If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'

Some of that vital, precious 'green belt'

Last night was shockingly cold and damp in Leeds yet, as usual, the streets of the city centre were dotted with the homeless. Most seemed almost too busy not freezing to death to hold out that familiar battered coffee cup in the hope of a little change. There were, to be fair, rather fewer aggressive drunks than normal but, for all the buzz of a city in the last few days before Christmas, it is sobering that we still have so many people camped out on the street without a home or even the hope of a home.

There are good people, far better and kinder than me, who help these homeless people - providing them with hot food, running hostels and pointing them towards places that can help with problems other than simply not having a home. But this work is just a sicking plaster over a seeping gash in our civilised society. In a world were we say we care too many argue for and support policies that would, for all their apparent goodness, just act to make things worse. We see calls for rent controls without seeing that big US cities with those controls - San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles - are homelessness crises far worse than the ones we have in Britain. And we see people pointing to a host of other problems, from addiction and mental health to the jobs market or bad landlords - almost never housing supply let alone the planning system.

But in the end the main reason for homelessness - whether its an ex-serviceman with PTSD bunking down in a Leeds shop doorway or a family crammed into a damp and mouldy B&B - is the simple fact of not having a home. Yes it's true that sometimes the actions of the homeless have contributed to their circumstances - financial crisis, debt, drugs and booze, violence - but it's also true that, in the end, the way to stop people being homeless is to get them a home. So the fact that there aren't enough homes doesn't just matter because Zeke and Jocasta can't afford to buy a house, it matters because if we don't get more homes we aren't going to stand a chance of finding a home for those sad men and women on our streets, for the family huddled in a bedsit or the young couple in South London cooped up in Mum's back bedroom because there's nowhere they can find to rent.

Lots of words have been poured our describing how we might resolve the problem - not everywhere but certainly in London, Bristol, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester - of there simply not being enough housing supply to meet the demand for housing. And remember that this isn't about shortages in one or other tenure (not enough social housing, too few hostel places, no affordable homes to buy) but about the whole supply, all the homes. Turning some of those homes from one tenure to another or taking up scarce housing land for new council housing simply doesn't solve the problem it just shifts it to another part of the market.

Everyone with their brain switched who looks seriously at the problem comes to the same conclusion. The problem lies with our planning system. Sometimes this results in things that increase supply but at a horrible cost in civilized living while in other places we get a new generation of soul-destroying, anti-family high-rise living. We see people saying we can meet the need without changing how we draw up plans - essentially by getting the houses built somewhere else. Usually this refers to a mystical thing called "brownfield land" - acres of previously developed land across our cities on which giant skyscrapers can be built into which all the poor peons and saps of city living can be crammed. All this so a fortunate few can look across a dull piece of agricultural monoculture devoid of most of its historic wildlife and utterly lacking in any amenity value beyond being there and being a field.

"Save the Green Belt" proclaim the leaflets of candidates from every political party. "Brownfield first" scream politicians from left and right. Even the housing "sector", dominated by local council officers and folk from social housing businesses, doesn't mention planning reform - just give us billions of other people's money, say Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation, and we'll solve the housing crisis. But they won't because all they'll do is take housing land that's already allocated out of the market and build homes for social rent. Without more land all we do is move the problem about. For sure we might fix the problem for the poorest and most vulnerable (a good thing) but at the cost of making it even less likely that young people with good education and good jobs can do what their parents did and buy a house.

I don't hold out much hope that government will come to its senses and reform the planning system but let me give them a way to do it. We'll start by accepting that all those MPs and councillors elected on the back of "saving the green belt" aren't going to roll over and agree to scrapping our disastrous policy of urban containment. So let's reform it. And the simplest way to do this is to change what 'green belt' means - not the five purposes (three of which are essentially the same thing) but the manner in which we treat applications on that green belt. Right now a 'green belt' designation comes with a presumption against development (or a presumption that the 'openness of the green belt' will be preserved) - if we removed that presumption and treated 'green belt' as a significant material consideration instead then it would be possible to prevent unnecessary sprawl, avoid the merging of communities, protect important environments and encourage the reuse of redundant developed land but not at the cost of constraining land supply to the point where it creates a housing crisis.

If you want - and I do - to live in a society that values everyone and where we can house the homeless so as to support them into a better life, then you can't be a NIMBY, you can't go to the barricades to prevent Barratts or Wimpy building a few hundred houses on the fields over the back. If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'.

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