Action on Climate Emergency (ACE)

The Government has revised proposals for controversial planning reforms in England after the new housing targets prompted a backlash by Conservative MPs. A computer-based formula used to decide where houses should be located has been “updated” to focus more on cities and urban areas in the North and Midlands.  Ministers said cash for brownfield sites would be distributed more fairly outside London and the South East.

Yesterday the Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick MP announced that 20 cities would instead be asked to build an extra 100,000 new homes in the next five years, heading off a rebellion from Conservative councillors and backbench MPs.

Continue reading “Government climbs down on housing formula”

Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust’s Together for Trees is one of the first environmental projects awarded a grant from the government’s £80 million Green Recovery Challenge Fund. Sixty eight projects have been awarded grants between £62k and £3.8 million to kick-start a pipeline of nature-based projects while creating and retaining jobs, with the first funding round seeing £40 million pot allocated. The second round of funding opens early next year.

Continue reading “YDMT gets £249,900 government grant from Green Recovery Challenge Fund”

More than two thousand local councillors (2,062 to be exact) have joined with the countryside charity CPRE and Friends of the Earth to call on the government to abandon the most damaging elements of its changes to the planning system. The changes the government have proposed threaten to silence local voices on planning issues and treasured areas of local green space and countryside.

In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Housing, Robert Jenrick, the councillors warn that the proposed changes to planning will undermine the trust that the public has in the planning system and ‘could radically reduce protections for nature, local green spaces and fail to tackle climate change.’

Continue reading “Calls on government to scrap planning proposals which will ‘undermine public trust’”