PLANNING chiefs in Burnley have hit back at claims that they are allowing too many houses to be built on rural land.

Council officers say their plan to protect green-field sites and regenerate towns is working - despite claims from the Council for the Protection of Rural England that more houses could be built on urban sites.

A CPRE report revealed that there was five times more urban space than planners estimated.

Replying this week to the CPRE report, Burnley's head of planning, Karen McCabe, said predicting how much land would become available was always difficult, and government guidelines meant councils had to make conservative estimates.

But she added: "More than half of all allocated housing sites are urban in-fill or brown-field sites. All except two were within the existing urban boundary. Burnley's local plan contains very strong policies to protect rural areas from housing development.

"Since the plan was adopted, nearly half of all new houses in Burnley have been on brown-field sites."

She said the CPRE was wrong to claim that urban regeneration was suffering because of miscalculation. Most recent large urban sites were "the result of the council's successful efforts to encourage re-use of redundant sites and buildings, such as redevelopment of Trafalgar flats and the conversion of Trinity Church and Guy Mill for housing."

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