North west

Success putting power lines underground (Lake District)
For a number of years, Friends of the Lake District has been campaigning to reduce the impact of overhead electricity and telephone lines on the landscape.

It recently had a campaign success. In January, two beauty spots near Coniston in Cumbria were the first places in the Lake District National Park to have overhead power lines replaced by underground cables. In all, over 1.5km of overhead power lines were removed.

United Utilities undertook the work as part of a project by Friends of the Lake District to tackle intrusive power lines in beautiful locations.

The branch has a project officer working one and a half days a week on its overhead wires project. One of the schemes currently underway is a countrywide project to underground overhead electricity lines in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

In 2005, Ofgem, the body that regulates the electricity market, agreed to provide an allowance for electricity distribution companies to underground electricity lines in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Friends of the Lake District is working with the Lake District National Park Authority, the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and United Utilities to ensure the scheme is a success in Cumbria and the North West.

Friends of the Lake District would like to see a similar initiative to that for electricity distribution for the telecommunications industry, but this is proving very difficult. It is talking with both the regulator, Ofcom, and the main network provider BT Openreach.

Manchester Green Belt kept green (Manchester)
A five-year battle by CPRE Trafford to save Green Belt land finally paid off afterTrafford Metropolitan Borough Council voted to remove the road-rail Trafford interchange from its unitary development plan.

The fight has been a long one. In 2003, the inspector at the plan's public inquiry said that the interchange proposal should be removed because it did not have sufficient merit to justify the loss of Green Belt land. When the council rejected this advice, CPRE lobbied the Government Office of the North West and through it, the deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott (who was at the time the secretary of state for planning).

Mr Prescott declared that the council would have to delete the proposal, or give exceptional circumstances to justify its retention. Finding no such circumstances, and concerned about the possibility of legal action by the developers, the council asked him to confirm the scheme's deletion, but he insisted that they should vote on this themselves. In the end, they did.

Other sites are more suitable:

...'CPRE has sympathy with what the road-rail interchange proposal was trying to achieve,' explains Arthur Jurgens, CPRE Trafford's chairman. 'The problem was simply that it was in the wrong place. It would damage the countryside needlessly.' CPRE also doubts the commercial feasibility of the scheme. In fact, much of the railway there is single track. 'Other more suitable sites are available for development,' which have better rail links, and are thus more environmentally sustainable.

Making sure mast installation respects the local landscape (Cumbria)
The Friends of the Lake District (which represents CPRE in Cumbria) has been working with the public services and O2 to ensure that the Airwave Project, a new mobile phone network to support the emergency services, has minimal impact on the Cumbrian landscape.

The project has needed a number of new mobile phone base stations to be built. Early rumours of over 50 new masts on the open fells of the Lake District raised concerns as to the visual impacts of the scheme in Cumbria.

After contact through the Cumbria police service, a meeting was set up between the Friends of the Lake District, the telecoms company and some of the public service users of the Airwaves system. This meeting explored the nature of the system and potential methods of delivery - including masts, existing sites and the erection of small, stone buildings as aerial sites.

Friends of the Lake Distrcit is now commenting on the list of potential sites, marking those for which they have concerns, supporting those sites they feel have minimal impact on the landscape and, in a few cases, applying their local knowledge to suggest potential alternative sites.

Green fields protected (Crewe)
It has been hailed as the end of greenfield development in Crewe and Nantwich by local councillors. The approved borough local plan for development up to 2011 has been able to find sites for 7,600 houses while protecting the countryside.

The plan puts no housing allocations on greenfield sites although some small greenfield sites were approved for housing during the long process of local plan finalisation. The final version is a great improvement on the draft, published in 2001, which imagined 65% of new housing would have to go on greenfield land.

Over the years, CPRE Cheshire has built up a good relationship with the borough. They took the opportunity during the drafting of the local plan to meet with planning officers and put forward their concerns. The branch commented on every draft of the plan and spoke at the local enquiry as did many residents groups and the county council.