Action Briefing Oct 2003 - Nov 2003
	The Newsletter of Birmingham Friends of the Earth

Peddi-power: Sutton greenbelt sites saved from development

“Green Belt Blow to Business” moaned the Birmingham Post on 29th August. It was in fact a remarkable happening - the inspector of the Birmingham’s Land Use Plan had backed our objections to further development on Birmingham’s greenbelt.

The Peddimore and Bassetts Pole site battles were going on for many years before my own involvement in last year’s public enquiry. Peddimore was first proposed for development for, it’s rumoured, a Philips silicon chip factory, then a booming industry.

Bandwagon
You can jump on a bandwagon but you can’t lead it to water: by the time the City came out with these plans, the demand for silicon chips had died down. Despite this, and the fact that the inspectors at THAT public enquiry agreed with us as well, John Prescott overruled them, on inward investment tail-chasing grounds, as New Labour is wont to do. There has not really been any serious commercial interest in the site since.

So it came to the Unitary Development Plan (UDP) last year, where the City Council and (disturbingly) the housebuilders supported land being taken out of the greenbelt at Peddimore, while local residents, and those of us who like to remember we only have one planet, objected extensively.

Following the UDP public enquiry, the Inspector’s judgement against this land release was, like ours, that the Council’s so-called exceptional circumstances were not, in fact, exceptional. He did not try to make the case that greenbelt development should never be allowed; in fact national policy does not do this either, so I imagine his hands were tied.
Specifically, he refers to the identification of Bassetts Pole for development as being “based on earlier thinking” (perhaps prehistoric?) and then enlighteningly describes John Prescott’s overruling as “amounting to very special circumstances in the mind of the Secretary of State” which is putting it politely, if you ask me.

Ideas of expanding industry into the greenbelt are, like wage cuts, reduced employment rights and ever increasing transport links, all part of the free trade “prostitution” for inward investment. Big global companies require huge single sites; and if there is no room left for these in the city confines, we must tempt them in with some lovely clear green belt land to which everyone can drive without having to deal with congestion.

However, as the inspector recognised, even under this policy the region has such sites within its boundaries. Big business is falling over itself to leave the UK for cheaper countries, where environmental and employment expectations are lower, so there may well be plenty of such brownfield sites coming up in the near future. Since no industrial user in all that time has come forward to base at Peddimore, it can be safely assumed that the demand can be met as it arises; there are already some brownfield sites of the required size available.

Alternatives
Alternative economic activity leaves the region less vulnerable to global fluctuations: learning and skills investment can go towards meeting local needs as well as providing jobs locally; more smaller scale enterprises instead of fewer large ones are a boost to genuine competition and create more jobs, and redistribution of, say, government jobs from the overcrowded south east can help.

Anyone who has seen these sites will not think they look particularly valuable. It has to be said, they are neither pretty nor particularly wildlife rich: but this is not the point: first, remaining in the green belt, the land will have far more ecological potential (not to mention considerable economic potential in rural uses) than it would have as some sort of “high technology” plant. Secondly, the purpose of the green belt is to curb city expansion. Cities that are not limited can spread out freely to unsustainable levels, leading to a kind of industrial and housing scorched earth policy that generates outward flight and inner decline while simultaneously ruining rural areas and ensuring that private car transport remains more feasible than public.

As Regional Planning Guidance (RPG) has backed us as well, the only remaining option for the council is to refuse the inspector’s recommendations, which means going through a further public consultation on its reasons - adding yet another tedious and lengthy stage to the UDP process. Certain economic dinosaurs, well known in Birmingham City Council and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) but who shall remain nameless, would be delighted to think this might happen, but I doubt the Council will come up with any further arguments at this stage - so maybe we’ve won this one for good. I for one shall be celebrating in the Anchor Pub in Digbeth pretty much every Monday night between now and Christmas. Feel free to come and join us!

Karen Leach