Labour's new housing plan is nothing short of an all-out attack on the Green Belt

12 December 2024, 18:42

The major UK nature organisations agreed this week that the Green Belt, an area of protected land around fourteen of our biggest towns and cities, could now be more important than ever.

It’s one of our most successful protections for land but will now be undermined by the introduction of the government’s ill-defined ‘grey belt’ policy.

At a time when the government need to address the climate emergency the opportunity to reimagine the Green Belt for the 21st century has been ignored.

Rather than think about what it blocks, we should be thinking about how the Green Belt could deliver for food security, important wildlife habitats, as well as mitigation against flooding and other climate change impacts.

Green Belt land remains the countryside next door for around 30 million people living in our largest towns and cities.

During the pandemic, it became more important than ever to many urban dwellers as their primary connection with nature and the countryside.

But with the new National Planning Policy Framework, published today, the government has launched nothing short of an all-out attack on the Green Belt, sacrificing what some have calculated to be an area bigger than Surrey.

The government is right to take decisive action on the housing crisis. But the green belt is not to blame.

The UK’s housebuilding industry is dominated by a small number of big players that maximise profit by trickling out identikit, car-dependent and unaffordable homes on green field land.

It’s this model that’s responsible for the painfully slow delivery of much-needed new homes, not the environmentalists who want development to be sustainable and benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, the government appears to be supercharging the status quo rather than delivering the change required. We recognise the desperate challenge of the housing crisis for families stuck in temporary accommodation and desperate for a home.

But the crisis will not be solved by more detached homes in the Green Belt, in Wren Close where wrens no longer sing. The shortage is of genuinely affordable and social rent homes – homes that the market has never delivered without support and incentives to do so.

We’ve argued that better targets to solve the housing crisis should be targets in these areas – as well as targets for brownfield homes.

These have worked in the past to make the most of previously developed land. The challenge with seeing housing almost entirely through the lens of growth, is that the lens of place is forgotten.

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