Why don't the social housing sector and housing campaigners support Green Belt reform?

Part of Britain's vital green belt

"During the 1930s most of Britain’s cities doubled their footprint by expanding into the countryside. After 1947 green belts stopped this sprawl, and concentrated the post-war housebuilding effort on existing cities and New Towns. Since then, green belt boundaries have constantly been reviewed and changed. The total area of green belt has doubled since 1997 to cover 13% of England, and a further 20% is protected in other ways such as national parks, while only 11% is classed as developed (half of which is parks and gardens)."

So states the preamble to housing campaign charity, Shelter's briefing on its policy in respect of Green Belts. The charity goes on to stress how useful and important green belts are - it points to how under the current system wicked dastardly developers tend to build "expensive, executive homes that make the highest returns" rather than the affordable homes that we need and how people might want to drive cars. Now, even if I leave aside that the folk buying those executive homes are moving out of a home somewhere else (do people at Shelter not understand the concept of a 'housing chain'), this conclusion fails to realise that the reason developers do this is also a consequence of green belt policies.

It is a source of disappointment that the social housing sector and charities like Shelter focus their efforts and lobbying on demands for huge dollops of taxpayers money to be used to subsidise the building of 'affordable' homes. Largely, of course, because the policies that mean at least 25% of England is barred from new development (and well over 50% in the places where people most want to live).

It gets worse if you head to the National Housing Federation, the representative body for the UK's social housing providers. Not only does their website fail to even mention planning as an area of policy concern but a search on their resources page, blogs and press releases reveals this:



Even a broader search on the subject 'planning' reveals some (not especially good) advice on getting planning permissions and a comment on the planning reform 'green paper' that doesn't mention substantive changes to any aspect of planning, just a preference for tinkering with rules on PDs, affordable housing allocations and the development control process. I may, of course, have missed something here but if the Nat Fed has a policy on planning reform and green belt, it's keeping very quiet about it. And hasn't said anything since October 2019.

Why is it that influential, well-resourced and active groups involved in housing campaigns and housing policy are so blind to the impact of urban containment on housing supply and housing affordability? Reading the Shelter position gives the impression that they prefer continued land supply constraint ("stopping sprawl" they call it) to actually meeting housing need through market mechanisms. And it starts with economically illiterate statements like this:

"...a blanket relaxation of green belt policy would allow far more piecemeal, unsustainable proposals to get planning permission – and would encourage developers and land traders to bid up the price of sites."

Yes folks, the experts at Shelter think that dramatically increasing the supply of land will result in higher land prices. Shelter go on to talk about 'windfall' profits from land and how this leaves no money for 'quality design' or infrastructure. As you've all worked out, the reverse is true - the windfall profits are largely the consequence of having an essentially arbitrary policy of limiting land supply to near (but not quite) zero in the places where housing demand is highest.

Like some centre-right lobby groups, Shelter want to continue having the state determine what land can and cannot be used for housing but to apply a punitive tax (backed up by compulsory purchse powers) to the value so as to pay for lots of supposed community goodies bundled under the heading infrastructure. Bear in mind that the developer isn't going to build without connection to actual infrastructure (gas, electricity, water, sewage, highways, broadband) so what Shelter mean by infrastructure isn't really infrastructure however much it might be socially valued.

Shelter's main argument (at least they have one unlike the wider social housing sector) appears to be a mix of that mealy-mouthed term, sustainability, and the inner urban snark word, 'sprawl'. In a blog post in 2015 Toby Lloyd, Sheter's policy guru, commented on how he sees it:

Fans of total planning deregulation tend to eulogise the 1930s – when we did build a lot of homes around cities. But would anyone really argue that our cities should double their footprint every ten years, as they did then? That only around 10% of England is urbanised is indeed a sign that a bit of greenfield loss would not be the end of the world. But it’s also a sign of the success of Green Belt policy in preventing infinite sprawl.

Again there's a silly polemic in here - 'infinite sprawl' - that reveals a lack of thought on the subject. Increasing England's urban area from 10% to 15% (including gardens, parks, playgrounds and assorted other open and public spaces) would not represent anything like infinity. Worse though, Lloyd and Shelter suffer an error of geometry - to double the land area doesn't double the radius. So extending London by 5 miles at its outer edge would provide for, even at the population densities in Bromley, around 4 million more people, and that's adding in an assumption there's a hidden homelessness right now of about 500,000.

And this also supposes that demand will be entirely met at the urban fringe with none of it on repurposing listed warehouses and old churches or by building swanky riverside apartments in the centre of town. It seems clear that the sort of value judgements made by defenders of urban containment (sprawl is bad, a 'free-for-all' favours developers, look at all those cars) are more important than the simpler truth that these policies make it too expensive for many to afford a home, let alone the manner in which the policy almost creates a new feudalism by debarring the urban workforce from property ownership.

I doubt anything will change, the housing sector is too wedded to demanding grant funding, but we need that change if we are to have a better housing policy and the chance of meeting the needs of millions in Britain - not just those wanting affordable rented accommodation but the millions who want the same societal deal their parents got - get educated, get a good job, work hard and, in return, get a real stake in the nation, a house they own. That the social housing sector takes such a narrow view - give us more cash, let's have more government - is at best a disappointment and at worst a missed opportunity to make the case that restrictive land supply policies like green belts are anti-poor and anti-equality ideas that should be scrapped.



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