Land patch promise ‘must be honoured’

The Open Spaces Society has come up with its own proposals to save parcels of land which may be small and are often not very green.

It follows the Government’s plans for a new designation “to protect green areas of particular importance to local communities”, which was due by the end of March, failed to materialise.

The society’s general secretary Kate Ashbrook said: “These will be bits of land which have got under the radar of existing protective designations. They won’t be registered commons or town and village greens; and they won’t be in protective ownership, such as by the National Trust or Woodland Trust. But they will be important to people who live close by: kids will kick balls about on them, dogs will be walked on them and sometimes flowers will bloom on them.”

The society says the rules need to be simple, transparent and robust. Miss Ashbrook said: “I don’t think there is any designation that properly protects land unless it is owned by someone who is very beneficent. Green spaces everywhere are under threat, people think they are safe and suddenly find they are faced with a supermarket or housing development.

“As it stands the rules are too weak and there are too many loopholes.

“If the Government was serious about the green spaces designation they would have got on and given it priority and published something before now,” Miss Ashbrook said.

A Framework for Green Space can be found at www.oss.org.uk