You may remember that housing secretary Angela Rayner struck a £150 million deal with major developers Barratt and Lloyds last year, to build entire new towns across the country.
A task force is now supposedly identifying locations for these towns, and think tank Centre for Cities has suggested Chelsfield as a so-called “obvious” location due to its proximity to London.
This would see between 10,000 to 25,000 homes forced onto the community, with nowhere near enough infrastructure to deal with it.
In my constituency, it’s not just Chelsfield that is under threat.
A couple of miles up the road in St Mary Cray, a developer has begun an exercise with local people, showcasing a potential housing development of approximately 350 units that they want to build on farming land.
As things stand, no planning application has yet been submitted for this proposal, but make no mistake, a development of this nature will fundamentally change the look and feel of the area and would open the floodgates to more and more development on our precious green belt.
Regrettably, actions from the government and the Mayor of London are exacerbating this threat.
Angela Rayner wants to remove decision-making powers from local councillors on all planning applications apart from the very largest ones.
If this happens, local people will no longer have a say through their elected councillors who know their areas well.
Furthermore, councillors would lose the right to “call in” contentious applications so they can be properly scrutinised.
This will make it easier to concrete over our green belt land, in areas like Chelsfield, St Mary Cray and many other places, and I am doing my best to fight it.
The Mayor of London, who despite his previous promises to protect the green belt, has now announced that he wants to explore building on it.
Sadiq Khan said that the rules which protect green belt land from development are “wrong” and “out of touch”.
The government needs to stop, listen, and rethink this malicious madness.
Of course, they should be building new homes—and they should begin with the many thousands of planning permissions which have already been granted, but not been built yet.
There are currently 300,000 of these, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE).
Next, they should concentrate on the vast areas of brownfield land that haven’t been built on yet.
Again, the CPRE have analysed local authority land registers and have identified a substantial amount of brownfield land available, with a capacity for over 1.2 million new homes.
But they should leave our green belt alone.
It is what makes areas such as Orpington special to live, work and grow up in.
Concreting over it would be a disaster for our communities and we will never get it back.
