Martin offers Hazel one last chance on green fields

3.36.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Tue 2nd Jun 2009

CHELTENHAM MP Martin Horwood has launched a stinging attack on the consultation process that led to the current draft of the South West Regional Spatial Strategy but offered embattled Secretary of State Hazel Blears one last chance to 'delight' Cheltenham people by making changes that would save valued green spaces around Cheltenham. Martin made the comments in the House of Commons during the second reading debate on the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. He said the bill threatened to 'make regional government less democratic, less accountable and even more vulnerable to diktat from the Secretary of State and Ministers'.

During the debate Martin condemned 'the extended, extravagant, and doubtless very expensive pantomime of consultation, which has had virtually no impact at all on the strategy as it has developed'.

He told astonished MPs about the Examination in Public inspectors' visit to Gloucestershire that resulted in Leckhampton being added to the north-west of Cheltenham as an area earmarked for thousands of new houses: 'I discovered that on the trip to examine the various areas, the inspectors in the examination-in-public process went from Bristol to Thornbury, Quedgeley, Brookthorpe, Gloucester docks, Twigworth, Innsworth, Down Hatherley, Brockworth, Gloucester business park, Crickley Hill and the community in question, Leckhampton. They then went on to Shurdington, Cheltenham, Uckington, Swindon-I think they meant Swindon village-Cheltenham racecourse, Prestbury, Bishop's Cleeve, Ashchurch, Tewkesbury, the southern edge of Cheltenham, Avonmouth and the Avon gorge, before finally finishing in Bristol. How long did that tour take-a month, two weeks? No. It was completed in a single day.'

'My local paper worked out how long could have been spent in each location. The answer was no more than five minutes. In the examination-in-public report, the tour resulted in precisely 12 words relating to the Leckhampton community. They were: "A further area of search is identified to the south of Cheltenham." '

Martin also condemned the major incursion planned into the green belt north of Cheltenham: 'the whole point of the Green Belt is its permanence. If it becomes negotiable-if every case can be looked at on its merits-that gives a green light to greedy developers to make a beeline for green belt areas that will deliver them more profit.'

He argued that there was no connection between the housing numbers and locally identified housing need and that we had 'a regional spatial strategy based on a completely unsustainable economic growth rate' of 3.2% which was now completely unrealistic. 'What happens when we have growth-based numbers without the growth?' he asked 'The areas that have been brought into play, including all the large greenfield sites and green belt areas, will be the first, not the last ones that developers make a beeline for.'

He made a final appeal to Secretary of State Hazel Blears whose department is expected to finalise the Regional Spatial Strategy shortly: 'The south-west regional spatial strategy is the last such strategy still awaiting implementation-it is still on the Secretary of State's desk. Perhaps even now she may delight my constituents and get me off her back and those of her Ministers by making some of the changes that local people have asked for. We have some hope of that, but we also have a great deal of fear.'