Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
The United Kingdom doesn’t just have one green belt, but many; there are 15 in England alone. But when the media talks about the green belt, this usually means the ring of protected land that envelops London and reaches deep into the home counties.
Including the satellite green belts that surround Oxford and Cambridge, the total area of green belt land in the greater South East covers 580,000 hectares. That’s 1.43 million acres in the old money.
Of course, some of this overlaps with various Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. We also need to take into account local amenity use, flood risk, and so on.
But allowing for all that, we can reasonably assume that there at least a million acres of land in the South East that we could build on, but which we can’t for no other reason than self-imposed restriction.
That’s a million acres in one of the most land-hungry places on the planet. A million acres while the British economy struggles to grow. A million acres as house prices kill the dream of home ownership.
There are those of us who view the unresolved housing crisis as an existential threat to the Conservative Party. Indeed, we’ve been banging on about it for years. The difference now is that we can see our worst predictions coming true in real time. It’s not just the Red Wall that our hapless leaders are losing, but the Blue Wall too.
I’m almost impressed by the refusal of the parliamentary party to admit to the scale of the unfolding disaster. This really ought to be tearing the Tory ranks apart, as did the Corn Laws did in the 19th Century.
Yet it seems we’re more interested in the Rishi-versus-Boris grudge match than a civil war about something that actually matters.
Perhaps the underlying tension just needs the right trigger. I suspect that Sir Keir Starmer knew what he was doing when he announced his support for building on the green belt. The Labour leader wasn’t just addressing the need for more homes, he was deliberately aggravating the latent Tory divide.
In fact, he helpfully provided labels for the two sides: “When it comes to new housing”, he said, “Labour will choose the builders not the blockers.”
Unwisely, Rishi Sunak rose to the bait, once again declaring himself for the blockers. The Prime Minister knows that he has the support, or at least the consent, for this of most of his backbenchers.
But a few are willing to protest. Among them is Simon Clarke, the thinking man’s Trussite and a former housing minister. The Conservative Party “cannot out-nimby the Liberal Democrats and the Greens” he warned.
Though deeply divided on most other issues, Tory wonks are united on this one. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single right-leaning think-tanker who doesn’t believe that we need more houses. Furthermore, most them see the green belt as an obvious place to get building.
But is it quite as obvious as it seems? Well, I’m afraid the answer to that is both yes and no. I apologise for my ambivalence, but it’s time for my fellow Tory builders to embrace the political virtue of nuance.
When faced with the bovine intractability of the blockers, it’s tempting to be equally stubborn. But, trust me, this is not an issue on which we can fight stupid with stupid. We just don’t have the numbers.
Instead, we need to begin with a clear understanding of what we’re up against. There’s a reason why the green belt has proven so impervious to reform – and that’s because it is, in its own terms, the most successful policy of the post-war period.
It has achieved exactly what it was meant to achieve: to prevent sprawl, stop neighbouring towns from merging into one another, and encourage regeneration within existing urban areas. The inconvenient truth about the green belt is that it works.
We tend to assume that the familiar pattern of development in this country – discrete cities, towns and villages with broad stretches of countryside between them – is somehow natural, or at least self-ordering.
But it really isn’t. Modern modes of transport and methods of construction allow radically different configurations.
Just look at the so-called exurbs (a polite term for sprawl) in the US. One of the most extreme examples is Houston, which is roughly the same size as London but with a quarter of the population.
Or, for a European example, there’s northern Belgium, where ribbons of development stretch along every road, turning Flanders into one extended street. Another for instance is the formless development to the south of Naples, where only Vesuvius imposes a distinction between town and country.
Or look east, to the Chinese heartland. The plain that stretches from the Yangtse to Beijing is a checkerboard of fields and closely-packed villages that goes on-and-on for hundreds of kilometres. Take a look on Google Earth — it’s mind-blowing.
Finally, I’ll mention Japan and the extraordinary conglomeration of Tokyo-Yokohama.
Evidently, there’s no reason why a successful capital can’t just keep growing. In theory, we too could build a megacity housing tens of millions of people. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the green belt, this might have already happened.
We’d have probably produced an endless Croydon rather than an infinite London, but either way I’m glad we chose not to. Instead, southern England has remained itself: simultaneously one of the most developed and most beautiful corners of Europe.
In an age when we curse the short-termism of our politicians, it’s remarkable that successive prime ministers have stuck to the same policy for decade-after-decade.
But having been in place for so long, we’ve forgotten how the green belt came to be. It was the result of post-war governments not only having a planning policy, but a spatial policy too – that is, making decisions about the broadest patterns of development and non-development.
Today, the idea that we should consciously determine what our country looks like – arguably the highest expression of national sovereignty – is simply too big a concept for our pygmy politicians. The green belt, therefore, is a functioning relic; the equivalent of the Roman aqueducts that carried water long after the locals had forgotten how to build them.
To win their struggle, Tory builders must revive the lost art of spatial policy. If we need millions more houses, then we also need some idea of where to put them. That means making big decisions again: choosing towns and cities for expansion and also where to place entirely new communities.
Of course, we don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the post-war period. We can and must build beautifully, using local materials, graceful architecture, and traditional street plans. We should also make the most of supporting infrastructure, especially our current (and former) railway lines.
But to achieve all that we need room for manoeuvre. And all too often that’s precisely what the green belt denies us.
For instance, just look how tightly it’s drawn up against the edges of Oxford and Cambridge. It makes no sense to choke off these nationally important centres of productivity. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, stopping villages from accommodating families and sustaining their community life is a force for destruction not preservation.
At the same time, the fear that development will make places worse is hardly unfounded. We should be sacrificing fields, but not landscapes. We should be making room for growth, but not sprawl. The green belt can square those circles – but only if we have the courage to systematically redraw its boundaries.
Call it the Eric Morecambe principle: the green belt is based on all the right ideas, but it’s not necessarily in the right places.