Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment is made of whether protection of greenbelt land outweighs unmet assessed housing need when (a) making local plans and (b) considering individual planning applications; and if he will make a statement.

This Government has a clear manifesto commitment to maintain the strong protections for Green Belt set out in our National Planning Policy Framework. The Framework makes clear that a local authority may alter the shape of its Green Belt only in exceptional circumstances, using the Local Plan process. The Framework does not define ‘exceptional circumstances’. Where necessary, and in consultation with the community, a local authority can propose a Green Belt boundary change as part of its Local Plan process, but the revised Plan is subject to rigorous, formal examination by a planning inspector.

In the Housing White Paper, Fixing our broken housing market, we proposed that a local authority should be able to adjust a Green Belt boundary only when it demonstrates that it has examined all other reasonable options for meeting its identified development needs, including:

- the effective use of suitable brownfield land;

- the potential offered by under-used land;

- optimising the density of development; and

- exploring whether other authorities can help to meet some of the identified development requirement.

We have been analysing the responses not only to the White Paper, but also to our later consultation on the assessment of local housing need. We will be announcing our conclusions on both as soon as possible, alongside a consultation draft of a revised National Planning Policy Framework.