Places for Everyone legal challenge update

Save Royton's Greenbelt offers its commiserations to Save Greater Manchester's Greenbelt, which has lost its legal challenge against Places for Everyone, and the release of Green Belt for development. Whilst this is devastating for many groups across Greater Manchester, it does mean that we can finally move on from this. Just so there is no confusion, the Thornham Old Road (Tandle Hills) site and Hanging Chadder will remain in the Green Belt, under the current terms of the spatial plan. We were less successful in the case of the south Royton sites (Beal Valley, Royton Moss).

We have been somewhat vindicated in our strategy: we went to great efforts to front-load our campaign funding. We didn't believe our sites would stand-up to judicial scrutiny, and that Oldham Council would back off, if faced with the prospect of legal action. In addition, we increased political pressure on Oldham Labour through the systematic elimination of their councillors at the polls. We said right from the start that Labour were driving the Green Belt grab and we were proven to be right: Following last year's general election, the new Labour government weakened Green Belt protections and increased the housing target. They can't say the Tories are making them do it now!

The resolution of the SGMGB legal action means that we can finally initiate the process of returning the £200 loans that many of you kindly made to SRGB as valuable members of our 200 club. This money was ring-fenced from our operational costs for legal action, specifically related to the Royton North sites of Hanging Chadder or Thornham Old Road (Tandle Hills). That means it will be returned in full, as per the terms of the loan. It was a lot of money to ask for and we are especially grateful to everyone who participated in this scheme. We will publish another post in the coming days to set out how we intend going about this.

The SRGB team