Planning to Save the Country

Most of us would, I think, agree that global warming is a thing, and reducing CO2 emissions can help. The simplest, most direct way to reduce emissions is to burn less fuel: to drive less, fly less often, insulate our homes, re-use and recycle. Reduce waste. Save energy.

Planning: Not just the planning carried out by local authority planning officers struggling to meet housing targets in their local plans and preventing you extending your house, but planning in every sense: should we build new high-speed railways or more motorways, phase out coal and nuclear or build more solar and wind farms, encourage rural living or build new towns,...

Saving is getting ever more important. Over the last two years the main focus has been saving lives in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. The financial cost of this, followed by sudden economic recovery brings enormous debt plus rising inflation so that for millions the most immediate concern is now how to save money. COP 26 highlighted the world's most serious and intractable problem, global warming, and how to save the planet.

Country is the UK as a whole, it's member countries, the country where we live - the west country, the north country, the highlands, farming country,... It's urban landscape. It's the countryside. It's where we live, from our immediate locality up to Britain, Europe, the world.

So this is about ways we can plan to save. To save money for individuals, local authorities, the nation. To save energy and reduce CO2 emissions. To save the countryside from urban sprawl and towns and cities from choking with traffic and pollution or dying from failing industry and retail. Rather than trying to find grand solutions I will look at a tiny patch of country near my home.

This patch includes hills and valleys, open countryside and woodland, a market town, villages, hamlets, farms and isolated cottages, rivers, a trunk road, A and B roads, lanes and tracks, ancient routes and modern railways. The town of Belper sits on the east side, by the river Derwent which powered its pioneering mills, it has thriving shops, a local hospital, schools and bus and railway stations. To the west are the villages of Idridgehay and Turnditch with pubs, churches and a school but no shops these days. Hamlets include Ireton Wood and Hillcliffe Lane in the west, Shottle to the north, and Cowers Lane, Hazelwood and Blackbrook towards the south. Two river valleys run north to south: the Derwent valley with its A6 trunk road and mainline railway, and the Ecclesbourne valley with its B-road from Wirksworth south-east to Duffield and its heritage railway between the same two towns. An A-road runs west from Belper to the next market town, Ashbourne. The higher ground between the valleys has farms, fields, woods a few isolated homes - some very new, converted from modern agricultural buildings under recent relaxations of planning rules.

Infrastructure

The town, Belper, is well served for travel, with the A6 heading north and south and A-roads east and west, reasonably frequent buses to nearby towns and villages, and a railway station. Cowers Lane stands at the junction of roads and bus routes north, south, east and west. The villages, Idridgehay and Turnditch, are on bus routes, albeit less frequent, but apart from three hamlets in the orbit of Belper, there is no public transport to neighbourhoods away from the main roads, and the roads or lanes are often narrow and neglected. Mains water and electricity are available almost everywhere, though a few places rely on boreholes and many on septic tanks, but gas services are sparse meaning homes away from A-roads rely on heating oil, LPG or electricity for their heating. Fibre broadband is slowly reaching villages but many properties rely on a privately-run radio network, W3Z. Mobile phone coverage is patchy and there is no 5G service yet.

Problems

This pattern of settlements and infrastructure provision militate against energy saving and are very susceptible to planning policies. There is little industry so the biggest users of energy and sources of emissions are transport and home heating.

Public transport is under-used. Away from Belper buses are infrequent and journey times are long, so they are used mostly by those too young or old to drive. The train journey from Belper to Derby is quick but ends with a long walk into the city, and the Ecclesbourne Valley railway is used for outings rather than travel. Consequently the vast majority of trips are by car. And, partly because so many people have to use rough, dirty lanes, a high proportion of cars are gas-guzzling SUVs. The number of electric cars is growing rapidly but there are very no public charging points outside Belper so they are not easy for those without off-road parking. The only shops are in Belper or other towns outside the area so few people can walk and car trips are more numerous. Similarly, with only one school outside Belper most children are driven to school and back. There are no cycle paths so cyclists must share the roads with cars and trucks. This, together with the distances and the hilly terrain, rules cycling out except for leisure and exercise.

Where mains gas is available it is the primary heating fuel and people will have to start thinking about switching to heat pumps when their boilers start to fail. Where there is no gas, heating oil is favourite , followed by LPG - both at least as bad as natural gas for CO2. Wood-burning stoves are widely used and are a greener choice and there are a few heat pumps appearing. Planning relaxations in recent years have led to redundant agricultural buildings - typically steel-framed barns - being converted into new country homes, often heated by heat pump, but most new homes, while having to be well insulated to meet current regulations, are built to a price, are rarely planned for passive solar heating or built with solar panels and use boilers rather than more climate-friendly heat pumps. Older properties tend to be detached, except in Belper, with high heat losses and often difficult to insulate. In a few cases, conservation area and listed building rules rule out many energy-saving improvements.

Solutions

It is already policy to end the sale of petrol/diesel cars and of gas boilers at the end of the decade. Oil and gas prices are rising faster than electricity, encouraging people to make the switch to EVs and heat pumps, but grants and subsidies for electric cars, heat pumps, insulation and solar panels are minimal and decreasing. Financial incentives should be maintained until electric cars are as cheap as petrol cars and heat pumps as cheap as boilers and help for homeowners to insulate their homes should continue indefinitely. Planning and Building Regulations should require every new home to be zero carbon with photovoltaics and solar batteries. This will increase build costs but reduce running costs and grants and taxes should change accordingly.

There is no prospect of bus services expanding in their reach or frequency or of all the narrow, ill-maintained lanes being improved, so while a large proportion of homes remain difficult to reach without high ground clearance and four-wheel drive people will still have to jump in their Range Rover when they run low on groceries or rely on delivery vans struggling to reach them. Ribbon development - the spread of houses alongside main roads out of towns - got a bad name before the advent of planning rules, and there is fierce resistance in planning policies and from locals to new building outside established settlements. But it makes far more sense to build close to good roads, bus routes, water mains, sewers and fibre than to create more homes from farm sheds in isolated spots. This approach would mean more people living on bus routes, encouraging regular services. Concentrating homes along and around established roads and settlements would mean more people to support local shops and pubs. Allowing businesses - small-scale industry, desk-based operations and service industries in the same areas - not in empty barns around farms - would bring life and activity all day, when most people are away working in the towns.

This map shows a future relatively small planning adjustments could take us towards. Encouraging new building around existing settlements on classified roads and bus routes would improve the viability of bus services and encourage shops, pubs and cafes while limiting development in less accessible areas would decrease dependency on the car, particularly SUVs. The orange strips show suitable settlements and how they might easily be expanded, while the red dots show possible 'hubs' for shops and other facilities. There is already incremental development of a cycle route along the Derwent valley ultimately extending from Derby deep into the Peak District and there is potential for it to ranch to a cycle route along the Ecclesbourne valley from Duffield to Wirksworth, running parallel to a railway line which could evolve from a heritage line into usable public transport. These valley routes would let people use their bikes to get into town without having to contend with hills and traffic. The same technology that makes travel around London so easy could be applied to allow tap-on and tap-off travel on trains and buses, encouraging people to use public transport and leave the car at home. The beautiful countryside would be all around, looked after by farmers growing our food and given grants and subsidies to re-wild and encourage wildlife, easily accessible along the miles of lanes, bridleways and footpaths, on foot or in the (bike or horse) saddle. If it proved too expensive to maintain the lanes to suit constant car traffic they could still serve the farms and leisure access.

Let's look in a bit more detail at an example: the hamlet of Cowers Lane which sits at the crossing of the Ashbourne-Belper and the Wirksworth-Duffield roads with the Ecclesbourne river and the Ecclesbourne Valley railway line running just to the west. There are bus routes to Wirksworth and on as far as Bakewell, to Belper and beyond to Duffield and Derby, and to Ashbourne. The Railway pub stands on the crossroads, the disused railway station is now an oil depot, and the Tinkerbrook filling station has closed. The yellow area show existing buildings, including a number of very recent houses, some still under construction.

This settlement is well suited to development. There are several strips of low-value agricultural land alongside the roads and between existing houses, ideal for more infill housing. The population could easily be doubled without significant loss of countryside. No-one risks cycling to Duffield or Wirksworth for shopping or to see friends, but there is the potential to create a new cycle path parallel to the railway and river allowing safe and easy bike trips. With oil heating being phased out, the oil depot has a limited life and the station could be reinstated, served by battery-powered (possibly driverless) electric rail cars providing regular and cheap public transport replacing the dirty, noisy, polluting steam and diesel 'heritage railway' trains between Wirksworth and Duffield. Doubling the population would be good news for the pub and might support a shop or cafe in place of the garage.

Very small adjustments to planning policies, local government initiatives to encourage such facilities as the cycle paths and public rail service imagined here, more bus services and tap-on/tap-off bus and rail tickets would bring life to rural settlements, reverse the trend to more isolated countryside homes, reduce car dependency shifting travel to public transport and bikes, bring more homes within reach of infrastructure like mains water and sewers and fast broadband, reduce energy use and emissions, and make the countryside more natural and rural while enlivening settlements.