Hopwood & Heywood August 2022

Building Sustainable Communities,
Protecting Our Green Belt
– the Places for Everyone Myth?
We are moving rapidly towards
the Public Inquiry in to Places
for Everyone (PfE), the latest
grand plan from the unelected
and barely accountable Greater
Manchester Combined Authority
(GMCA).
It is to be hoped that the Public Inquiry
process will provide an opportunity for
significant amendments, to this proposal,
and for common sense to prevail, as the
plan moves forward.
Why are significant amendments
needed, you may ask – here are
a few reasons:
Calculations: -
The numbers used to justify the whole PfE
scheme are seriously out of date. Brexit,
Covid lockdown and recovery, the war in
Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis, mean
that a comprehensive review using up to
date data is required before the viability
of any such strategy can be assessed.
Democratic Deficit: -
The originating documents for the GMSF
(the precursor to PfE) made it clear that
such a proposal could only move forward
with the unanimous agreement of all
ten Local Authorities within the GMCA.
The proposal was rejected by one of
those Authorities, but the GMCA chose to
charge on regardless- why was this?
Approach To Green Belt; -
The whole approach to developing on
Green Belt within PfE is fundamentally
flawed, and this is of prime importance
to communities in Heywood, Hopwood
and throughout the whole of Greater
Manchester. In the case of Rochdale, the
vast majority of entities asked to bring
forward development proposals were
house builders and developers, and
few other bodies were asked to outline
schemes. How surprising is it therefore
that the vast majority of housing sites
brought forward for consideration are
in Green Belt? Large house builders will
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