The areas affected include:
• Sefton, Merseyside, where the council voted for a plan in which more than 5,000 homes would be built on the borough’s Green Belt. A green belt review published last month identified capacity for twice that;
• Newcastle and Gateshead, where councils have just agreed to allow 6,000 homes to be built on redesignated land;
• Birmingham, where council leaders have warned residents it may need to build 10,
cheap jordans free shipping,000 homes on protected land to meet housing requirements;
• Rushcliffe borough council, Notts, which was told by the Planning Inspectorate it had to find space for 4,http://www.nevergiveup.cba.pl/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=10364cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg,000 more homes and would have to review its Green Belt.
The loss of Green Belt has become a major concern for Conservative MPs in suburban and rural constituencies.
Chris Skidmore, the Tory MP for Kingswood, Bristol, has set up the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Green Belt to ensure the land is given the protection that ministers have promised.
He said: “If there is to be building on the Green Belt, it must only be in exceptional circumstances and should not be imposed from above.
“There is an uneven playing field as a developer can have a right to appeal but a community cannot do anything if a council decides to allow a developer to build on an area of Green Belt land.”
The boundaries are being changed by councils as part of their core strategy plans for development in their areas, where they are required to set aside land for five years’ worth of house building.
Under the NPPF, developers who submit applications for buildings that fit with these local plans will receive automatic consent.
In a concession to conservation campaigners, including the National Trust which opposed the reforms amid fears they would allow unchecked development, ministers pledged the changes to the planning system would continue to protect the Green Belt.
However, under a loophole in the new regulations, councils can “redesignate” their land “under exceptional circumstances” and many are now using this to allow building to take place.
Among the areas to have redrawn boundaries is Reigate and Banstead borough council in Surrey, which has earmarked land for 1,400 homes on the outskirts of Merstham, Redhill and Reigate.
Newcastle and Gateshead’s joint strategy for growth warns that land is in short supply and says: “There is a need to identify land, to be removed from the Green Belt specifically to meet development needs.”
In Stevenage, Herts, protected land will also be lost to make room for 5,300 homes around the town. Central Bedfordshire council is to remove about 2,900 acres of land from the protection for up to 12,000 houses.
In some areas, the Planning Inspectorate, which must approve local development plans, has ordered councils to review their Green Belt boundaries in order to meet their housing requirements.
Chiltern district council, Bucks, has just ended a consultation to take several villages out of the restriction following orders from planners.
Paul Miner, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: “Ministers have said they want to maintain protection of the Green Belt, but as a result of the changes they have introduced, the problem is getting worse every year. It is sending out very mixed messages.”
Ingrid Samuel, historic environment director at the National Trust, added: “While we understand the need for new homes, the National Trust believes that the Government should be encouraging development on brownfield sites and refurbishing empty properties first,
cheap retro jordans, not making it easier to build on greenfield and Green Belt land."
"For many, the Green Belt represents nature on our doorstep. Much more than an empty space for building, we should be improving degraded land and providing new opportunities for sports and recreation and improved wildlife habitat.”
Woodland campaigners have also raised fears about the growing threat to areas of ancient woodland under the planning reforms.
Last week Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government,
approved an applicatio... a quarry into Oaken Wood, near Maidstone, Kent. Campaigners say there are another 11 threatened areas of woodland.
Despite the loss of Green Belt, Nick Boles, the planning minister,
cheap jordans for sale, insisted the planning reforms had increased green belt protection.
He said: “This Government has increased Green Belt protection by abolishing the last government’s top-down regional strategies that sought to delete the Green Belt.
“National planning policy that Green Belt boundaries should only be revised in exceptional circumstances is essentially unchanged from the guidance originally published in 1995.”,http://www.sam-clan.com/web/index.php?site=forum_topic&topic=101430cheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg;
Riding pillion behind my pilot, I go bumping down Tafika’s dusty airstrip and am airborne before I know it, lifting up over the surrounding woodlands to meet the red bubble of the rising sun. It’s my maiden flight in a microlight – a cross between a motor mower and a hang-glider – and I am hooked from the start. If you are making a list of 10 best things to do, put this near the top; but make sure that Tafika is where you do it.
Tafika, an idyllic bush camp with six comfortable reed-and-thatch chalets on the edge of the Luangwa River, is the home of John and Carol Coppinger, where safari purists come to explore Africa on foot and, uniquely, to fly by microlight over the South Luangwa National Park. John had already established himself as one of Zambia’s most respected guides when he set up his own company, Remote Africa Safaris, in 1995. On a trip to South Africa he visited a microlight factory and knew he just had to have one. “I bought it even before my wife and I had a house to live in,” he says. Having already qualified as a commercial pilot he took to the air as effortlessly as the bateleur eagles that ride the thermals on black-and-white wings, and has since clocked up more than 2,200 flying hours.
Only from the air does the valley’s extraordinary topography begin to make sense. Laid out below, you can see every serpentine loop of the river as it makes its way down the park, and the oxbow lagoons that are the ghosts of its former meanderings. The sun floods the plains with amber light, casting long shadows across lion-coloured grasslands where kudu and eland canter away beneath us. Giraffes stand like markers, measuring the distance. We spot elephants under the tamarind trees, and a herd of Cape buffaloes, 600-strong, moving through the dappled woodlands.
Giraffes stand like markers, measuring the distance
Coppinger points out a shallow stretch of the river where hippos rest like polished cobblestones. “That’s where Livingstone crossed in December 1866,” he says. Apart from a few tyre tracks and the thatched roofs of a distant safari camp hidden among the ebony groves, nothing has changed. On the home stretch we zoom below treetop height along a dried-up lagoon, scattering impala in every direction, and 30 minutes later we are back in camp for breakfast.
Africa doesn’t come any wilder than South Luangwa. Lying at the tail end of the Great Rift Valley, this is Zambia’s finest big-game stronghold: 3,
cheap jordans,500 square miles of woodlands and floodplains heaving with 60 kinds of mammals including lion, leopard, a unique population of Thornicroft giraffes, and the greatest concentration of hippos in Africa.
The reason for this extraordinary biomass is the Luangwa itself, a major tributary of the mighty Zambezi. During the rains the animals disperse into the park’s interior; but when drought returns they are drawn inexorably back to the river whose life-giving waters sustain them through Zambia’s long,
Kicksokok.com, hot dry season. This year the rains ended early. Already the beds of the oxbow lagoons are bone-dry when I visit, cracked and cratered with elephant footprints baked hard by two months of relentless sun.
Farther south in the park at Puku Ridge Safari Camp, a regular procession of animals troops in to drink at the waterhole – elephant, buffalo, zebra, impala – delighting guests on their verandas. When it comes to location, Puku Ridge is hard to beat. All seven spacious tented rooms, minimal in style but supremely comfortable, with cooling fans and a choice of indoor and outdoor showers, are raised on decks. What you see from them, enclosed by a distant wall of woodland, is a vast floodplain nibbled smooth as a Home Counties lawn – a giant, natural theatre-in-the round on which all kinds of dramas are played out.
The day before my arrival, I am told, lions had tried to kill a buffalo while guests were at breakfast, so in the afternoon we drive out to look for them. We find only one, but what a lion he is. The guides call him Shaka. Two years ago he lorded it over the local pride. Then, as is the way with lions, three feisty young strangers deposed him. Now aged 15,http://www.dhzxxx.cn/guestbook.aspcheapjordanshoesfreeshipping.com/bolg,
cheap jordans online, his day is almost done, but he still cuts a regal figure as he strides across the plain.
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View from the villa at Chinzombo safari camp
South Luangwa is one of the few parks in Africa where night drives are permitted. So on our return to camp we switch on the spotlight to search for nocturnal animals: genets, civet cats and porcupines. Under a dome of stars whose sides touch the Earth, we hit the jackpot – a pack of endangered wild dogs.
There are eight of them, and from their fat bellies and bloody fur it is clear they have just made a kill. Their Mickey Mouse ears make them oddly endearing,cheap jordan shoes, but don’t be misled. One glimpse of those jagged carnassial teeth – designed for shearing through hide and sinew – tells you this is a pooch with attitude.
Next morning brings drama of a different kind. This time it’s a martial eagle, a fearsome raptor with a black hood like a medieval executioner, swooping down to snatch a guinea fowl, which it carries off into a nearby tree. There it proceeds to pluck and devour its victim, the feathers falling like dark snowflakes, until only the bony legs remain.
These early mornings are my favourite part of the day, when the air is still cool and the valley echoes to the cries of a million Cape turtle doves. This is the ideal time for a walking safari, and who better to accompany me than Phil Berry?
Now aged 71, Berry is acknowledged as the most experienced guide in the Valley. Over the past 50 years he has clocked up more than 75,000 miles on foot in the bush. The last time we walked together was in 1983, when I joined him on an anti-poaching patrol organised by Save the Rhino Trust, the outfit he was then spearheading in a brave but ultimately hopeless attempt to protect Luangwa’s 8,000 black rhinos.
This time, we stride out from Kuyenda, where he lives beside the Manzi Sand River with his American partner, Babette Alfieri. With just four simple reed-and-thatch chalets (all with en-suite loos and outdoor showers), it’s the archetypal no-frills bush camp. A comment in the visitors’ book sums it up to perfection: “Kuyenda has everything you want and none of the things you don’t want.”
The shadows in the folds of the Chindeni Hills are already leaching away in the heat as we follow a beaten-down elephant path through the combretum thickets. In a little while we come to a hidden valley in which springs bubble out of the ground, creating a haven for saddle-billed storks, and shortly afterwards we reach the riparian woodlands.
Here we rest: Berry, Isiah Nyirenda the game scout with his heavy rifle, Damasco the tea bearer and me. Under the trees it is as silent as a church, the hush broken only by the fluting calls of barbets and the explosive guffaws of hippos in the river, and we sit in the shade on a fallen leadwood while Berry pours tea and hands around muffins before heading leisurely back to camp.
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The main deck of Chinzombo at twilight
Unequalled for walking safaris, Luangwa is also the best place in Africa for finding leopards. By the time I leave Kuyenda I have seen seven; but the best is yet to come. It happens while I’m at Chinzombo, the flagship camp of Norman Carr Safaris, beside the Luangwa River. This was the site of the green season camp from which Norman Carr, the great Zambian game warden, used to operate his walking safaris 35 years ago. Today the original Chinzombo is no more, replaced by a new camp that has become the smartest address in Zambia since it opened in June .
At Chinzombo, Norman Carr Safaris has taken a quantum leap into the future by introducing the kind of safari-chic style and luxury that are the trademark of Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens, the architects who created North Island Lodge in the Seychelles, where Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge honeymooned in 2011 .
The walls behind the main dining area are adorned with sepia photographs of Carr himself, the man who reinvented foot safaris half a century ago, taken with Big Boy and Little Boy, the two lions he adopted and returned to the wild long before George Adamson did the same with his Born Free lions in Kenya.
But at Chinzombo it is leopards that most visitors want to see, and the Luangwa always delivers. Normally shy and elusive, these elegant predators have become so tolerant of vehicles that the big male we find asleep on the riverbank one morning can hardly be bothered to open his eyes. But in the golden glow of late afternoon it is a different story, and for two unforgettable hours we follow him as he stalks puku antelope across the floodplains until he and his quarry are swallowed up in the swiftly falling dusk.
Zambia essentials
When to go
May to October, when the weather is dry (better game viewing, fewer mosquitoes).
Flying time and time difference
London to Nairobi is nine hours, plus about two and a half hours to Lusaka and a 40- minute internal flight to Mfuwe. GMT + 2hrs.
Getting there
British Airways ceased its direct service to Lusaka last month . The best alternative is Kenya Airways (020 8283 1818; kenya-airways.com/uk) from London Heathrow to Lusaka via Nairobi.
Baggage allowance: 15kg plus 5kg for hand luggage.
Currency
New Zambian kwacha: currently 8.9 to the pound.
Health advice
This is a malarial area. Take appropriate advice and precautions.
Insider tips
Bring good-quality binoculars, a camera and a head torch.
Dress in layers for chilly morning and evening game drives,cheap wholesale jordans.
Don’t wear anything black or blue (such as jeans). These colours attract tsetse flies that bite like horse flies.
Bring decent walking boots with thorn-proof soles.
Wear all-day sunscreen like P20.
Further information
Zambia (Bradt, ?18.99)
