Hello, I’m Paula Moss. I’m the face behind Rural ROAR—the campaign to stop the Green Belt turning grey. I was born in Liverpool, a boomer—just about—and the first of my family to go to university.
Where I came from, it took a hardy blade of grass to stick its head up between the paving slabs in the terraced street in Wavertree where I was born. It was one of those back-to-back houses: no garden, just a yard.
My mum knew how much I loved nature from our once-a-year holidays to North Wales, when Ford’s closed down for three weeks and my dad took us off to a caravan site. When it wasn’t raining, I walked the hills and hedgerows with him. I loved it so much that one year my mum decided to build me a brick garden in our back yard.
I loved that garden. Cities more than anywhere need green space around them. That is why the Green Belt matters: so every child can reach green space, and cities cannot simply concrete over the hills and fields beyond them.
But the Green Belt does so much more than that. It protects our sense of place. Today, I no more want my little village in Surrey to merge with the next one along than I do my beloved Liverpool to merge with Manchester. Where we’re born, and where we live, should be a source of pride and character—as unique as the people themselves.
“The country I know has always been a blend of rural idylls and bustling cities, market towns and coastal harbours. It’s what makes Britain, Britain.”
Why I launched Rural ROAR
Villages are not spaces between towns.
The grey-belt test must be suspended for villages.
But all that is under threat. The latest version of the National Planning Policy Framework—the third in under a year—has pushed grey-belt policy still further. It now represents an existential threat to Britain’s ancient villages. That is not an overstatement.
Grey belt was supposed to release scrubby land and car parks, not green fields between villages, or between villages and towns. In my home borough of Guildford, AECOM found that 551 of 575 assessment areas—96%—met the A/B/D threshold now used by the national definition. The council is updating its assessment following the latest policy change. That cannot be right.
So I am launching a campaign which I hope will be backed by parish councils, residents, residents’ associations and community groups all over the country. I’m calling for reform of the grey-belt rules that have consigned villages like mine to the scrap heap and fail to treat encroachment into the countryside as a fundamental test of Green Belt land.
If government is serious about speeding up planning, powers should be delegated—not sucked up to a new and higher authority. Devolution is not devolution if it takes power upwards. Parish councils are the natural place to make it happen.
And where a parish has a made Neighbourhood Plan, its council should have the power to call in applications—not an individual mayor with individual powers and no knowledge of the area. Ten heads are better than one.
I may have started Rural ROAR in my own village, but it cannot belong to one person or one place. It must become the collective voice of rural communities across England.
I’ve launched Rural ROAR to fight for this change. I hope to sit down with Andy Burnham, Scouser to Scouser, and find common ground. We may never agree on the best football team in Liverpool. But I hope we can agree that there is a better way forward on planning.