The next round of consultation on the Buckinghamshire Plan is imminent, with much of it already published for scrutiny by Councillors, writes the Conservative MP for Mid Buckinghamshire Greg Smith.
Let’s not forget what is driving this. An unacceptable housing target, imposed by central government, with legal force demanding Buckinghamshire builds 90,000 homes. Oh, and not a penny for infrastructure – doctors surgeries, schools, roads – is included alongside that. Plainly, it is wrong.
What I can say with absolute confidence is that our Council do not want to do this. If it was a locally made decision, the concept of building 90,000 homes would be rejected faster than Keir Starmer by his own backbenchers. The Council team have put together a plan, under legal threat, that does try to avoid greenbelt land and densify the larger towns in the county. However, there is no getting around the fact that the plan sees greenfield land, farm land, open countryside marked for development. For me that is unacceptable and I will fight each and everyone of these sites with everything I have got.
The government’s land use framework already wrongheadedly looks to take nine per cent of the UKs farmland out of food production for so called environmental schemes. Add in all this housing and not only will our natural beauty and rural identity be further diminished, but farming put under even more strain than it already is. We need to eat and I would rather eat British food, produced by our first class farmers, not increasingly rely on imports.
This is a fight we must have and win. I have always said my top priority is protecting our countryside. So please can I ask everyone to join me in replying to the consultation over the summer (details on the Bucks Council website) – making the case to protect all our countryside, all our farmland and say development must only happen on brownfield sites and brownfield sites only.
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