As your Local Champion, protecting the Green Belt in Beaconsfield, Marlow and the South Bucks villages remains one of my top priorities.
I warned in the General Election that Labour was coming for our Green Belt - and they have. The Lib Dems stayed silent - because they wanted 20% higher housing targets than Labour.
Labour have re-instated top down, mandatory targets - which I had successfully helped remove in the last Conservative Government. These targets now impose 95,500 houses on Buckinghamshire - a 43% increase on previous needs based assessments. Without a single penny of additional money for schools, GPs, roads or sewerage.
I will be pressing the Labour Government to think again on these targets and giving us the infrastructure investment we need.
Labour also invented the nonsense that is Grey Belt. It is simply a Trojan Horse for wholesale destruction of our Green Belt.
Today marks an important stage in our fight to protect the Green Belt in Beaconsfield, Marlow and the South Bucks villages with the publication of the next stage of the Local Plan.
This Local Plan matters. Our voice as a community matters.
The Local Plan stops Labour imposing a plan on Buckinghamshire from Whitehall. Nearby Lib Dem run Three Rivers Council has just seen that happen to them because they didn’t do a proper Green Belt assessment.
I have been impressing upon the leadership of Buckinghamshire Council the importance of protecting the Green Belt through the Local Plan. So I am pleased to see the focus on brownfield sites first and a focus on towns like High Wycombe and Aylesbury with their existing infrastructure. That means building in Green Belt will be an absolute last resort to meet imposed targets and no new housing in Green Belt is included in Bucks Council’s current calculations.
The consequence of that is that my constituency of Beaconsfield, Marlow and the South Bucks villages appears to have the smallest amount of new housing allocated across Buckinghamshire.
But now we have to get into battle on the detail.
Whilst I am pleased to see Bucks Council has rejected a number of the sites put forward by developers around Beaconsfield - I am concerned that those sites have a ‘potential Grey Belt’ classification. Developers must not be allowed to take advantage of that in the gap between now and the final plan. I will be working with local Cllr Jackson Ng to methodically assess every site, the “Grey Belt” methodology used and challenge where appropriate.
In Marlow, I will be working with Cllrs Alex Collingwood and Carol Heap to make sure the sites identified in the town centre area are appropriate and we resist potential “Grey Belt” sites that would lead to a merging of Marlow with the villages.
I’m also concerned to see some areas of big impact around Iver and Denham. These areas do not have the infrastructure or frankly space to cope with large scale development. Again I will be working with local Cllrs Wendy Matthews, Thomas Broom, Michael Bracken and Jaspal Chokhar on a detailed review of sites.
There are also specific sites across Burnham, Stoke Pages and Wexham, the Farnhams, Flackwell Heath, the Wooburns and Bourne End that I’ll be reviewing in detail.
This plan is now out for engagement - NO sites are decided.
So we have a chance as a community to have our say. Please join me in helping to shape a plan for Beaconsfield, Marlow and the South Bucks villages that protects our Green Belt.
