Letter to Kate Josephs
This morning (20 March 2026) the Sheffield Green Belt Alliance sent the following letter to Kate Josephs, Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council, with copies to all 84 councillors and Clive Betts MP.
The letter is sent the day after Sean Bean's front-page criticism of the Council in The Sheffield Star, calling out the hypocrisy of apologising for the Street Trees scandal while pressing ahead with Green Belt release. The letter makes the same case using the Council's own words.
Subscribers to the mailing list may also have seen our earlier email on Sean Bean’s comments in the Daily Mail: "Sean Bean calls out council hypocrisy".
Dear Ms Josephs,
The recently-published Sheffield Pride of Place Prospectus, which you co-signed, promises “up to 36,000 new homes built, every neighbourhood sharing in prosperity, and Sheffield recognised as a national exemplar for place-based, community-led growth”.
We are writing to ask a simple question: which community led, or was meaningfully involved in, the decision to propose 3,900 new homes on Green Belt sites in the Sheffield Local Plan?
The answer is none. No community led this decision, and none was consulted before it was made. As Clive Betts MP told the Local Plan examination, “this plan has been done to people and not with people”. The Leader of the Council has acknowledged that the distribution of Green Belt release is “unfair”, that “given more time the plan may have looked different”, and that the Council “may not have got it right”. That is impossible to reconcile with what the Prospectus promises.
When we have sought engagement, the Council has not provided it. On 13 June 2025, when Clive Betts MP arranged a public meeting attended by over 200 Handsworth residents, Council planning officers declined to attend. When written questions were submitted afterwards, the response was that officers did not have time to deal with them. When we turned to Full Council itself, Councillor Hunt stated that questions of detail about the Local Plan should be dealt with through the inspection process, closing down democratic scrutiny and accountability there too.
The Prospectus promises “every neighbourhood sharing in prosperity”. The message delivered to affected residents has been the opposite: at aLAC meeting at Woodhouse Library on 17 June 2025, Michael Johnson, Head of Planning, was asked how the proposed developments would improve quality of life for residents. His minuted response was that there would be “an impact on communities and sacrifices will be needed” and, later, that he “sympathised with residents”.
This is not a national exemplar of community-led growth. It is the opposite: decisions made without communities, defended by refusing to answer questions, and justified by telling residents that sacrifices are necessary - but that the Council sympathises.
“Community-led” must mean communities having a voice in whether their neighbourhood changes, not merely being informed of the details after the decision has already been made.
We have attended every Full Council meeting since April 2025. We have submitted questions, statements, evidence and formal complaints. We have been told, repeatedly, to take our concerns elsewhere. The Council's language may have changed since the Street Trees dispute and the Lowcock Report. Its conduct has not.
If “community-led growth” means top-down decisions that communities are expected to accept with sympathy and not allowed to question, then the Pride of Place Prospectus is not a vision for our city. It is a warning to every neighbourhood in Sheffield.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Parkin
On behalf of the Sheffield Green Belt Alliance