North Somerset Council is bracing for the possibility of more housing developments and less protection for the green belt under the new Labour government.

Much of the north of the district lies in the Bristol green belt, while much of the south around Weston-super-Mare and the Weston villages is already seeing a huge amount of development. In Backwell, which sits just on the edge of the green belt and is the first stop on the railway outside Bristol, developers want to build hundreds of homes around the village which locals warn is going to “become a small town.”

Next week, North Somerset Council’s executive will vote on putting its proposed new local plan — the document that will set out planning policy and where developments should be built across the next 15 years — out for consultation again, ahead of sending it to the government for approval.

Under the Conservative government, the council had been told needed include 20,000 new homes across the next 15 years, but councillors battled to get the number down to 14,985. The proposed plan would also create a new stretch of green belt next to Backwell to prevent it merging with the nearby town of Nailsea.

But now the United Kingdom has a new Labour government, which has made planning reform one of its central pledges. The party wants to see 1.5m new homes built across the country in the next five years and had pledged to allow some poor quality areas of the green belt — dubbed the “grey belt” — to be built on.

Mark Canniford, North Somerset Council’s cabinet member for cabinet member for spatial planning, placemaking, and economy, said: “In terms of how it will affect us, we don’t know yet. But we have been listening to the chancellor’s speech and its quite clear that the new Labour government are going to reintroduce new mandatory housing targets — and clearly they will not protect the green belt as we would hope.

“However we are awaiting a letter from the Deputy Prime Minister by the end of the month which should set out the details of her speech.”

He was responding to a question from Stuart McQuillian (Long Ashton, Green) at a full meeting of North Somerset Council on Tuesday July 9 around how the government’s new planning rules would impact the proposed local plan. Mr Canniford said: “We do intend to carry on intend to carry on into executive next week and put the [local plan] proposal forward and we will obviously keep a track of and look at any changes that we may need to make and clearly talk to council about that with regard to housing numbers when we are given more information on that.”

The man who is now the new Labour MP for the North Somerset constituency (which covers the northern part of the North Somerset district), Sadik Al-Hassan, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service during the election campaign: “We were the party that created the green belt. We believe in preserving our environment. But we don’t believe in preserving grey belt land which is under the mask of it being biodiverse.”

He insisted: “We are the party who will conserve the green belt. Unlike the Conservatives who have allowed it to be sold off and parcelled.”

He added that the proposed new Epic office campus on fields near Long Ashton was on land which would still be considered green belt and not reclassified as “greasy belt” under Labour’s plans. But he added it was a regulatory decision that would not be up to the local MP.

The proposed new local plan — which is in what is known as the “Reg 19” phase — will come before the council executive’s meeting on Wednesday July 17.