The Aireborough Neighbourhood Development Forum is very pleased to announce that the Aireborough Green Belt sites of Ings Lane, Wills Gill, Hollins Hill, Guiseley and Victoria Avenue, Yeadon have been officially taken out of the Leeds Site Allocation Plan 2019 (SAP) until such time as the exceptional circumstances for their removal are demonstrated in the future. We have no doubt, following the Leeds Full Council meeting yesterday, 17th January 2024, that LCC will be seeking their removal from the Green Belt once again in the next rounds of the Local Plan which continues this year. 

But, we hear you say, surely we knew this back in 2020. Indeed, the High Court ordered the Aireborough sites, along with 33 other Green Belt sites in Leeds, to be put back into the Green Belt on 10 August 2020 due to the following errors that had ‘prejudiced‘ Aireborough (see High Court Judgement):

• inadequate justification for Green Belt release.
• the use of Housing Market Characteristic Areas (HMCAs) for site selection .
• errors of fact in the housing land supply evidence.
• a lower housing requirement than the SAP in the Core Strategy Review, which was being examined in parallel with the SAP in 2018.

Then, following a Council review of the housing land supply (as had been ordered by the High Court), in November 2020 LCC concluded themselves that there were no exceptional circumstances to release land from the Green Belt, and sent the Site Allocation Plan 2019 back to The Planning Inspectorate for an Inspector to approval the removal of the sites

It has taken three years for this process to wend its way through consultations, challenges from developers, hearings, modifications, more consultations, more hearings, more heated discussions, until an Inspector’s Report was issued on 2 January 2024 (after a period of fact checking by LCC). The biggest hold up in the process was LCCs desire to still allocate the Green Belt Barrowby Lane site in east Leeds for employment land; particularly as other SAP employment land had been ‘put on a shelf’ whilst the route of HS2 was ratified.  On the other 36 Leeds Green Belt sites the Inspector’s conclusion was

106. I conclude that even considered in combination, the benefits of allocating the remitted sites for housing in terms of delivering more market and affordable housing, improving housing mix and type, and helping to achieve the Core Strategy’s spatial distribution would not be sufficient to outweigh the harm to the Green Belt. I do not therefore consider that the exceptional circumstances required to alter the Green Belt boundaries have been demonstrated as required by the NPPF. This applies equally to those individual remitted sites that have planning permission or a resolution to grant permission. The removal of 36 sites from the Green Belt and their allocation for housing development is not justified or consistent with national policy including that relating to Green Belts.

107. Therefore, the 36 remitted allocated housing sites will need to be removed from the SAP.

The Inspector’s Report to Leeds City Council, 2 January 2024 can be seen here

A meeting of the Full Council yesterday then ratified the Inspector’s conclusions on the SAP modifications needed whilst congratulating themselves on their “brownfield first” planning policy, and “evidenced based planning“. You can hear this “rewriting of history” session here (Council, 17 Jan 2024, 0:30:50). However, if you are interested in following the real historic events and how Leeds came to make such prejudicial ‘mistakes’ in its 12 year SAP process you will find them on this website in the posts written at the time of each step of the process.

Finally, we pay tribute to the many thousands of people from across Leeds who fought against an intransigent Council for years; Aireborough people just took the fight for justice to the end conclusion. LCC were told again and again, their housing need figures were too high, and that (based on the evidence) sites were not sustainable or justified. Due to a Freedom of Information Act request, we now know that the Council spent over £140,000 fighting their own residents in the High Court case alone; the figures obtained do not include officer time spent on either the court case or the “thousands of hours” spent on the three years of the SAP remittal process. There has never been any mea culpa apology from LCC to local residents.