Shaun Spiers - CPRE

ePolitix.com speaks to Shaun Spiers of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) about a range of issues affecting the countryside this year.

Question: What does CPRE have coming up in 2008?

Shaun Spiers: We'll be working across the board to protect and improve the countryside, but I'd highlight three major projects for 2008. First, we will be promoting amendments to the Planning Bill in the hope that the final Act will be less damaging to the environment and democracy – we know there is concern in Parliament about a number of the proposals in the bill. 

Second, we want to generate a national debate on the future of the countryside, and get support for a positive vision for the countryside that recognises its value to the nation. The countryside will change – it always has changed – but we hope to be able to influence those changes to ensure that they are for the better. 

Finally, in April, our president, Bill Bryson, will be launching a big campaign against countryside litter. We have a beautiful landscape – but we often seem intent on trashing it. We need to clean up the countryside.  

Question: What are your key campaign areas and why?

Shaun Spiers: Planning – the planning system should be a key tool of environmental protection. Planning is a democratic process that mediates between different interests – local and national, economic and environmental, the short-term and long-term. Planning deals with complicated and emotive questions – but those questions won't become simple or uncontroversial just by reforming the planning system. 

So, we'll keep making the case for planning – for the need to think seriously and consult effectively on new housing, roads, wind farms, power stations and any other development. 

We'll also continue to campaign on food and farming issues. Seventy per cent of the landscape of England is farmed. The landscape we love is, very largely, a farmed landscape. But there are huge changes taking place in farming and some further significant reforms of the CAP are possible in the years ahead. 

As a country, we have our best chance, at least since we entered the Common Market, to shape the future of our farmed landscape. If we get it wrong, we could end up with some farming sectors seeking to compete on the world market with little or no thought given to the environment, while other sectors give up farming altogether because they are unable to compete, leading to productive land being abandoned which could eventually become developed. That would be a disaster. So CPRE will continue to engage with and seek to influence debates on the future of sustainable farming.  

Question: Does Gordon Brown care about/understand the countryside?

Shaun Spiers: He's made some interesting and encouraging statements on the countryside. At a Green Alliance meeting last year he spoke nostalgically about summer holidays spent on a family farm in Fife, and there were positive words about the countryside in his speech to last autumn’s Labour Party conference. Of necessity, he has also had to get to grips with some farming crises since becoming prime minister. 

So I'm sure he cares, and I hope that he increasingly understands. But I don't think he gets 'sustainable development', the need to integrate social, environmental and economic ends. The environment – and 'softer' quality of life issues, including the countryside – are always liable to come a poor third. But I've offered to take him for a nice long walk in the countryside any time he feels like recharging his batteries, and I hope he'll take me up on this! 

Question: Are his housing plans sufficiently flexible/green?

Shaun Spiers: No. There have been positive developments such as the government's commitment to zero-carbon homes over the next 10 years, and an emphasis (in rhetoric at least) on affordable housing, which is often a particular concern in rural areas. But what we're faced with now is a numbers game. The government will build houses – or try to persuade the private house building industry to build houses – but it's almost given up on building truly sustainable communities. 

Question: Is it possible to meet our housing needs and protect the green belt?

Shaun Spiers: Yes, if we build wisely. But the scale and speed of the government's plans put the green belt under severe threat across the country. And in spite of John Prescott's 'guarantee' in the House of Commons in 2003 to maintain or increase the area of green belt land in each English region, since then it's declined in six of the nine English regions.

And that rate of loss is about to get worse, with threats to the green belt in York, Bath, Nottingham, Oxford, Harlow and many other places.

Question: Can the Conservative be both pro-house building and protective of the countryside? Or will they have to choose?

Shaun Spiers: I like to think that CPRE is pro-housing. The important thing is to get the right sort of housing in the right place.  But you can't be anti-planning and pro-countryside, so I hope we'll hear no more gibes from the Conservative Party – or the other parties - about the planning system being 'bananas'. 

A key test for the Conservatives will be how they reconcile their competing policy reviews on Competitiveness (led by John Redwood) and the Quality of Life (led by John Gummer). We hope they will embrace the prescriptions set out in the latter, not the former, but there are clear differences between them, and real choices to be made.

Question: What are the CPRE views on nuclear energy?

Shaun Spiers: We don't think the UK's energy problems can be solved by 'big kit' construction projects. We need much more of an emphasis on demand management, conservation and local generation. That said, we are not dogmatically against nuclear energy. But we do believe that the problem of the disposal of nuclear waste should be resolved before we build any more nuclear power stations. 

And we firmly believed that large facilities such as nuclear power stations should be properly planned and democratically scrutinised, not imposed on communities through some 'streamlined' – for which read 'centralised' – planning system.