On Monday evening Barnet Football Club’s bid to return to its historic High Barnet home stumbled at the first hurdle. It was rejected by Barnet Council’s strategic planning committee – predictably, perhaps – as “inappropriate development” within the Green Belt that would cause an unacceptable “loss of public open space and loss of playing fields”.
The Barnet team played its final game at its old Underhill stadium, its home for more than a century, back in 2013, going into exile in Harrow after clashing with the council over the future of the ground and failing to find a local alternative.
The decade away from their home borough hasn’t been positive, off the field at least. Attendances went down, with not enough fans travelling across the boundary. Coupled with lower season ticket sales and sponsorship, that was adding up to losses of a million pounds a year, threatening the club’s survival, even as on the pitch it regularly challenged for promotion and last season made a triumph return to the Football League.
A return to the borough too was always the club’s and its fans’ ambition, and plans for a new £14 million, 7,000-seat stadium on council-owned playing fields to the south of the old site – now filled by a secondary school – were submitted at the turn of the year. The scheme would ensure the club’s future and benefit a community in which Barnet FC has played a central role for generations, the club said.
Barnet had become renowned for defending of its extensive Green Belt. Long-standing Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers, whose constituency included the Underhill site, was a front-line warrior in the battle against suburban development, dubbed by some the “patron saint of Nimbyism”. But her defeat in last year’s general election was widely seen as a sign that, even in the leafy suburbs, the tide was turning in favour of “builders, not the blockers”.
As a consultation on the club’s scheme began, that looked like the case. The Barnet Residents Association concluded that the scheme would be of “considerable value” to the community. There was “nothing intrinsically attractive” about the site, and there would be still be “sufficient green” for dog-walking and “other recreational purposes”, they said. Even the influential Barnet Society, defender of the Green Belt since 1945, added its qualified support.
After vigorous campaigning by the Bring Barnet Back and Save Barnet Playing Fields groupings, the final public consultation score was 1,274 comments supporting the club and 1,162 against. Local councillors Tim Roberts and Zahra Beg highlighted the divisions, with one addressing the committee in favour of the scheme and the other speaking against it. “The community is divided on this proposal”, Beg conceded.
In one of her final election salvos, Villiers had warned there were “only five days left to save the Green Belt”. At the time that seemed apocalyptic, and in the end this week’s decision wasn’t close – six votes to refuse and three abstentions. Disappointed fans suggested online that not much had changed despite Villiers’s defeat and Labour taking control of the council in 2022, while LBC presenter Ben Kentish used his considerable platform to call the councillors “self-important Nimbys vetoing everything this country needs”.
Kentish, who grew up near the site, condemned the decision as a “self-indulgent” rejection of “almost £3 million of investment, dozens of new jobs, a new health centre and a community sports facility”, as well as leaving the club in a precarious state, all in the name of preserving “low-quality” land.
Planning decisions must be taken in line with national, regional and local policy though, and Green Belt status affords a high level of protection. Development can be justified only in “very special circumstances” where the benefits of a scheme are judged to clearly outweigh its harm to the Green Belt, as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework. The club argued that case, but in their 120-page report, the council’s planners disagreed.
The development, they said, would be a “significant urbanising intrusion” causing “substantial and irreversible harm to the openness of the Green Belt”. Proposed new landscaping would not mitigate that harm, and the scheme’s other benefits, including new jobs, local economic uplift and community engagement, while recognised, did not outweigh its harm to the Green Belt either, in the officers’ judgement.
Being a Green Belt site, the scheme also had to be considered by City Hall. Its planners agreed with the council that the scheme would be “inappropriate development by virtue of harm to the openness of the green belt”, and that those “very special circumstances” required to shift that conclusion had not been demonstrated.
What about the new “grey belt” rules, effectively allowing building on previously-developed Green Belt sites or on those deemed not to be contributing “strongly” to three of the five statutory Green Belt purposes – checking urban sprawl, preventing neighbouring towns merging, and preserving the “setting and special character of historic towns”? The site fell short on that test, the club argued. But the council’s planners and the committee disagreed, meaning the “very special circumstances” test still applied.
This week’s vote isn’t the end of the matter. The club is “currently reviewing” the decision, its spokesperson said. An immediate option is an appeal to a planning inspector, where the Grey Belt issues as well as the appropriate weight to be given to the scheme’s harms and benefits would be considered afresh.
The decision this week by City Hall that Spurs could go ahead with plans for its elite women’s academy on former golf course Green Belt land in Enfield, close to its existing men’s facility, will be of interest. Its conclusion that the need for the centre and the lack of other suitable sites in the area in that case did amount to very special circumstances showed a different approach to the balancing act at the heart of all planning decisions.
Meanwhile, with all councillors supporting the club’s return – though not on this site – there was some confusion at the committee about alternatives. The club had investigated 51 locations without success, the committee heard, with planning officers suggesting it had not looked closely enough at possible previously-developed “brownfield” sites. “Three or four” had been suggested to the club, council leader Barry Rawlings told a recent full council meeting, but no information on that was available to the committee.
Initial disappointment for the club, then. But the decision left grounds for further argument, perhaps particularly around the grey belt policy, which has yet to be tested within London. The debate also provided more evidence of the strength of feeling behind the campaign to “bring Barnet back”, which the council might now be more inclined to support. The club’s stadium game, raising key issues around Green Belt development and attracting attention across the wider football community and beyond, is not over yet.
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Barnet defends the green belt largely through pushing so many developments into Edgware, Burnt Oak and Colindale. As for BFC if they do move from the Hive they’ll have left that bit of public land overdeveloped too.