Town and village green registrations set for overhaul
The government has revealed that it is planning to launch a review of the town and village green registration system next year.
The announcement came after the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs received a final report on how the system is working.
In a written Parliamentary answer, Environment Minister Huw Irranca-Davies said: “The findings of the research, as well as feedback from local authorities and others, lead me to conclude that there is sufficient evidence to justify a review of the existing system, with a view to exploring possible changes. Therefore, Defra plans to consult in spring 2010 on whether there is a need for reform of the registration system, and the options for reform that exist.”
Many applications for registration have been controversial in recent years, with campaigners accused of using the regime to thwart development.
The Defra research revealed a wide variety of motivations for town and village green applications, with many applications triggered by a perceived threat to the site by those who lived close to it.
“This was not necessarily the threat of housing or other building development but also a possible denial of public access or a lack of consultation over management,” the report said. “For example, the site survey highlighted that applications on council-run parks and playgrounds may be caused by disagreement with the way in which the council runs the site or by the possibility of part of the site being lost without consultation.”
The key finding in the research was the existence of two parallel systems between which there is minimal communication: the town and village green registration process and the planning system.
“In our view this seems to be problematic,” the report’s authors said. “There is no legal requirement for one system to inform the other at any stage and this is understandable as the presence of an application under one system does not affect the process of the other (although the outcomes of the process obviously do.
“Nevertheless, the processes in each system rarely seem to take explicit account of issues/decisions in the parallel system, even though they can have significant importance for each other, particularly as far as the impact on individual sites and the individuals involved are concerned.”
The report called for:
- Explicit interaction, albeit not integration, of the two systems;
- Understanding of the ‘other’ system by practitioners in each system; and
- Adoption of a greater degree of consistency in such matters as site identification/description and mapping protocols.
