📰 Sheffield's Green Belt fight has gone national - again.

👉 The Daily Mail has published a piece highlighting the contradiction at the heart of Sheffield City Council: on one hand, unveiling a plaque at the Town Hall honouring the "courageous campaigners" who saved the city's street trees - and on the other, pressing ahead with plans to build on 234 acres of Green Belt.

Sean Bean, who grew up in Handsworth and has been a vocal supporter of the Save S13 Green Belt campaign, has publicly called out the hypocrisy.

The plaque, unveiled earlier this month, recognises the campaigners who fought Sheffield City Council's street tree felling programme between 2012 and 2018. An independent inquiry later found the Council had misled the public and the courts, leading to a series of public apologies. Council Leader Tom Hunt said the plaque would be a "permanent reminder" and that he would "never take the trust of the people of this city for granted”.

At the same event, Chief Executive Kate Josephs said the Lowcock Review had challenged the Council to reflect on "how we work with the communities we are here to serve", and that the Council would "never take that trust for granted”.

But trust is exactly what communities across Sheffield feel is being broken - again. The same Council Leader is presiding over plans to release 234 hectares of Green Belt, 73% of it farmland, for housing and factories without any direct consultation with the communities affected.

In S13 alone, that means 91 hectares of open space lost and over 1,690 homes across two sites. Thousands of residents have objected. The Plan is unchanged.

The plaque itself reads:

Why the parallels matter

As Cllr Craig Gamble Pugh has said: this feels like the street trees all over again - the same patterns are repeating themselves.

The Lowcock Inquiry found that during the street trees dispute, the Council developed a "bunker mentality", was unreceptive to outside views, discouraged internal dissent, and "closed its ears and doubled down on a course of action, seeing scrutiny as an attack".

Look at how the Council has handled the Green Belt plans:

• Communities were shut out from the start. Most residents only found out about the proposals from a newspaper article, days before a key committee vote. There was no meaningful early engagement - and when thousands of people objected, the Council told residents to take their concerns to remote Government Inspectors.

• Misleading public messaging. The Lowcock Inquiry found the Council "repeatedly said things that were economical with the truth, misleading and, in some cases, ultimately exposed as dishonest" - and that it "long persisted in putting out messages that it knew conveyed a false impression". Residents fighting the Green Belt plans will recognise that pattern: the repeated claim that "brownfield has been maximised", the insistence that this affects "just 3.6% of Green Belt" - a figure that obscures the reality that 44% of all the housing is concentrated in S13.

• Scrutiny has been treated as an obstacle, not a process. Over 300 examination documents have been published since the draft Plan we were asked to comment on - many released late, some only hours before hearings. Councillors on the committee that approved the plans said they couldn't read 1,000+ pages in the few days they were given.

• Legal firepower has been deployed against the Council's own residents. When a tenant farming family at Town End Farm - who have farmed Council-owned land for 45 years - objected to their farm being bulldozed for 592 houses, the Council instructed a King's Counsel from one of London's most expensive specialist chambers to write a legal opinion explaining why the farmer's rights don't matter. Public money, used to overpower the people it's supposed to serve.

• The Council has doubled down rather than engage. At the February council meeting, the Cllr Tom Hunt stated that further Local Plan questions would not be answered.

The street trees plaque says these failures "must never happen again." But they are happening again - right now.

Photo: Sheffield's Street Trees — Sorry's Not Good Enough, University of Sheffield Journalism

Read the Daily Mail article

👉 Sean Bean accuses council chiefs of hypocrisy

From our website

If you're new to the campaign or want to understand the issues in more depth, we've been publishing detailed, evidence-based articles:

⚖️ Sheffield Council hires top London King's Counsel to evict its own tenant farmer - The Council owns the land, allocated the site, and when the farmer objected, called in one of the most expensive property barristers in the country. Your money, spent fighting the people it's supposed to serve.

🌾 "We will not plough through farmland" — so why is Sheffield proposing 1,697 homes on S13 farmland? - The Prime Minister told Parliament the Government wouldn't build on farmland. Sheffield's Local Plan proposes exactly that: 73% of the Green Belt being released is farmland.

🏠 Sheffield demolished 10,000 council homes - then said it needed Green Belt for housing - How FOI data reveals the Council's own record undermines its case for Green Belt release.

📊 Sheffield is one of England's least dense cities - so why build on Green Belt? - Why higher-density brownfield development could meet housing targets without touching the Green Belt.

What you can do right now

⚠️ The Main Modifications consultation is open until 5pm, Monday 14 April 2026. This is the last formal chance to tell the Inspectors that these Green Belt releases are not justified.

📋 Consultation FAQs - what it is, how it works, and what you can comment on

✍️ Sign the Sheffield Green Belt Petition - You don't need to live in S13. A city-wide petition is being submitted to the Inspectors as part of the official consultation response. Every signature counts.

📣 Share this email - Forward it to friends, family and neighbours. The more people who know, the stronger our voice.

Contact

If you want to get in touch please email us at either:

info@saves13greenbelt.org.uk - email the working group.

website@saves13greenbelt.org.uk - suggestions/additions to the website.

In honour of Sapphire McCarthy