IN REPLY to Chris Proudfoot’s letter last week 'Council ruining our green belt'.

The photograph of the affordable housing site accompanying the letter shows the site at the worst stage of construction.

The purpose of green belt legislation was to stop urban sprawl, not to protect every blade of grass in the country.

Norley has changed immeasurably over the past decades including the building of a few developments, urban in appearance, on School Bank and the Stanneybrook Close area.

Those developments were also built as exceptions to green belt policy as Mr Proudfoot and his fellow objectors would have us interpret it.

How can the current occupiers of those dwellings now object to anyone else having the chance to live in a modestly-sized dwelling built under the same valid exception?

When the provision of some affordable housing in Norley was first mooted, the parish council initiated a consultation process on where and how such development might be sited, but the objection from the villagers was so great that this consultation was immediately withdrawn, leaving the development here discussed as a default option.

The vast majority of the village clearly did believe that Norley was a “special case”, and even considering provision of affordable housing was unacceptable.

The subsequent fight against this planning application consistently advocated alternative proposed developments which took up green belt land.

It seems that other parishes’ green belt land does not have the same value as that in Norley?

Development of the brownfield sites Mr Proudfoot favours inevitably swallows up undeveloped land at the same time in order to offset the massive costs developers incur in preparing brownfield sites.

Mr Proudfoot states: “I see no evidence there has ever been any attempt to create an inventory of brownfield sites before setting out to ruin the green belt.”

I would point out that the Strategic Housing Land Availability study has been in place for many years and lists all brownfield land put forward by owners for consideration as housing sites.

Council officers recommended approval for this scheme from the outset in line with policy, but elected members saw fit to refuse it, no doubt to appease their electorate.

Thankfully the planning inspectorate saw fit to allow the subsequent appeal recognising that such developments are long overdue in our rural communities in order to regenerate them, and that the council were only doing their job.

John Davidson Hartford