There has been lots of commentary about Stockport’s withdrawal from the Greater Manchester Spatial Plan (Places for Everyone, or PfE) since they made the decision in 2020, especially about the consequential risk that being out of the plan will lead to more Green Belt release and speculative development.  The same threats are being made to those who, more recently, want to remove Oldham from PfE, with some Councillors suggesting the arguments in favour of withdrawal are misleading residents and that this approach “would lead to further developments on the greenbelt”.

Breaking News!

It doesn’t matter whether you are in or out of PfE that risk is still there.  Trafford’s rejection of a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) on retained Green Belt has been approved on appeal by the Planning Inspectorate, despite participation in PfE that supposedly gave protection to that land!

Given the £millions of public money spent on Places for Everyone over the more than 10 years it took to bring the plan to fruition, why hasn’t the media picked up on this issue and who is auditing this failure to achieve even the basic aims of the plan?

Places for Everyone is supposed to be a brownfield first plan, it is supposed to protect retained Green Belt from development, it is supposed to help resolve the housing crisis in Greater Manchester. 

It does none of those things!

Green Belt allocations are coming forward across the region (much reported in local press and the MEN) and are being approved in advance of all the swathes of brownfield land available for development (despite huge amounts of public money being made available to regenerate that previously developed land).

Retained Green Belt is not protected by participation in the PfE plan. In the particular case mentioned above, the Planning Inspector used the Government’s ‘Grey Belt’ rules to assert that it is appropriate development.  There were no concerns raised about the number of fires that have occurred on such developments, including the BESS fire in Liverpool that burned for 59 hours, or more recent fires in Essex and Aberdeen.  At least there will be plenty of water available from the River Mersey should a fire break out, but All Saints Catholic Primary school is just down-wind of the site, so alarms should be raised to alert the school and local residents if a fire or the associated toxic fumes are released.  Nothing was mentioned about this by the Planning Inspectorate, which seems to be blindly allowing as much development as possible to support the Government’s war on nature and communities.

There are many ways to resolve the housing crisis, none of which require the release of Green Belt.  These are outlined in the Community Planning Alliance Homes for Everyone Report. 

The Government and Greater Manchester’s leadership are explicitly ignoring the data that shows:

• There is sufficient brownfield land available to deliver at least 1.2m homes nationwide
• There are 1.55m empty homes across England and Wales (including 70,000 homes owned by councils and housing associations)
• There are an estimated 165,000 empty commercial properties that could be turned into houses and/or flats
• More innovative solutions could also be looked at, such as promoting the 26m empty bedrooms in the UK that could provide income for the householder and a place to live for someone on a waiting list.

Shockingly, there are many sites which have been granted planning permission but have not been developed that could provide over 1m new homes – yet there is no impetus from the Government to ensure these sites are brought forward BEFORE any Green Belt is released.

Finally, the biggest issue with the housing crisis is the lack of genuinely affordable homes (social or Council housing).  This is an issue that has been disregarded for many years and the current Government has not even set a target to ensure Councils increase the number of these homes to address the huge and growing waiting lists.  Places for Everyone should have been renamed ‘Places for those who can afford to buy’ because the target for all affordable housing was removed from policy during the modifications process and the target for social housing was removed from the plan altogether!

We have frequently highlighted the impact on nature’s recovery, climate mitigation and our future food security when Places for Everyone was adopted by the Greater Manchester leadership in March 2024.  The consequence of the loss of environmentally and ecologically rich Green Belt land which provides all these benefits, along with the other issues set out above, shows the extent of the betrayal of future generations that is now becoming increasingly obvious.

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill (published by the Government on 11^th March 2025) intensifies the Government’s war on nature and communities by reducing democracy and weakening protections for flora and fauna.  It introduces Spatial Development Strategies, similar to Places for Everyone, but without the consultation previously required.  We’ll say more about this in a future blog, but it appears to be yet another Developer’s Charter, as someone else succinctly put it – another Government initiative providing

Developer Net Gain!