What's magic about the Magic Map?
Not much. Somerset Confidential® takes a live example of how the Magic Map, a tool planners rely on, can turn out to be fundamentally flawed.
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We have written a lot of late about the protection of agricultural land against development. Primarily because what little protection there used to be from the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has been watered down by the current Government.
This is a Government with a significant house building target and one that seems more determined to push through development where previous governments have rather dragged their feet.
But the downside is that housebuilders are rarely interested in developing brownfield sites as they are expensive. So instead we are going to see vast swathes of farmland starting to disappear under new housing estates.
Which is not to say we could not benefit with more housing to shelter the population. What every government over the past 15 years has failed to grasp, is that if you build over farmland, you may be able to shelter the population, but you won’t be able to feed it.
Such protection as the NPPF offers (and it is minimal) is a suggestion that planners should “recognise” the value of “best and most versatile” agricultural land.
But what does that mean? Frankly very little in planning terms. It doesn’t instruct planners to save farmland or to attribute harm to a planning application if it proposes building over farmland. It is essentially a lame and pointless statement.
All agricultural land in England and Wales is graded into five types. Grade 1 being the finest quality and grade 5 the lowest.
Grade 3 land is split in two, 3a and 3b.
“best and most versatile” is all land graded 1 to 3a
Land that in NPPF terms is defined as “best and most versatile” is all land graded 1 to 3a. When planners look at land to make recommendations on whether a development should go ahead, they turn to maps under the care of Natural England. First there is Natural England’s Regional Agricultural Land Classification Maps. These however do not split land into 3a and 3b but they do cover pretty much all of the farmland of England and Wales. It also does not easily show data at the level of individual fields.
The ultimate bible for planners is something called the Magic Map. This, Government instructs, must be used to define land classifications for planning where possible. However because the Magic Map does not cover even half of the agricultural land in England it is not always possible to use it.