Dudley Council have today announced that the Planning Inspector has backed Dudley Council’s desire to protect the borough’s green spaces from development.
Planning Inspector Louise Nurser, wrote to Dudley Council confirming that she "concurred" with the council that there should be no review of green belt boundaries as part of the latest edition of Dudley Council's Local Plan.
Ms Nurser said: "The Council has relied on paragraph 145 of the 2023 Framework, which makes clear that there is no requirement for Green Belt boundaries to be reviewed as part of the preparation of the Plan. "In the context of this examination, I would concur with this position."
In practice, this means that Green Belt sites in Kingswinford and South Staffordshire like the Kingswinford Triangle and land between the Charterfields estate and Holbeach, where local groups have been campaigning to stop inappropriate development in recent years, will remain as green spaces – hopefully for many years to come.
As a leading community campaigner for Green Belt land, local Member of Parliament Mike Wood MP said:
"I am delighted to hear that The National Planning Inspector has upheld our proposals to protect Dudley's Green Belt.
"Huge credit to the Conservative Leader of Dudley Council Patrick Harley for having the courage to come out of the Black Country Local Plan (where we were powerless to stop our Green Belt being put forward for development) and instead adopt our own Dudley Local Plan that builds the homes local people need without sacrificing our precious Green Belt. He got a lot of unfair criticism for this brave decision at the time – much of it politically-motivated – but the Inspector’s ruling vindicates his decision to put our local community first.
"While the Government continues to try to take the right to protect the countryside away from us, we will continue to fight to save our beloved Green Belt by making sure that the homes that we need are built in the right place."
