Ashwell in Cambridge green belt dispute

Paul Thwaites’ Ashwell Property Group is embroiled in a legal dispute with Cambridge council over land it wants to develop in the green belt. Ashwell is asking the High Court to quash the council’s July 2006 decision to adopt a new local plan. That plan, contrary to Ashwell’s wishes, failed to remove from the green belt a site on Barton Road, west of Cambridge, on which Ashwell proposes to build over 350 houses in a mixed-use scheme.  In 2000, Ashwell claims, the government issued “radical” planning guidance for East Anglia which favoured development on the periphery of Cambridge rather than in outlying towns and villages. The guidance said that, if land could be released without “significant detriment” to the green belt, its suitability for development should be assessed against criteria including proximity to public transport, employment and services and environmental quality. Accordingly, in 2004, Ashwell asked that the new local plan then being prepared should redraw the boundary of the green belt to exclude its “West is Best” site. Following an inquiry, in autumn 2005, a planning inspector recommended that the site “should not be allocated for housing, and that there are no exceptional grounds for altering the green belt boundary in this location”. Ashwell’s QC, John Steel, told the court that the inspector and the council had therefore “fundamentally misunderstood” the planning guidance and had applied an incorrect test of whether there were “exceptional grounds” for removing the site from the green belt. The council argues that the challenge is “misconceived” and that even if the wrong test was applied the error had made no difference to the substance of the inspector’s decision. High Court judge Mr Justice Forbes has reserved his decision to a later date. In 2002, Cambridge-based developer Ashwell Property Group signed an agreement with Railtrack Property for a £200m development on a site next to Cambridge railway station.