24 THE SOCIAL NETWORK Patrick Mooney
MOMENTUM GROWS FOR BUILDING ON THE GREEN BELT
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance magazine, says there is a growing possibility we could build on Green Belts.
IN ENGLAND THERE ARE 14 AREAS OF GREEN BELT – WHICH ACCOUNTS FOR AROUND 13% OF THE TOTAL LAND AREA
WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK
I
n this General Election year it is inevitable that the nationwide shortage of housing will be one of the main topics fought over by the political parties, and yet there is a ready-made solution which most politicians shy away from even talking about.
Almost everyone agrees that we are not building enough homes for the population’s needs, with a wide consensus that we should be building at least 300,000 new homes a year. Instead of which, we built around 200,000 homes last year (including conversions) and we have averaged just over 150,000 new homes annually in the past decade. There are many contributory factors for this – a lack of materials and labour, the high cost of fi nance (including mortgages), planning
issues, land banking by developers, and so on, but probably the single biggest problem is the shortage of suitable land for building housing on. This is refl ected in the price of residential land, which normally accounts for around 70% of the cost of new houses. It is accepted that land is a fi nite resource and it needs careful management. The sight of fl ooded homes has shown us the foolishness of building on fl oodplains, particularly when our climate appears to be going through some pretty wild changes, including the increasing regularity of excessive bouts of heavy rainfall. So surely it is time for us to rethink our approach to the Green Belts which surround many of our conurbations, and which are designed to prevent urban sprawl and
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