On Monday 4th March, the afternoon in the House of Commons was dedicated to a debate on Farming. Ian Liddell-Grainger MP took the opportunity to stand up for the rural communities of West Somerset on a number of issues.
PLANNERS’ ATTITUDE ‘FORCING UP PROPERTY PRICES
Exmoor national park’s restrictive planning regime has been directly responsible for soaring local property prices, MP Ian Liddell-Grainger has asserted.
He says planning officials have made it so difficult to obtain consent for new homes that the Exmoor property pool has remained almost static, while demand has continued to grow.
And in a Parliamentary debate on farming this week the Bridgwater and West Somerset MP warned Government proposals to relax planning restrictions to allow farmers to convert unwanted buildings would achieve nothing inside any of the national parks unless planners were ordered to conform to them.
“The spirit of the new framework is to make it far easier for farmers to diversify, whether to provide housing or open up other income streams,” he said.
“But Exmoor national park authority has become a world leader in saying ‘no’ to planning applications.
“Some of the more spectacular cases have included refusal of a barn conversion on a building that was 200 yards from any road; refusal of consent for new farm buildings where the existing ones no longer complied with animal welfare regulations; telling a farmer he didn’t need three bedrooms in a retirement home he was planning to build; and seeking the removal of a shepherd’s hut because it was ‘out of character’ - in an area where there are 40,000 sheep.”
Mr Liddell-Grainger said because of the planners’ anti-development stance virtually no new homes had been built within the national park boundary in recent years.
“Yet one local estate agent alone had 2,000 people on its books, all looking to move and live on Exmoor,” he said.
“This state of affairs is now reflected in property prices that are going through the roof to a point where it is nigh-impossible for anyone on local wages to obtain a mortgage.
“So in addition to creating a totally stagnant property sector the park planners are now helping to drive young families out of Exmoor because they can’t afford to live there. Congratulations.”
CONTINUING BADGER CULL ‘ONLY OPTION’ - MP
A Government decision to continue culling badgers in the battle against bovine TB was the only sensible one to take, says MP Ian Liddell-Grainger.
He said despite the widespread protests it met with initially the culling programme had been a success.
And during a Parliamentary debate this week he welcomed news that the operation was being extended.
“There are literally hundreds of farmers who have had the spectre of TB removed from their lives and thousands of cattle in the fields that might otherwise have had to be slaughtered,” he said.
The southwest was one of the first parts of the country where culling was initiated to remove the pool of infectivity contained within a badger population that had grown exponentially since the animals were given legal protection.
Initially protestors tried to disrupt the night-time shooting and there were reports of the marksmen involved being intimidated.
But the more the culling has continued and the more TB rates in cattle have fallen the less vociferous have the campaigners become.
Mr Liddell-Grainger said he knew of dozens of farmers who were immensely grateful to have TB-free herds.
“This was never intended to wipe out the badger population, merely to get it back to a manageable size and disease-free status - and no other approach has worked as well as culling,” he said.
“In Wales there were trials to trap and vaccinate badgers but the same animals were visiting the traps night after night to get the food they contained, which made a nonsense of the whole venture.
“The protestors also demanded a pause in the culling because a TB vaccine for cows would be developed by the mid-20s. Here we are in the mid-20s and no vaccine has yet emerged from the laboratories.
“If we had caved in and agreed to wait there would be barely a single cow left anywhere in the whole of the southwest by now.”
