Protect our green spaces, not our green belt
A lot of safeguarded land near cities is neither beautiful nor accessible and could be used for housing
Driving from Hampshire to Edinburgh this week I was struck, yet again, by how exquisite our island is. Our fields are not, as in most of Europe, rectangular strips divided by wire fences. They curve and undulate with the contours of the land, their borders marked by old hedgerows or drystone walls.
In Britain, unusually, we don’t place agriculture and natural beauty in two separate mental categories. When we think of our loveliest landscapes, we rarely think of wilderness. An American might think of the Rockies, a German of the Black Forest, but we tend to conjure in our minds fields and copses softly sculpted by cultivation.
To see how lucky we are, look at, say, the Netherlands, where the population density is similar to southern England’s, but there is remarkably little of what we would consider unspoilt countryside.
How do we ensure that our green spaces aren’t smothered under concrete? The short answer is that we need to think again about where to build houses. In particular, we need to ask why we have made it almost impossible to build on land that is neither beautiful nor accessible to the public, but which happens to be near towns.
No one seriously denies that we need more space for people to live in. The rate at which we create new housing stock has been falling, as a percentage of our population, since the Sixties. We build fewer new housing units, in proportionate terms, than any country in Europe. Result? Our homes are more cramped and more expensive than pretty much anyone else’s.
As well as damaging our quality of life, planning restrictions damage our national productivity. High rents for businesses drive up the price of the things they sell. High rents for employees push up their salaries but not their disposable income – never a good combination for an economy that wants to stay competitive.
It has become commonplace to point out that high prices are bad news for young people, who will never be able to buy a home. True. But other negative consequences, though less visible, are arguably even more severe. We rarely stop to consider how excessive housing costs contribute to our low savings ratio, or to the unusually long hours we work. The British pay nearly half as much again in rent as the French, Germans, Belgians or Dutch. That’s a lot of overtime.
When downsides are indirect, politicians can be blasé about them. Consider, for example, airport expansion. It’s easy to persuade people to oppose a new runway because the costs, in terms of greater noise and disruption, are obvious and immediate. The costs of not building a runway, by contrast, are often oblique. Think back to the last time you had a delayed flight. Whom did you blame? The airline, I suspect, and possibly also the airport. But I’ll bet you didn’t blame the protesters who had earlier prevented the airport expanding its capacity. That asymmetry in public attitudes is why runways don’t get built.
The same is true of house building. We all like the idea of spacious countryside and we fear that new houses might clutter it (though, even in my relatively crowded South East England constituency, around 85 per cent of land is wholly undeveloped). We are far less likely to notice the costs involved in not building – costs that fall hardest on the working poor. Why, Labour activists like to ask, do people use food banks in a country as wealthy as ours? Well, comrades, it’s not because food has become more expensive: as a proportion of household income, its cost has halved over the past 50 years. Over the same period, though, house prices have risen by an extraordinary four-and-a-half times over and above inflation – a rise unmatched in the developed world.
Politicians diagnosed the disease some time ago, but shied away from prescribing an effective cure. The help-to-buy scheme simply shifts the problem, giving some people an advantage, and thereby reducing availability for everyone else. Labour wants rent controls, which would restrict supply even further – more of the medicine that sickened the patient.
The present Government recognises that we need to build more houses. But the problem will remain until we can build some of them on land that was arbitrarily designated as green belt.
The Institute of Economic Affairs, which is offering a £50,000 prize for the best solution to our housing shortage, has been photographing parts of the London green belt: rubbish dumps, car washes, petrol stations and the like. Of the green belt land that is agricultural, much is intensively farmed and ugly.
To be fair, the green belt was never supposed to be pretty. It was supposed, rather, to provide cities with neighbouring space. But that space is hardly an amenity: a Londoner wanting to spend a day in the countryside might go to, say, the Kentish Downs, but is unlikely to want to visit the scrubland around Ealing. And protecting that scrubland means far more intensive building in London – in other words, smaller gardens and fewer parks and playing fields.
How about this. Let’s set aside a defined proportion of green-belt land for green residential development – that is, development where at least half the land is either gardens or parks. Let’s rewild some of the rest. And, at the same time, let’s expand our Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Deal?