In an open letter to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg [1] sent on the eve of the Liberal Democrat party conference, Shaun Spiers, Chief Executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), reminded the Lib Dem leader of a speech he delivered to CPRE in which he said: “Fixing the economy must never come at the expense of protecting the environment. The two must go hand in hand.”[2]

The Liberal Democrat leader said at the 2008 lecture that CPRE and his party share a belief that “we must not squander this wonderful inheritance, our rich and diverse natural environment… our plans for land must always be green.  Fixing the economy must never come at the expense of protecting the environment. The two must go hand in hand… We have a green backbone running through everything we do.”

Shaun Spiers said, “The Government’s proposed planning reforms stand in stark contrast to this philosophy. They need to be fundamentally revised to remove the primacy they currently give to economic development over all other considerations.”

Shaun Spiers congratulated the Deputy Prime Minister on his recent commitments to sustainable planning[3], but warned that, as they currently stand, draft Government planning reforms will not deliver sustainable growth. Shaun Spiers said:  “A bargain basement approach to economic growth based on removing protections from unsuitable development is unlikely to be effective in the long term.”

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Notes to Editors
[1] A full copy of Shaun Spiers’s letter to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is available here: http://bit.ly/q19vZA
[2] A full copy of Nick Clegg’s 14 November 2008 lecture to CPRE is available here: http://bit.ly/ppxUhA
[3] A full transcript of Nick Clegg’s 14 September 2011 speech to the London School of Economics is available here: http://bit.ly/riR09n