THE York Natural Environment Trust views with increasing alarm the conduct of York's Green Belt Review.

Having failed to set firm green belt in its Local Plan, City of York Council was ordered by the Local Plan Inquiry Inspector to go away and do so. The resulting review was then placed in the hands, not of planners but of development officers whose careers depend on promoting maximum new development.

These have devised questionable ways to exclude land from green belt. For example, at the September 2000 Greenbelt Conference they produced plans claiming to show areas of lower quality countryside suitable for development, which delegates concluded were "highly suspect". Meanwhile, they have aggressively avoided examining proposals for new green belt areas such as Osbaldwick wildflower meadows.

The green belt feedback survey currently being distributed is equally untrustworthy. It gives trends assumed from past population growth as reason for new development, without admitting that this growth was largely inward migration, itself stimulated by increased development.

It talks of developing up to 29,000 jobs and 12,400 homes, without acknowledging that there is effectively no unemployment in York and that the council's own housing survey indicates fewer than one per cent of homes are overcrowded whilst over 12 per cent are under-occupied. And it does not explain why, if affordable homes are needed, the council sells its own land for mainly high cost commercial housing, rather than using it wholly for providing them.

Crucially, feedback questions are carefully worded to invite answers which support development but avoid the single question most people want to answer: "Do you want expansion of urban York into green belt?" YNET urges York people to make their answer to this avoided question clear, in this review and to candidates in the elections.

Barry Potter,

Chairman, YNET,

Knapton Lane,

Acomb, York.

Updated: 10:49 Tuesday, April 03, 2001