Goodbye to Green Belt

8:52am Wednesday 14th May 2008

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OUTRAGE has erupted over housing targets which threaten major destruction of rural land around St Albans.

In the final version of planning guidance, announced by the Government this week and now set in stone bar a legal challenge, nearly 30,000 homes will be built across the St Albans district and neighbouring Welwyn Hatfield and Hemel Hempstead.

While the exact locations have not been decided, the document admits major developments outside Hatfield and Hemel Hempstead are likely to spill over into the St Albans district, adding "strategic adjustments" of the local Green Belt are inevitable.

St Albans MP Anne Main said: "I am deeply concerned about these totals.

"This is a huge number of houses, and I am not sure that the area can sustain this level of development, especially without major infrastructure improvements.

"We already have particularly heavy congestion and water shortages in our area and I have not seen any plans to improve the situation in light of these totals.

"The Green Belt is a valuable environmental resource.

"Developments may become perilously close together, where currently they are separated by clear green space."

St Albans will have to find space for 5,370 new homes by 2021.

But the 22,000 proposed for Welwyn Hatfield and Dacorum will inevitably encroach over the boundaries and concrete over agricultural land on the fringes of St Albans.

The most likely areas for development are the former British Aerospace airfield, which would urbanise the Smallford area which divides St Albans from Hatfield, and agricultural land between Hemel Hempstead and the A5183 Redbourn Road.

Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Sandy Walkington said: "The Government is going to drown our historic cathedral and market city in a sea of new suburbia charmingly called London Arc West'.

"It is blowing apart the Green Belt around St Albans."

St Albans will receive an extra £600,000 for the cost of dealing with the extra population, which Mr Walkington described as "absolutely laughable".

But district council Labour leader and parliamentary candidate Roma Mills said: "The Government is being pilloried for low housing development.

"There is huge hysteria about the Green Belt.

"Seventy per cent of St Albans, and 83 per cent of Hertfordshire, is Green Belt.

"I know a family with a mum, dad and two children living in a one-bedroom flat, and another child from a previous relationship visiting every weekend.

"My daughter, at 26, is a qualified teacher - she has not got a sniff of her own accommodation in St Albans and will have to move away.

"We have to provide housing for local people, or we will end up with a city where everybody who lives here commutes to well-paid jobs in London, and everybody who provides essential services here drives in from Milton Keynes or further.

"We could easily build on some of the not particuarly beautiful parts of the Green Belt without causing distress to anyone."