Debate: More housebuilding or protect the green belt?

We spoke to Lizzie Bundred Woodward, a planning policy manager at the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and Sam Stafford, who’s planning director of the Home Builders Federation.

Cathy Newman: Lizzie Bundred Woodward, first, the last time a government built 300,000 homes a year, it was back in 1969. Do you accept that mandatory targets are needed because otherwise young people simply can’t get on the housing ladder?

Lizzie Bundred Woodward: So CPRE are really pleased that the Labour government are grasping the challenge. They understand the scale of the challenge in terms of the housing crisis. However, targets to councils don’t actually lead to homes being built out in the ground.

Cathy Newman: Well, they’re not being built at the moment, so they’ve got to do something.

Lizzie Bundred Woodward: Absolutely. And setting these big targets is good and it’s good to have ambition, but we need to see affordable homes being built, and that’s primarily the issue. The government’s announcements to date, there’s no clear direction of travel in terms of actually building homes that young people like myself can afford.

Cathy Newman: But you’re worried about the number of homes being built and what area they’re being built, and it’s urban sprawl all over again.

Lizzie Bundred Woodward: We are concerned that there’s going to be nibbling away at the green belt. And really what we want to see is a brownfield-first approach. We want to see urban regeneration, regenerating our dilapidated town centres. Post-Covid, many of them are used to seeing empty shops boarded up. Let’s bring those shops back into use first before building on greenfield.

Cathy Newman: Right, Sam Stafford. Nibbling away at the green belt, that’s the problem. I’ve heard it described today as the worst sprawl since the 50s. Do you accept that is what is going to happen now?

Sam Stafford: I think that’s somewhat of an over-exaggeration, Cathy, if I may say. I think the government should be applauded for grasping two nettles that the previous government didn’t do. One is that if we are going to build 300,000 homes a year, we need to plan for 300,000 homes here, and the calculation for doing that under the last government got to about 240 in practical effect and we’re building about 240. So in dealing with that national national ambition, it gives us, you know, more than a reasonable chance of actually getting there.

And the government have opened a conversation about building on the green belt, which is necessary in the longer term because there just isn’t enough capacity within urban areas to meet housing need. And these are only really the sites that should be allocated in local plans if local authorities got around to adopting a local plan. This is not a presumption in favour of development. It’s a presumption in favour of sustainable development.

Cathy Newman: Lizzie, nibbling away at the green belt, you said. But there you heard from Sam that the green belt needs to be built on to deliver these kind of numbers. And they are saying brownfield-first, government, aren’t they?

Lizzie Bundred Woodward: CPRE completely disagree and we have research to show that there is sufficient brownfield land available across the country to build 1.2 million homes. We think that’s a really good start in meeting the government’s ambition for 1.5 million. Why green belt should be released, it should be released as part of a local plan process and it should be strategically released, not on a site by site basis.

Cathy Newman: Answer that point about the brownfield, that you could almost get there by building on brownfield, Sam?

Sam Stafford: The last calculation I saw, Cathy, was a couple of years ago, and it was 1.4 million homes if you added up every single site on every local authority’s brownfield register. But over the longer term, and planning is about the longer term, that gets you to about a third of the requirements over a 15-year period. And brownfield first? Yes, absolutely.

The government consulted recently on what brownfield passports may be in order to expedite the development of vacant sites in towns and cities. And that’s to be encouraged. But as I say, it just won’t get us anywhere near and it won’t give the plurality of choice in the market to significantly increase supply, because if the government is going to get anywhere near 1.5 million homes, we need planning permissions in very short order and they need to be lots of planning permissions on lots of sizes of sites in different locations.

Cathy Newman: But Sam, the greybelt, as Keir Starmer calls it, is actually the old green belt, isn’t it? And, you know, it’s straying very far from Keir Starmer’s original definition of disused petrol stations, isn’t it?

Sam Stafford: That is true. Grey belt is to be defined as land that’s in the green belt and making a limited contribution to three of the tests of greenbelt. Now, as I said before, arguably if authorities like, for example – Swale was the authority featured in in Gary’s piece – that doesn’t like or the councillors were about to vote down a planning application for major development. So councillors don’t like that development, but they have had ample opportunity to put a local plan in place on sites and land that they do like.

Cathy Newman: Let me put that back to Lizzie. I mean, if the councils are wise, they can use the brownfield sites and the disused petrol stations, as Keir Starmer defined it, they don’t have to build on the green belt, do they? It’s down to the councils.

Lizzie Bundred Woodward: In some areas, absolutely and in other areas, not so much. And we really think that this centralisation of the planning system is a challenge and actually planning should be locally specific. It should be a democratic process. But the grey belt, I think, and CPRE think, is really masking a larger issue, that the homes being delivered just are not affordable for people. The government really need to grasp the nettle and set affordable housing targets and we’re really disappointed that they’ve reneged on the 50% affordable housing commitment that they had promised on the grey belt in the summer.