What do Britons most love about Britain? At the last count it was still the NHS. After that it was not the royal family, the army or democracy. Believe it or not, it is the countryside, according to polling commissioned last year by Future Countryside, an initiative of the Countryside Alliance. Today, the NHS may cram election manifestos, but of the countryside we hear not a word.
This will not last. An almighty clash is looming between the lucrative renewables industry and defenders of the rural landscape. Labour and the Tories are both eager to weaken local planning. Keir Starmer wants to curb the rights of citizens to object to new development in the countryside. The Tories recently announced a return to onshore wind, hence the proposal for a turbine cluster on the Yorkshire Moors above Charlotte Brontë’s Calderdale. Sixty-five turbines funded by the Saudis are to rise a staggering 200m each, higher than Blackpool Tower. It is hard to believe such an outrage is to be allowed for so trivial a contribution to the climate.
This is nothing on the National Grid’s extraordinary plan for a massive, £31bn expansion of Britain’s onshore pylon network. This will include a chain of structures 50m high, three to every kilometre, running north to south across the Lincolnshire Wolds into East Anglia and on to Tilbury in Essex. It will urbanise some of the most beautiful landscape in eastern England and will have a fight every inch of the way. Another branch of the network will run down Wales from Bangor in the north to Swansea in the south, intruding on the great landscapes of Snowdonia and the Cambrian mountains. It will be like a noose round Wales’s neck.
Both these lines could go underground or under the adjacent sea. Though figures vary wildly and depend on location, the extra cost could be four to six times that of pylons. Such costs have to be negotiated. But debate on the costs and benefits of public projects is startlingly illiterate. During the election we quibble over grants to operas or GP surgeries. Yet we fail to challenge the astronomical cost of submarines or of the energy-guzzling HS2, the financial burden of which is ever rising. Cancel it and Starmer could breathe new life into the NHS.
The grid project is being carried out by a private company that will reward itself with bonuses and dividends. As with Britain’s water companies, it is a private monopoly whose chief concern – we might say its capitalist duty – lies in maximising profit, not in advancing the public interest. That interest should be decided by the government, not fought out between a bunch of feuding lobbyists.
The various costs of lowering carbon emissions are high and some are hard to assess, in particular those that will be hard to reverse in the future. One such cost would be a countryside wrecked by fields of solar panels, wind turbines, electricity pylons and substations. This would be tragic if some day we find methods of taming and storing carbon that contrive eventually to control the climate. As long as no such sacrifices are required of China, India or the US, these decisions by Britain are mere virtue gestures.
Balancing costs requires determined policy. For decades, urban dwellers have fought to control their townscapes from visual destruction. At least in the more beautiful ones, such as Bath, Norwich and York, they have succeeded. Listed buildings and conservation areas are protected, even at considerable loss to developers’ profit.
Why should that profit be left to run riot over the rural landscape? Outside the national parks building pressure has brought near anarchy. Residents fight builders over every inch of soil. Case after case ends up in some court or other. This will worsen if Starmer means what he said at his party conference, that he would “fight the blockers” and overrule “nimbys”.
The time has come to treat the countryside as we do towns. It should be valued for what it is: a much-loved resource of nature, beauty and peace. That resource is finite, with more disappearing every year, and is the more precious because of it. At present its sole defenders are local people who are snubbed as nimbys and told – often by stern defenders of urban neighbourhoods – that they have no right to a say over another turbine cluster or executive estate.
The answer must be to “list” the countryside for protection as we list towns. At the top would be national parks and areas of “outstanding natural beauty”. These would be followed by uplands and coastlines, valleys, woods, stretches of farmland and the fringes of villages and towns where proximity to greenery is particularly precious. Most of rural Britain would certainly be protected. But there is no doubt that large areas, brownfield and greenfield, would be zoned as suitable for building. Elsewhere in Europe this zoning works. Why not in Britain?
The rural landscape is already recorded for agricultural grant purposes. Its listing would mean that builders, landowners and local planners would know where to direct their efforts. Zoning the countryside, like zoning the city, is in everyone’s interest. It makes sense to know which parts of the countryside should be regarded as a glory for ever, and which can be put to a better purpose. And it might tell the National Grid where to bury its ugly cables.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
