Planning Barrister Zack Simons’ article ‘We need to talk about England’s greenbelt’ – https://www.ft.com/content/f240e825-eca0-4fba-8813-86dfaa0a6933 – published in the Financial Times has received a lot of attention in the past week. Zack is one of the most highly rated planning barristers in the country.

In his piece, he says, ‘The greenbelt is the most familiar and least understood plank of England’s planning policy’ and ‘The confusion starts with the name. It’s not all green and it definitely isn’t a belt.’ He goes on to say that, ‘to stand a chance of solving a national housing crisis we really need to talk about the greenbelt. But, as Mr Johnson knows, that is often politically impossible.’

Well, at Civic Voice, we are not afraid to talk about the big issues. So we have decided to invite Zack Simons, Crispin Truman and Catriona Riddell to join us for a webinar in January to talk about the green belt.

We are delighted to have Zack, a planning barrister at Landmark Chambers and author of the popular #Planoraks blog, Crispin, the CEO of CPRE The Countryside Charity and Catriona, an expert in strategic planning joining us on Wednesday 20th January (6-7pm). We are sure this will be a challenging and thought provoking conversation to start 2021.

Some of the questions we might cover include:

– Are the five purposes the most relevant and appropriate concepts for defining the green belt in the 21st century, or have our urban areas evolved to such an extent that we need to think again?

– Is a national strategic body needed to independently assess the role of green belts and their positive and negative impacts?

– Are there parts of the country that should create new green belts in places that don’t have them?

You can follow the three speakers on twitter at:

Zack Simons @ZackSimons

Crispin Truman @CrispinTruman

Catriona Riddell @CatrionalRiddel1