“Hands off our green belt!” say North East Derbyshire councillors as Labour leader Keir Starmer's comments on housebuilding prompt furore

It comes after Conservative councillors called on Cllr Barker, the new leader of North East Derbyshire District Council, to provide an ‘urgent update’ on plans to review the area’s Local Plan and plannng policies.

Labour regained overall control of the council at the local elections in May after four years of a Conservative-led administration.

Now the Conservative’s former council leader Cllr Alex Dale, and deputy leader, Cllr Charlotte Cupit, have penned an open letter expressing their concerns around the potential loosening of green belt planning restrictions.

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They said the letter was prompted by comments made by, Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer on Times Radio in which he outlined a pledge to: “make Labour the party of housebuilding by relaxing planning restrictions and allowing more housebuilding on our Green Belt”.

The two councillors have called on Cllr Barker to ‘condemn Sir Keir Starmer’s recent comments and pledge to commit to keeping the Green Belt protected’.

In their letter, they said local residents to be given more influence on ‘what happens in their neighbourhoods’ and added: “Given that North East Derbyshire as a district is almost two thirds Green Belt and that the previous decade has seen more than one thousand extra speculative new homes on our green fields than we needed, we strongly object to Labour’s emerging new national policies on planning.”

But Cllr Barker said it was ‘successive Tory governments' that had seen the loss of ‘large tracts of the highest quality bits of our green belt’ and that the administration previously led by Cllr Dale had ‘wasted their four years in office’.

He said: “We support strong and robust protections to maintain legitimate greenfield space in our planning system. Successive Tory governments have presided over the progressive loss of large tracts of the highest quality bits of our green belt across the country, including nature-rich greenfield land which local people enjoy, via haphazard and speculative fringe development of expensive executive housing that does not support communities. Keir Starmer has committed to putting a stop to this.

“We will support the release of poor-quality ex-industrial land, or dilapidated, neglected scrubland, to build more housing.

“Buying a home of your own has become but a dream for far too many people under this Conservative Government. The demand for council properties has grown massively and yet the last administration wasted their four years in office and failed to address this problem.

“We are committed to working with the residents of North East Derbyshire to ensure we build the right houses in the right places.”

Cllr Dale commented: “Both locally and nationally, Labour need to come clean on what they’ve got planned for the Green Belt and what, if any, plans they have to change our local development policies and framework.

"North East Derbyshire’s Green Belt serves the absolutely vital purposes of protecting our beautiful countryside from encroachment, restricting urban sprawl and promoting town centre regeneration. Sir Keir Starmer’s recent comments show an utter disregard for why the Green Belt matters so much to local people in areas like North East Derbyshire and demonstrate why he is so out of touch.”