Sir Keir Starmer must give England’s green belt a complete overhaul if he has any hope of solving the housing crisis, a leading expert has told Money.
Professor Paul Cheshire, an adviser to multiple British and foreign governments, says the land designation has choked city growth, exploded house prices and created social division.
While ministers are adopting some welcome reforms – including some of Cheshire’s ideas – they are suffering a “delusion” by thinking an “ad hoc nibble” on pockets of green belt land is enough, he says.
“I just don’t see what the point of the green belt is,” Cheshire, who was decorated for services to economics and housing, tells Money.
“The name itself is a piece of wonderful rhetoric because the green belt isn’t green.”
Muddy fields in Enfield, a car wash in Tottenham and a disused golf course in Kent are examples, he says.
“All it is is a prohibition on building – and they cover vast areas of England around our big cities.
“It needs a strategic rethink to ensure it serves societal needs.”
Who created the greenbelt?
The green belt was designated in 1955 under Anthony Eden, the Conservative prime minister, encircling major cities such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Bristol, Sheffield and Liverpool.
It spans 1.6 million hectares, the equivalent of 2.2 million football pitches.
The green belt was not – as is commonly believed – specifically an environmental designation, but was instead intended “to prevent urban sprawl” encroaching on the countryside or merging towns and to encourage urban redevelopment.
It blocks most housebuilding, but does not guarantee environmental quality in the same way as national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONBs).
Cheshire says there was a political motive for the policy. “The Conservatives were worried about Labour voters spilling out into the Home Counties and endangering safe Tory seats,” he says.
“In that sense, it was gerrymandering and it was discriminatory zoning. But, of course, you don’t call it that.”
The southeastern Shires were experiencing the fastest rate of housebuilding in England before 1955, falling to the lowest by the mid-1960s, according to the Centre for Cities.
Popular cities could no longer expand to meet demand, sending prices soaring, Cheshire says, warning: “House prices will continue to increase relative to incomes in the long term, unless we supply more land.”
Not in my back yard
To this end, Starmer’s government appears to be the first in decades to try to release the green belt.
Housing Secretary Steve Reed tells Money: “We have to get Britain building to end the housing crisis, but this will not be at the expense of genuine green belt land.”
Brownfield sites – those developed for industrial or commercial purposes that need further development before reuse – are not enough for the 1.5 million homes the UK needs, he says, “so councils have been told to release poor-quality grey belt if they cannot meet their housing targets otherwise”.
Grey belt is a new designation applied by the government to green belt land it deems to be of lower quality, removing some restrictions on development.
“This comes alongside our plans for a fresh generation of new towns that will create thriving communities and restore the dream of homeownership to families across the country,” adds Reed.
New towns are developments of at least 10,000 homes. One of three locations Reed’s department has set its sights on is green belt land in Enfield, north London, with space for 21,000 homes.
Alongside grey belt and new towns, the government recently unveiled plans to grant default approval for homes built anywhere within 15 minutes of popular railways and to empower ministers to overrule obstructive councils.
But Cheshire, who first proposed the plan in 2014, says all these proposals leave out a crucial part of his – wresting power from local councils.
Local resistance
“There is a disconnect between national policy and local implementation,” says Ufuk Bahar, managing director of Urbanist Architecture (UA), a London-based firm specialising in complex planning applications.
“We are still seeing planning officers routinely recommending refusal at the application stage.
“Local authorities are, in my personal view, afraid of approving development because of local opposition.”
The grey belt status is too vague to stop them, says Bahar, who has specialised in green belt applications for a decade.
Housing officers challenged his application to build nine homes on grey belt land in Essex last year on the grounds of maintaining the area’s openness – a protection that only applies to green belt land.
Another developer, Quinn Estates, has been trying to build 800 homes on a derelict golf course on green belt land next to Knockholt Station in Kent for six years, but has been refused permission twice.
“Most of those local authorities that you really need to build houses in will intentionally drag their heels as much as possible,” says Cheshire.
They are beholden to electorates who moved to existing green belt towns and villages over the past 70 years specifically to live in areas where new houses can’t be built close by, he says.
Ever-increasing house prices have only encouraged them to resist development because houses have become homeowners’ biggest assets and could be devalued should more be made available.
“The housing crisis – which we’ve created by policy… it’s not something that naturally occurs – is really creating serious social divisions and conflict of interest between the priced-out and the homeowners,” Cheshire says.
With 335,800 planning applications in the year to March, asking ministers to intervene is an impractical solution: “There is a ministerial delusion,” he says.
“They haven’t grasped how incredibly decentralised our system is. Ministers can’t just wave a magic wand and intervene in even 100 of those applications.”
‘Disastrous’
Yet green belt campaigners are fighting Labour’s approach precisely because they fear how effective it will be in releasing protected land.
They’ve branded the plans a dangerous threat to the environment, food production, flood defences and public health.
“The grey belt situation is really becoming quite serious,” says Richard Knox-Johnston, chair of the London Green Belt Council.
“It is almost impossible to protect any green belt whatsoever.”
Alice Roberts, of the Countryside Charity (CPRE), says ripping up the green belt won’t bring down house prices anyway, calling Cheshire’s analysis “extremely selective”.
“The green belt has literally nothing to do with solving the housing crisis. The housing crisis is not about the number of houses, it’s about the cost of housing.”
Margaret Thatcher’s council house fire-sale is to blame, as well as mortgage deregulation, which allowed people to buy homes they previously weren’t able to afford, she says.
A shift towards rented accommodation by developers has also contributed, she says – a problem compounded by a lack of rent controls.
Knox-Johnston says: “The problem with Paul Cheshire and also with the Treasury is they don’t believe the countryside has any value until you pour concrete on it.”
Building enough houses needs hardly any land compared to the size of green belts, responded Cheshire.
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A subsidy for golfers and horse riders?
A 900-hectare parcel of land in Roberts and Knox-Johnston’s backyard is fast becoming the battleground for these warring ideas about the future of British housing.
After reviewing 12 locations recommended by an independent advisory panel, the government named green belt land between Chase Park and Crews Hill in Enfield as one of three “particularly promising” sites, where 21,000 homes could be built.
But Roberts, who is head of campaigns at the CPRE’s London branch, says the government should be looking to brownfield (that is, previously developed) land first.
Local campaigners have compiled a list of such sites they say have capacity for almost 14,500 homes.
Across England, there is enough brownfield to build 1.4 million more, according to CPRE research.
Affordable homes are more likely in these locations, compared to large country houses erected by profit-hungry developers in green spaces, says Knox-Johnston.
“I can’t see why building on green belt serves any purpose other than it creates a site where there is money in it for land speculators,” adds Roberts.
The government’s New Towns Taskforce says half the homes on the Enfield site could be affordable (generally meaning 20% below market rates) and would make use of “poor quality” green belt there, like garden centres and a golf course.
Golf courses occupy 7% of London’s green belt – an area more than twice the size of Kensington and Chelsea.
But Tom Oliver, professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading, disagrees with the taskforce’s assessment, calling the Enfield site a “rich” landscape with a “high density of hedgerows and woodlands”.
“There are many places in the green belt that are much worse in terms of essentially being biodiversity deserts,” he says.
Indeed, the wildlife value of green belt land varies wildly.
“The stark truth is that many landscapes are quite sparse in biodiversity, especially where they’re intensively farmed,” says Oliver.
“But it’s important not to have a blinkered view and just focus on one aspect, such as biodiversity, when actually green belts provide a whole range of different benefits.”
Flood protection, air quality, beauty, food production and recreation are among them, he says.
But to Cheshire, the green belt’s recreational benefits actually symbolise its absurdity.
The belt’s rules permit certain middle-class recreational developments like golf and horse riding, effectively subsidising them by oversupplying available land.
At the same time, they restrict land available for housing where demand is greatest, artificially inflating the price of urban homes.
“Undoubtedly, the winners are those people who live in the green belt itself, because they’re the only ones who get any benefit from not having houses around them.
“The losers are poor people in Hackney and Islington and Lambeth, whose housing is much more expensive, and who also have increasingly crammed towns.”
