We have to welcome innovative ideas.
Tony Ward is chief executive of Clayton Euro Risk
Last May, former government planning minister Paul Cheshire suggested that green belts around cities should be abolished and replaced with ‘green fingers’ flanked by thousands of new homes built in the countryside.
The professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics said that Britain’s housing crisis could be solved by building large estates in green belts close to train stations. He argued that London and other English cities should adopt the Scandinavian concept of green fingers, in which wedges of the green belt would remain protected but gaps would be filled with new homes. He suggested that green belts ‘benefit very few people but we are paying a huge price for them in terms of housing costs’.
Fast forward to March 2016: ‘Beyond the Green Belt’, a major exhibition led by the Landscape Institute, is examining this topic in detail and looking to explore innovative approaches to working with green belt environments, including learning from international approaches. One suggestion from the institute is that developers should be allowed to build thousands of homes in the green belt in return for paying a levy to enhance the remaining land. The levy would pay for creating parks and woodlands in England’s 14 green belts. The Landscape Institute, which represents 6,500 landscape architects and planners, claims that the levy would compensate for the loss of green belt lands by providing funds to make remaining areas more accessible to the public and better for wildlife. The institute is calling for a ‘more nuanced debate’, saying that much of the green belt is not very green and has no public access but is close to road and rail links and services.
One million new homes could be built within ten minutes’ walk of a station by building on less than 4% of the protected land around London, according to research quoted in the Institute’s new exhibition. It is calling for a fundamental rethink of the management of the green belt, which covers 13% of England, to help to address the acute shortage homes.
While the issue of whether we should build on green belt land remains a thorny one – and I do have sympathy with the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s view that ‘it would set a dangerous precedent which would be used as an excuse for building on more and more of the green belt’ – we have to welcome innovative ideas such as these and consider their viability seriously.
How else are we ever going to address the dire shortage of homes for our rapidly expanding population?
