Greenbelt land starting to buckle
Sunday 27th January, 2002
Since the 1940s, the Metropolitan green belt has sat like an impregnable buffer around London, protecting property prices with its promise of permanent open fields safe from developers.
But are the cracks beginning to appear? The Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) warns of "death by a thousand cuts" in the face of the relentless demand for new homes.
It notes that while the government professes to support the green-belt concept, in the past four years it has waved through 119 out of a total of 251 development proposals in green belts across England, eating up 1,300 hectares in the process.
Any official government changes to planning guidelines will appear in about two years' time, in the revision of Planning Policy Guidance (PPG) notes to local authorities.
Some, however, are already suggesting the previously unsayable. In a recent internal discussion document, the Royal Town Planning Institute called for the green belt to be "modernised".
According to David Barraclough, RTPI planning policy officer and author of the report: "It should not be sacrosanct and unmovable when all other aspects of the planning system are being reviewed by New Labour."
Some of the most severe pressures arising from green-belt policies are in Buckinghamshire, where there are plans to provide 64,000 new houses by 2011.
The National Housing Federation, which represents housing trusts catering for lower-income tenants, says change is inevitable. "Green belt as it is presently shaped in the southeast is an increasingly artificial construct from the past," says policy officer Sharon Hedges.
"It needs reviewing. There is a crisis in the provision of affordable housing in the southeast. This contributes to recruitment and retention problems. There is too much emotion in the arguments against some level of greenfield building."
CPRE statistics show that the green belt has already started to crumble in some areas. One of the biggest incursions is in Newcastle, where work has begun on a huge 1,000-home development on Land recently taken out of green belt.
While official advice is that all suitable "brownfield" land in a local authority must be used first, the government last year told councils they could "review" green belt boundaries in order to meet demonstrable housing need.