Government Responds To Petition On Threat To Airfields
A result! Well at least, a reply, from No.10 Downing Street in response to the petition receiving over 11,000 signatures so far!
The petition and the full response is at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Airfields/?ref=airfields
Actually if you look at the wording below, there isn’t any attempt to reverse the mistake which fell into the revised planning guidelines. What they now seem to be saying is that the original policy statement didn’t mean what it said anyway. Sir Humphrey Appleby would be a proud man!!
Any thoughts on where we go from here??? 
There has been a common misunderstanding about the status of airfields in Planning Policy Guidance 3 (PPG3). Airfields were not exempted from the definition of previously developed land. Previously developed land includes the permanent structures and the curtilage of a site. Planning Policy Statement 3 (PPS3) reaffirms this position.
However, PPG3 stated that where the proportion of open land on previously developed sites (the curtilage) was large, then it would not normally be appropriate to develop these sites to the boundary. It used airfields as an example, but this was never an exemption.
PPS3 continues this approach. It states that there is no presumption that previously-developed land is necessarily suitable for housing development. Nor is there any presumption that the whole of the curtilage should be developed.
This applies to airfields as to all other land uses. It is up to local authorities to decide these issues on a case by case basis.
The extent to which a site is defined as being previously developed land will depend on the particular circumstances of the site. For example, in the case of a large site with few structures, some parts of the site might be classed as previously developed, and others as greenfield.