Farm fresh

With building in the Green Belt declared unacceptable, the spotlight is now turning on land which until now has been safeguarded from development. This is agricultural land classified on plans as best and most versatile and accorded the acronym BMV in the planners’ vocabulary.

This policy has a long pedigree. During the Second World War geographers such as the late Lord Dudley Stamp stressed the loss of the best agricultural land that had disappeared during the suburban housing boom of the 1930s.

For many years policy was that land of a higher agricultural quality should not be taken for development where land of a lower quality was available.

Revised advice was published in 1987 of the need to take account of environmental and economic considerations, but in practice the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has maintained resistance to high quality agricultural land being taken for development and virtually exercised a veto, as it can insist on a public inquiry. This even attracted criticism from the Sunday Telegraph which said, “the usual result of its dogmatic determination to protect agricultural land from development has not been that development has been prevented. It has been that development has happened on land that is even less suited to it.”

Sophisticated document

Expectations were raised in 1995 by John Gummer’s Rural White Paper that a more flexible approach might be introduced, but if anything the revised version of PPG7 (February 1997) provided less flexibility.

The Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit report on the rural economy published late last year is a sophisticated document that not only asks some important questions but poses some possible answers. It questions why agriculture is subsidised so heavily when other sectors of the economy are not and how the CAP has led to unsustainable agriculture. In addition why is agricultural development largely exempt from planning control?

Special treatment

The report suggests special treatment for agriculture should be phased out, with subsidies moved to environmental management and support for rural economic and social development. It also recommends agricultural development be brought within planning control like any other industry.

On agricultural land it suggests, “moreover, the special treatment of agriculture within the planning system (in particular the national protection for BMV agricultural land) needs to be re-assessed against current thinking - in particular the desirability of protecting land of high environmental value.

“Making the removal of protection for BMV land dependent on the introduction of a new national framework for protecting land of high environmental value could provide reassurance and constitute a significant improvement on the current system of BMV protection.”

The Cabinet Office is driving this debate and the Rural White Paper is due out by the autumn. The issue is also part of a turf war within Government. For years the DETR has wanted to take the veto from MAFF. It provided the ministry with an involvement in planning that environment ministers have always wanted to resist. MAFF minister Nick Brown does not look as if he is going to resist the change. “It is dealt with in this ministry for historical reasons to ensure self-sufficiency, to provide for national emergencies. That isn’t quite the point it was 40 or 50 years ago. We are 65% self-sufficient ... and we could become 100% self-sufficient very quickly.”

Predictable opposition has come from the Conservatives, CPRE and a whole host of other groups, but the Sunday Telegraph hit the nail on the head when it said that “it is better that an ex-farmer’s future is secured by the sale of land.” With farming incomes in freefall Government has to ease the pain for many farmers to come out of agriculture. For homebuilders and planners the change could provide exciting challenges and opportunities.

Because it has been safeguarded from development in the past, much BMV land is well located to existing urban areas. In tandem with this could be measures to preserve field boundaries and hedgerows and assist biodiversity. Farmers will be paid for managing the countryside in an environmentally sustainable way.

Predictable outcome

Perhaps it is predictable that when a 50-year old policy is being questioned the House of Commons Environment Committee would be cautious about the Cabinet Office Unit’s argument that the system is now outdated and should be replaced with one that offers protection to land with high environmental value.

The committee accepted the rationale but believed that, “on the grounds of sustainability, the release of good quality agricultural land for development should remain exceptional.“ Paradoxically it asserted there will be circumstances where it is more sensible to develop higher grade land than land of environmental or amenity quality and “Government must ensure that this can happen.”

The intellectual rigour of that advice will be difficult for the Government to dismiss and the Rural White Paper, due out by the autumn, will signal whether or not they have.