The Yorkshire Dales at Risk: Local Plan Pressure + Hope Moor Wind Farm = Irreversible Damage

1. A Local Plan Consultation Designed to Be Impossible

The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority has issued:hundreds of documents,covering twenty years of growth,with only a couple of weeks before the December hearings.This is not consultation. It is an overload that makes proper assessment impossible, especially for rural communities without the resources or specialist planning knowledge to respond quickly.It creates the perfect conditions for large, landscape-changing developments to pass through with minimal challenge.

2. Major Housing Expansion. Especially in Grassington

One of the most alarming elements in the Local Plan is the size of the Grassington development.Grassington is already one of the most pressured and sensitive villages in the Dales, yet the Plan proposes:

Large-scale new housing,significant expansion into surrounding fields,and added pressure on infrastructure, transport, and visual landscape.But Grassington is not alone.Other Dales villages. Bainbridge, Sedbergh, Kettlewell, Reeth, Hawes and more,are all lined up for further growth and densification.This is a step-change. It normalises development on the edges of protected landscapes.And once that boundary is breached for housing……it becomes far easier to breach it for energy infrastructure too.

3. The Local Plan’s Push for “Green Infrastructure”The Local Plan is explicit:

It supports infrastructure required for national climate goals and Net Zero. including large-scale energy and grid schemes outside the Park boundary.This strategic policy language:opens the door to wind, grid lines, substations, and HV cable corridors;

weakens the traditional argument that the Dales’ setting must be protected;

invites developers to use national climate objectives to override local landscape concerns.The result is a new planning environment where major energy projects can claim:“We support the Local Plan’s sustainability priorities.”This is exactly the gap that Hope Moor Wind Farm is preparing to drive through.

4. Hope Moor Wind Farm:

A Direct Threat to the National Park

The Hope Moor scheme near Richmond now classified as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project .Is enormous:100 MW capacity

Approximately 20 turbines

Up to 200 m tall, On over 1,100 hectares of open moorland

Despite being just outside the National Park boundary, the site sits directly in the viewshed of the Yorkshire Dales.The turbines will dominate:the Park’s southern horizon,the western approaches,tourism landscapes,and skylines seen from many classic Dales viewpoints.This is where the Local Plan becomes a problem.

The Local Plan’s acceptance of:housing growth,infrastructure expansion,and climate-aligned development around the Park’s perimeter,creates the policy justification the wind farm needs.

Developers will simply say: “The Yorkshire Dales Local Plan recognises the need for major growth and green energy infrastructure outside the Park. Hope Moor delivers exactly that.”

5. The Myth of “Green Turbines” and the Real Damage They Cause

The Local Plan repeatedly uses the term green or sustainable, but large industrial wind developments are anything but green when assessed honestly.

Hope Moor will require:✔ 10–20 km of new access roads carved across open moorland, permanently scarring peat soils and bird habitat.

✔ Heavy haulage of turbine componentsincluding blades up to 90m and towers transported on long, slow convoys.

✔ Major substation and grid connection works, includinghigh-voltage cabling,new compounds,pylons or underground cable routes,and transformer infrastructure.

✔ Destruction and excavation of peatlandreleasing stored carbon and causing long-term hydrology damage.

✔ Landscape industrialisationon one of the last remaining open upland horizons in northern England.None of this is reversible.None of this is “green”.All of it is enabled by the Local Plan’s push for growth and climate infrastructure.

6. The Combined Threat: Expansion + Infrastructure = A Changing Dales

The Yorkshire Dales is facing two parallel pressures:

(1) Village expansion inside the Local Plan turning rural settlements into growth zones.

(2) Energy megaprojects like Hope Moor using that growth as justification for grid and turbine industrialisation around the Park’s edges.Together, they will:

transform the landscape around the Dales,industrialise moorland and farmland,increase traffic, noise, and visual intrusion,encourage more developers to push similar schemes,permanently alter the character of the National Park’s setting.

This is the point: the Local Plan and Hope Moor are not separate issues.They are two faces of the same shift in planning philosophy:Turn the rural perimeter of the Yorkshire Dales into a development and energy corridor, with the Park itself preserved only in name.