13 July, 2001

Many residents of the Yorkshire Dales National Park will be surprised that it has just been voted the best in England on planning matters. John Sheard examines a change of direction.

TEN YEARS ago, I was reporting almost week by week on rows raging in Britain's national parks over planning controversies. For the residents of those parks, the planners were often seen as politically correct ogres who said No as often as a Russian diplomat in Stalin's time.

The Yorkshire Dales park was by no means the worst although, many years ago, one member famously opposed the erection of a TV transmission mast to serve local viewers by declaring that, if they wanted television, they should go and live somewhere else.

In the Lake District, members considered hiring a helicopter to spy on the roofs of new or converted buildings to see if they had tiles made of re-constructed Westmorland slate instead of the real thing - despite the fact that a local quarry made the news slates from waste, creating employment and producing something virtually indistinguishable from the old slates to the human eye.

Unless, of course, it was examined at close quarters from the air!

And the North York Moors, planners rejected the re-occupation of a farmhouse which had been empty for just a few years because they thought that new people might hang laundry on a washing line.

Actions like this brought down on the national parks the fury of locals, who thought that their rights to a home or a place of work were being put second to the whims of visitors who made their living in the big towns and cities.

Some of that feeling still lingers so the publication of an official Government survey showing that the Dales national park is the most efficient on planning matters in England - and says Yes to 95 per cent of applications - will no doubt come as a surprise (see News, July 10).

There are several reasons for this turn-around. One is that the last Tory Government changed the laws on national parks so that planners must take the social and economic interests of locals into account when judging planning applications.

They also gave the parks full planning powers which, before had been held by the county councils, and broadened the membership of park committees to include members of parish councils and other interested but non-elected bodies.

The latter helped ease one area of protest - that the parks were run by people who didn't live there - but it has also brought about a fundamental change of attitude: the parks now feel responsible for their actions to local folk and spend a great deal of time meeting them to understand their hopes and fears.

To me, this is one of the best things that has happened in the countryside in a decade of almost continuous disaster. After the greatest debacle of them all, foot and mouth, it is this cooperation between residents, farmers, local business and planners that, given good will and effort, will ensure the survival of small rural communities in the future.

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Comments

What would your view be of a newly re-elected County councillor who, whilst living in the Park and representing a substantial area within the Park, chooses not to seek membership of the YDNP authority.

I ask about your view, particularly in the light of your comments about the amount of local understanding which you say supposedly exists today, and therefore by implication did not exist in the past, which in my opinion is blatant and utter nonsense.
Kind regards.

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