4 INDUSTRY NEWS
FROM THE EDITOR
James Parker
To paraphrase the funk and soul legend Edwin Starr, while robbing his lyric of a huge amount of its power, ‘The Green Belt, what is it good for?’
Well, many including of course the former Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (now just the more sober-sounding CPRE, in a rebrand that you assume was to suggest they aren’t the sorts to lie down in front of bulldozers), think it’s fundamental to our survival. England’s green spaces might be the greatest asset we have as a country, but the real issue is that a lot of the Belt isn’t actually Green.
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The General Election which will probably be held this year will see battles (possibly even literally) over this issue like never before. In a continued cost of living crisis, clinging to blanket Green Belt protection for what is really just an unremarkable bit of a town’s outskirts as the reason not to build affordable homes seems almost criminal.
But I’d argue that many voters across the country put this polarising issue above many others, even including our fraught and increasingly terrifying international politics. That’s why both Rishi and Keir will be claiming they’ll be building millions more homes, without mentioning exactly how that needs to be done.
Different zonal approaches have been pursued as a way for building on brownfi elds, with some success. But the Green Belt has essentially never been touched – it now surrounds 14 of our major settlements, and represents 13% of the total available land. It’s ridiculous; just slightly over that amount of the Belt itself constitutes trees and green space.
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You might think the way out of this is a sliding scale/set of ‘shades’ of green, laying out exactly where will never be touched, and where there can be development, and what kind. Not just ‘rural exception sites,’ but an across-the-board set of parameters and permissions that loosen the belt fundamentally.
Will the Tories (or more likely Labour), be able to summon the courage to clearly lay out such dispassionate, but necessary, thinking before the voters this year? Highly unlikely.
In his regular comment piece in this issue, Patrick Mooney rightly pinpoints a potential new Government recipe for this dangerously hot political potato, signalling just how acute the problem is for preventing development and the associated commercial benefi ts.
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As atrick says, the new chair of the Offi ce for lace within the Department for Levelling Up, Communities and Housing, Nicholas Boys Smith, seems to be taking a much more agnostic approach to the Green Belt. He has been quoted as saying that land within the Belt which is of “low or no agricultural or amenity quality” shouldn’t necessarily be protected.
Political suicide, or pragmatic sense? Time will tell. James Parker
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