Last week the government pushed for building on more brownfield land, but for me that’ll barely have any effect compared to opening up pockets of the green belt.
Councils were told to prioritise brownfield developments, while the bar for refusing brownfield plans will be made much higher for big city councils who fail to hit their locally agreed housebuilding targets.
To me it seems like a lot of pontificating however.
There’s a reason building on brownfield land can be a slow process, especially in areas like London, which the government seems to be pointing its finger at in particular – despite completions in the capital hitting their highest levels since the 1930s.
Brownfield sites commonly contain toxic contaminants from whatever was on the land previously, while you’ve got to deal with the cost of often destroying what was on the land previously.
Surely some city limits can be widened to allow for more in new areas without these complications.
In last week’s announcement PM Rishi Sunak pledged to protect “our precious countryside” – and I do sympathise with that environmentalist element of Conservatism.
However I think the UK’s need is too great to blanketly rule out the green belt as a place to build on.
While Labour’s Keir Starmer so far seems a rather uninspiring leader, his comments on building on the ‘grey belt’ make far more sense than Sunak’s.
In October of last year, he pledged to build on areas of the green belt in certain areas, and for me that makes a lot of sense.
He said at the time: “Where there are clearly ridiculous uses of it, disused car parks, dreary wasteland. Not a green belt. A grey belt. Sometimes within a city’s boundary. Then this cannot be justified as a reason to hold our future back.”
If the UK is to seriously gear up its housebuilding and keep prices in check, they need to be bolder in their plans.
I’m not saying the Tory plans are necessarily bad, it’s more they seem to be more focused on tweaking things round the edges rather than making a profound difference.
