Sylw
1 Ymgynghoriad ar Cynllun Datblygu Lleol Newydd
ID sylw: 6188
Derbyniwyd: 11/03/2026
Respondent ID: 2506
Ymatebydd: Ms Lucie Taylor
Only positive.
SF&G recognise the importance of green wedges and other countryside land, for food production and suggest safeguarding land accordingly, aligned with housing growth. Our communities face challenges like poor health, climate change, and inequality, with a fragile food system vulnerable to shocks. The Welsh Government Community Food Strategy (2025) aims to develop diverse local food networks. Supportive policies are needed for small-scale horticultural farms to enable essential infrastructure, moving away from strict scrutiny and towards recognising genuinely necessary structures for agriculture, ensuring resilient and sustainable local food businesses.
Green wedges are particular opportunities to encourage food production and this should be mentioned under this policy. We can use green wedge land and land that has high agricultural value to more specifically safeguard land for food growing – perhaps commensurate to the level of housing growth in a region, city, town or village.
The levels of housing growth referred to in the RLDP requires land outside settlements - in green wedge and other countryside locations to be protected for food production which will happen alongside the growth.
Our communities are facing many challenges - poor health, climate change, nature loss, disconnection and loneliness, and the cost of living. These intensifying pressures are straining communities and deepening inequality. Our food system is very fragile. The ground-breaking report last year by Tim Lang, Just in Case: narrowing the UK civil food resilience gap, shows how our highly centralised just-in-time food distribution system, on which we are wholly dependent, is not resilient to shocks that we already see happening - cyber-attacks, closed ports, global conflict, extreme climate events. The launch of the Community Food Strategy in 2025, saw a Welsh Government commitment to deliver representative, diverse and active local food networks working to increase the number of collaborative community food projects. Their commitment is long term and whole system. There is now a national realisation that infrastructure change is needed and that joined up thinking and policy support is the core foundation to that. Horticultural food production often happens on small areas of land where farmers benefit from little permitted development rights. they need supportive policy for their often absolutely essential infrastructure that allow food growing initiatives to thrive. We must move away from the old-fashioned approach of stricter scrutiny and regard such structures as ‘genuinely necessary’ for the purposes of agriculture, if reasonable and proportionate information is provided to support their need.