‘Ministers are announcing open season on Green Belt’

WEALTHY home owners should brace themselves for “open season” on greenfield land after ministers announced a plan to force housing schemes on the most sought-after parts of the country. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said that plans to create a single way to calculate housing need will require a big increase in more homes to be built in the Home Counties.

Councils are likely to be forced to accept more homes by bureaucrats if they refuse to agree to the increased targets.

Regulations say that if councils fail to meet their housing target they will be expected to find 20 per cent more sites for development. The plans were unveiled by Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, who said a consultation will be launched in three weeks.

However, Paul Miner, from the CPRE, warned that the reforms would “require uplifts of around 25 per cent in house building figures in places like Cambridge, West Dorset and a number of districts in the Home Counties including Windsor and Maidenhead”. He said: “Sajid Javid is in danger of making problems worse by encouraging developers and speculators to buy up all remotely developable land in Green Belts, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and much of the wider countryside, as both need and demand are so high in these areas. This would thereby crowd out local councils, housing associations and self-builders who want to build to meet local need.” He added we “need to plan homes so that they cause minimal or no damage to our precious countryside.

“Simply allowing open season on our countryside, without wider reforms to how we build housing, would be the worst of all worlds.”