain kinds of development have always been deemed "appropriate" on green belt land. These are listed in a dry Government document that glories in the name PPG 2. They include sports fields and playing fields; small developments related to agricultural use; and those related to forestry use. Developments, in other words, that don't threaten the green, open nature of the land in question.

There is more, however.

Other kinds of development can be considered if a special case can be made for them, and if it can be shown that the benefits of the development outweigh the damage caused to green belt.

The absolute protection against development that being designated green belt offers is also weakened by the fact that local authorities do have the power to take land out of the green belt.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has already warned that green belts in England are under threat as never before, with everything from universities, airport runways, new housing developments and sports clubs seeking to expand on to them.

Those concerns ring so true in a city like York, where there are two controversial developments - Derwenthorpe and the York University expansion - proposed for land that is (or, in the case of Derwenthorpe, was) on green belt land.

Both proposals have been referred to the Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber for a decision on whether there should be a public inquiry, after the city council indicated that it would like to approve them.

In both cases, the council believes a special case has been made - the long-recognised need for the university to expand, in the case of the university; the need for housing in York, and the particular mix of housing proposed, at Derwenthorpe.

In the case of Derwenthorpe, the council is bending over backwards to be seen to be acting properly, insists Dave Caulfield.

The land there was actually taken out of green belt following a public inquiry in the early 1990s. In the draft local plan, it is clearly highlighted as having been identified for housing use, he says: and yet despite that, the application has been referred to the Government, when perhaps strictly-speaking it needn't have been.

The irony in the case of the university expansion, meanwhile, is that had the York local plan been adopted, the Heslington East site would also have been taken out of the local plan: and it, too, wouldn't have needed to be referred to the Government.

As it is, it is the Government which will, in each case, have the final say on whether a public inquiry should be ordered. But is the mere fact that the two applications have got so far in itself an indication that green belt policy just isn't working any more?

Jeffrey Stern, a Heslington parish councillor and vice chairman of Heslington Village Trust who is implacably opposed to the university expansion plans, says as a concept green belt is 'fantastic'. "But the problem is that it just seems to be rather casually thrown away," he said.

Malcolm Kettlestring, who is vice-chairman of Osbaldwick parish council and a leading opponent of Derwenthorpe, agrees that in principle green belt is a good idea.

"But when it suited the city fathers, they just didn't bother about it really," he said, referring to the 1990s removal of the Derwenthorpe land from green belt, which his parish council opposed.

Ann Reid, York's executive member for planning and transport, has no doubt that the green belt has made a big difference to the York we have today.

"If there were no green belt, people could do virtually what they wanted to do, anywhere," she said. The fact that occasionally there might be exceptional circumstances in which a development could be permitted on green belt land - or in which a particular parcel of land might be taken out of green belt - did not diminish the importance of the green belt concept, she added.

Hopefully, in York, the protection afforded by the green belt might in future be even stronger.

That is because the city council is now working towards a new blueprint for permitted development - the Local Development Framework, or LDF. Under the latest government panning legislation, LDFs will replace local plans.

York may never have adopted its local plan. But the aim is that by the end of 2007, it will have adopted a broad LDF strategy - and that by summer 2009 it will have adopted a more detailed version that will, for the foreseeable future, set out exactly where the city's green belt begins and ends.

And that really will be a cause for celebration.

Updated: 09:07 Wednesday, August 03, 2005