Protect local landscapes

What’s your favourite, local landscape in Wales? It might be the view from your window, the place where you walk the dog or a picnic spot for a summer’s day. But unless you live in a national park or Wales’s five Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or in a nature reserve, chances are that that landscape has no protection from development.

Wales’s landscapes are under extraordinary pressure, despite the recession. From wind farms in rural Wales to opencasting in the valleys and from Cardiff’s 45,000 new homes to a new stretch of M4,  large swathes of very attractive and valuable countryside could be transformed by development.

Wales is unusual in having so much of its countryside protected by designation as a national park, AONB or national nature reserve.  Development that is permitted in these areas has to meet high standards, with the impact on the landscape being a key consideration in deciding what can be built.

Outside these areas, however, whether a development goes ahead is down to the decision of the local planning committee.  No matter how beautiful an area may be or how iconic it is, no matter how loved by local people as an open space, there is no protection.  The local planning committee should of course take landscape into account, but very often the presumption is in favour of development and the planning application will go ahead.

What’s needed is protection for landscapes of local significance – they might not be of ‘outstanding’ beauty but they are still important to a community, whether it’s the mountain behind a village or the sweep of a bay.  Think of Caerphilly Mountain, north of Cardiff. Not the most outstanding of places, to me anyway, but an extremely important backdrop to Cardiff as well as somewhere that gives breathing space to residents of the city.  The same is true of the valleys – which I love – but put wind farms across the top of every single mountain and the unique valleys landscape is gone.

This wouldn’t be an anti-development measure, but rather a means of establishing some no-go areas because they are locally important.

It is, I think, in the Welsh Government’s powers to create a new protected status for locally-important landscapes. Doing so could save some key bits of Wales’s countryside from damage, while still allowing development elsewhere.  In a tough economic climate discouraging development is not going to be flavour of the month although it could well be popular with people who are trying to fend off endless applications from developers.  Something for the next legislative programme maybe?