Bradford Council has approved an outline application from Hargreaves Land for up to 100 homes on land north of Harden Lane in Wilsden. The scheme includes 35% affordable housing and more than £130,000 towards local parks and play areas. As Business Link reported, planning officers concluded that recent changes to national planning policy meant the site could be treated as grey belt, despite its previous Green Belt designation.
What grey belt actually means
This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is going to determine a great many Northern planning decisions over the next few years and almost nobody outside planning can define it.
Grey belt is a category introduced into national policy to describe Green Belt land that does not strongly serve the purposes the Green Belt exists for. The Green Belt was designed to check unrestricted sprawl, prevent neighbouring towns merging, preserve the setting of historic towns and safeguard countryside from encroachment. Some land inside Green Belt boundaries does none of that well: previously developed sites, scrappy parcels enclosed by existing development, land behind petrol stations and depots.
The grey belt reform allows that weaker land to be released for development without a full Green Belt review, provided certain conditions are met, typically including affordable housing above the usual level and contributions to infrastructure and green space.
Which is exactly what has happened here
Look at the numbers again with that in mind. 35% affordable is meaningfully above what most schemes deliver, and above what many councils secure in negotiation. The £130,000 for parks and play areas is the green space contribution. These are not incidental generosity, they are the price of grey belt release.
That is the policy working roughly as intended: land that was not doing much Green Belt work gets developed, and the community gets a higher affordable proportion than it would otherwise have won.
The argument against
It deserves stating fairly. Green Belt boundaries were drawn deliberately, and a reform that allows parcels to be reclassified as weak shifts judgement from a democratic plan-making process to a case-by-case assessment at application stage. Residents who understood their local Green Belt to be settled now find it is contestable.
There is also a slippery slope concern with genuine substance: what counts as weakly performing is a matter of assessment, and assessments can be argued. Wilsden is a village north west of Bradford surrounded by countryside of real quality, and residents there have a legitimate interest in where the line gets drawn next.
Bradford’s wider position
Bradford has been notably absent from Northern development news for most of this summer, which we have flagged before. That absence has not reflected a lack of ambition. The city has City Village, delivering up to 1,000 homes on its former commercial core, backed by £30m of government funding and £13.2m from the mayor, and the Southern Gateway scheme, which is projected to open up more than 5,000 homes and 23,000 jobs around a proposed new through-station.
A hundred homes at Wilsden is small against those. What makes it worth covering is that it is the first concrete example we have seen in the district of the new grey belt rules being applied to release land. There will be more.
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