Readers of this blog site will know how passionate I am to preserve Sefton’s Green Belt land from development mainly because it is almost all of the highest grade of agricultural land in England. To my mind building on it is utter madness as it is the very land that grows the food we eat and which we can’t grow enough of to feed ourselves now.
Green Belt campaigners outside Maghull Town Hall.
Click on the photo to enlarge it.
This is not though a rehearsal of my previous postings about how Sefton Council under Labour rule has got us to the state we are presently in i.e. them planning to concrete over acres and acres of additional land across the Borough but it is about the latest curved ball that has been launched at Sefton which makes for even more grim reading.
On 3rd July Sefton’s all powerful all-Labour Cabinet received a report from Council Officers which claimed in effect that if we were worried about building on high grade agricultural land before we now have double the reasons to be worried, or is that horrified!
It is all to do with a factor called ‘household projections’ i.e. the increasing number of new households that may be formed in the coming years. The report says that ‘this unexpected rise relates in a large part to under-recording of population in Liverpool during previous population projections and the incremental net migration to Sefton arising therefrom’. It goes on to say that ‘this has been compounded by an ageing population and other trends in household formation in Sefton which has resulted in a growth in small households’.
To put this in straight forward language my interpretation of this officer speak is that Liverpool Council, or those who compiled the previous population figures/projections for it, have made some big mistakes and Sefton Borough will have to live with the consequences!
I will return to this matter with more detail soon but how will Labour-run Sefton Council react to this news? Kick it into the long grass (if we have any left to kick into) whilst planning to give more of our precious high grade agricultural land the nod for concreting over?
