The City of Durham Trust

Trust opposes plans to build on Green Belt

This page records the Trust’s position in February 2011. Later developments are on the home page.

The City of Durham Trust has written to Durham County Council to oppose its plans to build houses on the City of Durham Green Belt. (Read the letter here.)

The officially preferred core strategy proposes to make Durham City a boom town by vastly increasing its population, in the hope — yet to be substantially supported by evidence — that this will attract new prestigious businesses to the City, with added prosperity then spilling over into the whole county. The Plan involves absorbing large areas of the recently established Green Belt around Durham in order to build there 5,050 new houses.

Much of money raised through the new Community Infrastructure Levy, exploiting the jump in land values that results from removing Green Belt protection, would then be used for two destructive road schemes in the same Green Belt, supporting the increased traffic. Apart from the fact that Durham City remains already the one part of the county for which traffic congestion and now air-quality are already public concerns it remains hard to see how this level of focus of development on the City can benefit areas of the County still in need of direct local support.

The County is ploughing ahead even though responses to that Core Strategy showed that 60% opted for Option B or a further alternative strategy. (More about the Trust’s response.)

The Green Belt was established less than a decade ago. A major public inquiry in 2002, presided over by an independent inspector, led in 2004 to the formal adoption by the then City Council of the Green Belt as part of the City of Durham Local Plan. Government Planning Policy Guidance, set out in document PPG2, says that “the essential characteristic of Green Belts is their permanence”.

The independent inspector’s Report repeated the primacy of the Green Belt in his chapter on ‘Housing Strategy’. His words are highly relevant: “its [Durham’s] unique character and setting makes it physically and environmentally unable to absorb new housing at levels which market forces might indicate. It is largely for these reasons that the Green Belt has been proposed…… …..Housing development which extends either into the countryside surrounding the City, or into important open spaces or undeveloped areas within it, will be resisted” (paras 4.9, 4.10).

So if that is the case, where could houses be built? The Inspector considered this question in that part of his report dealing with the Green Belt: “…a boundary set tightly up to the existing edge of the main built-up area would be likely to limit severely the possibility of extensions to that area, not only in the Plan period but ‘as far as can be seen ahead’, or even ‘permanently’” Normally land would be left between the main urban area and the Green Belt to provide for longer term development needs. However, in the particular circumstances of Durham, the Green Belt was so narrow that “Development outside such a comparatively narrow Green Belt could still be located so as to minimise travel distances for work and leisure by being at existing or proposed public transport nodes and close to existing facilities in the larger settlements with better facilities beyond the Green Belt.” (Read the Inspector’s report on the Green Belt here.)

Trustees are not alone in still being deeply concerned about key elements of the present draft County Plan, not only in relation to the heritage of Durham City but also in relation to County Durham as a whole. Our concern is that major changes are now being progressed that seem certain to damage Durham City and put the wider county at a disadvantage initially while taking a gamble on its long-term benefits.