Free farmers from planning policies stranglehold

Outdated and inflexible planning policies are holding back many farmers and landowners from changing and developing their businesses

The warning came from William Worsley, vice president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who lives at Hovingham near York, who said there was an increasingly important range of businesses and people on whom the rural economy would increasingly depend as a result of a changing agriculture.

Mr Worsley said: "The sad closure of British Sugar's York factory merely emphasises that farmers can no longer rely on traditional markets.

"Change is a necessary fact as in all businesses and agriculture is no different. But the market is there. A bright future is there for those who grasp change and adapt their businesses."

Farmers, rural businessmen and rural entrepreneurs had a vital role to play in the region's economy and they could do it without any form of subsidy.

Mr Worsley who runs a family business involving residential and commercial property, farming and forestry said: "It's what's stopping them that concerns the CLA.

"It's not so much the dreadful fiasco at the Rural Payments Agency, the regional spatial strategy, the arrogance of urban based organisations that thinks business begins and ends in the office blocks of Leeds but something far more and literally down to earth.

"It is the planning policies which are complex and stifle change. They are sometimes ridiculous. They should enable the rural economy to change so that farmers can diversify.

"No one is planning massive housing estates, industrial parks or other developments that ruin the rural landscape. But if a huge factory on a brownfield site in Leeds can be given every encouragement to be redeveloped why does the same not apply to a redundant piggery?"

Mr Worsley said rural enterprise was being stifled by inflexible planning policy, and a total inability to see that without a profitable and thriving rural economy, who was going to pay in the long term for the landscape which was so much admired?

He said of one of the CLA's Yorkshire members: "The lady wanted to venture into tourism but her holiday cottage eco-friendly building plans, incorporating straw bales were turned down by the planners".

They said they were non traditional materials and also her venture was car dependent even though a railway station was within walking distance.

On affordable housing Mr Worsley said it could happen immediately in villages throughout the UK if planning policies allowed a commercially sensible policy of cross subsidy – some open market housing and some affordable mixed in a joint scheme. Many landowners were willing to do this.

"A vibrant rural economy has a requirement for housing and for new buildings for new enterprises and for new uses for land and places to process what is grown on the land.

"All these issues have one thing in common – the planning process. So we are redoubling our efforts to get things changed to a planning system which does not despoil rural Yorkshire but ensures its protection by enabling land managers to make the best use of their available assets."

He added: "We want the government to take the rural economy more seriously. We don't want a free for all but a sensible approach to planning.

"The rural environment is a living breathing place and development should be able to take place providing it is done to a good standard and buildings fit in the local vernacular. We want help and encouragement rather than every increasing regulation."

Date: 12th July 2006
Source: Yorkshire Post