What is the future for leafy Warwickshire?

GOVERNMENT planning reforms lack clarity and are in danger of creating a “developers’ charter”.

Farmland south of Whitnash could disappear under offices, not just housing, Cllr Simon Rowberry warned Whitnash Town Council.

Advising the council how it should respond to the Government’s draft National Planning Policy Framework, which seeks to introduce a presumption in favour of ‘sustainable’ development, Cllr Rowberry said: “We don’t actually know what sustainable means.

“Where I would have said 1,100 pages was probably a bit excessive, 52 isn’t enough. We’re in danger of creating a developers’ charter.”

He warned guidelines stating councils should ‘prefer’ retail and leisure applications in town centres ‘where practical’ could only be defined by courts.

Unlike much of Leamington and Warwick, Whitnash had no green belt, and Cllr Rowberry added developers might not opt simply for housing, saying nearby motorway junctions might attract office developers.

With many ‘easy’ brownfield sites redeveloped, Cllr Rowberry warned developers might avoid polluted industrial land.

He added: “We shouldn’t sacrifice the easy greenfield sites we have here for the metropolitan sites.”

• What do you think? Email letters@leamingtoncourier.co.uk

BUSINESS leaders in Warwickshire have been urged to reassure people they do not want to concrete over the countryside in the race to slash planning guidance.

Entrepreneurs at the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership’s first annual conference last week urged the Government to cut through the “treacle” of the current planning system.

But they were told care was needed if reforms were not to be “squashed” by the National Trust and even the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph.

Business and enterprise minister Mark Prisk said the Government planned to cut more than 1,000 pages of planning guidance to 52.

With one delegate harking back to days when companies could draw a red line around a site and do what it wanted, LEP chairman Denys Shortt called for “simplicity and speed”.

He said: “Not a day goes by when we don’t find out how business has been slowed down in the treacle of the current planning system.”

National LEP Network chairman David Frost said: “We have an enormous stand-off between Government and the rest, whether that be the National Trust, the Council for the Protection of Rural England or the Daily Telegraph and the Times and somehow we have to bridge that.

“When we have John Lewis opposing the reform and saying it is the death of the high street we have to listen.

“The business community is being portrayed as wanting to concrete over the countryside. That is not the case, but business needs to make the case for what it is about.”

Mr Frost attacked planning laws that did not define hotels and care homes as creating jobs, but added: “The business community needs to seriously raise its game in this debate or we’re going to be absolutely squashed by the environmental lobby.”

• See this week’s Courier or Weekly News for more on the LEP conference.