The map below shows green belt sites that could vanish from Surrey’s landscape in the coming years.
With government housing targets putting huge pressures on local authorities, councils are continually turning towards the green belt as they scramble to find more land to build homes. Protected spaces all over Surrey are now under threat.
At least 16 villages and more than 170 patches of land will be removed from the green belt as councils seek to meet government housing targets.
Surrey’s district and borough councils have either adopted, are compiling, or submitted a local plan, a blueprint for future development within their boundaries. Housing targets from Westminster have caused Waverley are causing them to buckle under pressure and remove the protection that has acted like a security fence for nigh on 60 years.
Housing targets for Surrey councils. Including Waverley, which is higher than Guildford!
Targets that PM Liz Truss says she will now rip up and dump under changes to planning rules.
A national housing crisis means councils are scrambling to find land to meet those demanding targets, so it may come as no surprise to see the green belt being eroded away, with 96,350 new homes needing to be built in the county; a target that is almost identically to that which Hong Kong has set itself to build by 2021.
Guildford has removed 15 villages from the green belt, Runnymede wants to make an eye-popping 183 alterations, and Spelthorne’s leader made a stark warning recently that the 19 green belt sites it wants to develop will “irrevocably change the face” of the borough — and we are yet to see how Mole Valley is to squeeze in an extra 5,900 homes by 2033.
Waverley’s Conservative Group sent this letter to Editors in 2015. Below see the Green Belt to be removed in Surrey.
What the Conservatives said about Surrey’s Green Belt in those long ago days of 2015!
When can you tell a local Conservative can’t be trusted? When they put it in writing.