We can't make housing affordable without reforming the green belt. Stop pretending otherwise.

In 1963 my Dad bought a house for a couple of thousand pounds and we moved out of our first floor flat. The house was – still is – a 1930s semi-detached house in the suburbia between Croydon and Beckenham. In 1975 the house was sold for about £15,000 and we moved into a bigger, six-bedroomed house on the edge of Penge which, if I recall, cost about £17,000. None of this was, in any respect, out of the ordinary – millions of people like my Dad with ordinary clerical jobs in city businesses afforded semi-detached homes in London’s suburbs.

Today the little house in Shirley will sell for about £400,000 and the big house probably for north of £1million. Senior insurance clerks in the City (or their 21st century equivalent) have no chance of buying these homes short of winning the lottery or inheriting lots of money. Even on the sort of average salaries in London and two folks earning them the chances are that borrowing enough to buy that semi in Croydon means at least five times thoses earnings and more likely seven times. It ain’t gonna happen.

Meanwhile those people who, in my Dad’s generation could buy on one salary, are renting. Not renting family homes but renting flats and apartments. And the rent is still too damned high – often over half of post-tax income goes to the landlord – and these now not-so-young people make it work by having a lodger, sharing their tiny space with another ambitious young graduate captivated by London’s bright lights and opportunities.

What went wrong? Is this one of those quirks of financial liberalisation? Or the consequence of immigration? The remarkable success of post-1980s London? Maybe the whole thing is a developers’ ramp designed to rack up the profits of those developers at the expense of us hapless buyers and renters? Or it the landlords, have they made it all more expensive by buying up houses that otherwise would have been owner-occupied? It was Thatcher with right-to-buy that did it surely?

Hardly a day passes without another lobbying piece suggesting that the one thing we can’t blame for our housing crises is the town and country planning system. We hear how that system smoothly delivers thousands of planning permissions while maintaining the ‘green belt’. And that it’s the developers who aren’t building these houses that cause the problem. Fans of the planning system then tell us that we don’t need to change anything – just get the government to cough up fifteen or twenty billion, give it to councils and they’ll build the homes we need on that “brownfield” land. All the poor people who are paying rents to nasty private landlords can, instead, pay rents to nice council landlords. None of them will be able to do what my Dad did in 1963.

Today’s “it’s not the planning system” take comes from the CPRE, a “charity” that spends its income on protecting the financial interests of semi-urban Britain. The CPRE funds planners and consultants to make the case for urban containment at pretty much every local plan examination and publishes “research” that claims all the homes we need can be built on “brownfield” sites with not a single blade of precious grass lost to the proverbial concrete of housing development.

"It’s clear the Government has gravely misdiagnosed the problem – slow build out rates and market led housing are blocking the quality affordable housing that rural communities are crying out for."

So says the CPRE’s boss as he blames the developers for the lack of homes. This is completely wrong but the most shocking thing isn’t that Crispin Trueman is selling such a false argument but that so many people just refuse to consider the realities of housing in and around London. MPs for suburban London constituencies (and some not so suburban) regardless of party line up to tell us that there’s plenty of ‘brownfield’ land somewhere other than Barnet or Kingston or Croydon or Barking. We can build the homes in somebody else’s back yard, behind somebody else’s home, blocking somebody else’s lovely view. We need more houses but somewhere else.

The reason London has a crisis of housing affordability is not because of developers, not because ‘brownfield’ land hasn’t been recycled, not because of insufficient density, not because of too cheap mortgages, not because of immigration, not because of the success of London. The reason London – and now Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Manchester – have unaffordable housing is because of urban containment, because of that ‘green belt’. For sure we need funding for more affordable homes, we need some rent reforms and more protections for private tenants. And yes, prices are affected by the availability of cheaper finance and the fact than nearly all buyers work off two incomes. But the main reason for expensive houses is expensive land, and the cause of that expensive land is that the government – that planning system with its green belt – has rationed that land to the point where, for example, 93% of the area of Sevenoaks Borough is protected green belt.

This is the problem and the people defending it – for selfish reasons mostly (‘I like my view’, ‘what about my home’s value’, ‘we don’t want poor people lowering the tone round here’) – are defending young, bright, university-educated people with good jobs being condemned to renting pokey little overpriced, rabbit hutches in high-rise blocks while they fund Crispin at the CPRE to campaign against building the homes those people need.