Tighten our green belts

I have to say my heart sank when I saw yet another antigreen-belt rant in your publication (“Holding Britain back”, August 19th). You never miss an opportunity to express your distaste for this bête noire of yours. But you’re right. We Britons love our green belts, and so do the many animals, birds and plants that live there. Our green belts help ensure that our tiny island still retains grassy areas and that urban areas do not sprawl everywhere, as they do in Italy or Spain, for example.

The main causes of our housing crisis are not green belts but other issues, which include buying property as an investment rather than a place to live, “buy to let”, demographic changes, holiday homes, historically low interest rates, mass immigration, multiple home ownership and so on.

Rosalind Sudlow

Felsted, Essex

You advocate scrapping England’s green belt to secure high levels of growth around places with economic potential. Yet a brief glance at the map that accompanied your article shows that much, if not most, of England’s green belt is beyond the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It surrounds cities like Liverpool, Newcastle and Stoke-on-Trent, where low house prices often reflect their low economic potential. Here the green belt plays a crucial role in regeneration by focusing redevelopment on recycled land and older communities.

The risk with your laissezfaire perspective is that a policy which might suit part of the south is applied to the whole of England. A better approach would be to allow green-belt reviews on the basis of county level and regional plans. That system was dismantled in England by the reforms of David Cameron’s government, which foolishly gave all planning powers to parochial district councils. Professor Ian Wray Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place University of Liverpool

The overwhelming problem of housing shortages is caused by Britain’s brain-dead approach to density and design. My home town, Ashford in Kent, serves as a perfect example. Single-storey supermarkets and retail already abound, with further land wasted for parking above ground and excessive road space that car-dependent development produces. A new residential development contains 192 dwellings on ten hectares of land. A just-finished development on my street in Berlin, on half a hectare, combines underground parking, a supermarket and four retail units all accessible by lift from the 187 high-quality apartments on the six storeys above.

If towns were to build new streets using this type of design most of the green belt could be left untouched. Such vibrant areas then become attractions themselves, like my street in Berlin.

Justin Silk

Berlin