Among the supposed policy divides in this General Election campaign is the future of the Green Belt. The Conservatives are pledged to defend it. Labour has, by contrast, positioned itself as the party of free enterprise, home ownership and property developers – willing to liberalise state control in this area as part of a broader change in approach to encourage building new homes. I still intend to vote Conservative. Only four years ago the Conservative Government was proposing to ease the planning restrictions that thwart the dreams of a generation. Labour responded with indignation. Like Pavlov’s dogs, Labour MPs queued up in the House of Commons to denounce the proposals as a “Developer’s Charter.” The Conservatives folded. Robert Jenrick was removed as Housing Secretary and his enlightened reforms were abandoned.
But even if we decide that Labour’s conversion since then is genuine it amounts more to rhetoric than substance. Let us consider Angela Rayner’s speech to the UK’s Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum in Leeds last month. She said:
“In hostels across the country, there are kids in temporary accommodation, doing their homework on the bathroom floors.”
But Labour would make that worse with a war on private landlords that would reduce the supply in the private rented sector and push councils into placing more families in hostels.
Much of the speech had merit. She was right to say that local housing targets should councils should be restored – without which all development can blocked. She was also right to say we should “build beautiful new settlements” and “buildings with character, in tree-lined streets.” She didn’t actually repudiate brutalist tower blocks and slab blocks but that was surely implicit.
I also like her renaming the Green Belt the Grey Belt. “Green Belt” is a misnomer. The German Democratic Republic was not democratic (though that fan of Communist East Germany and the candidate proudly put forward by the Labour Party for the electors of Hackney North and Stoke Newington might disagree.) Much of the Green Belt is not at all green. So Rayner was right to call for “unlocking ugly, disused grey belt land for housebuilding.”
The snag comes in her demand for 40 per cent of the new homes to be for social housing. This requirement would be specified in a “New Towns Code.” That ratio is so high it is probable that the development would not be economically viable and so this is chatter rather than viable policy. The only way the figures could add up would be via a reduction in state landbanking: There is a lot of surplus public sector land. That could be given away, or sold cheaply, to developers in return for them offering a higher than usual ratio of social housing in the tenure split. But she has shown no interest in that. Another option would be boosting right-to-buy sales so that some more funding for replacement stock would be available from that revenue. But she seems a bit sniffy about that too (at least for other people.) So nothing will get built in these illusory New Towns. Labour’s proud boast can be that if it had been 40 per cent would have been social housing.
Could we not at least agree that “Green Belt” land which is contaminated should be released for development, which would necessitate the developer cleaning it up? Quite a lot of such and has already been identified. There is a further category of “potentially contaminated land.” Public Health England states:
“As with many other industrialised nations, the UK has a legacy of contaminated sites, including former factories, mines, steelworks, refineries and landfills. At these sites, there can be a variety of potentially harmful substances such as oils and tars, waste metals, organic compounds, gases and mining materials that are left over from, or created by, historical activities on site. DEFRA, in their Statutory Guidance (DEFRA 2012), note that on all land there are background levels of substances, including substances that are naturally present as a result of the varied and complex geology in England (eg metals) and also substances resulting from diffuse human pollution (eg road traffic pollution). However, there are greater concentrations of contaminants in some areas, often associated with historic industrial use and waste disposal, and in a minority of cases these may be sufficient to pose a risk to public health or the environment.”
A lot of the land on these disused sites has not been tested:
“The process of assessing a site for land contamination takes time. The soil, any ground or surface water, and in some cases, gas and vapour originating from the ground, should be sampled, analysed and the hazards identified. A risk assessment is then carried out to see if the sampled concentrations could impact on public health; the identification of a contaminant linkage, linking the contamination source to a receptor such as a human is considered. Many contaminating substances accumulate or persist in the soil, and the public can become exposed to these substances by direct contact with the soil itself, by inhalation of dust outdoors or indoors from soil tracked into the house or by inhalation of gases and vapours indoors and outdoors. Exposure can also occur by directly ingesting soil by hand-to-mouth contact after gardening or playing outside and substances may also enter the human food chain when we consume produce grown in the soil.”
It is conceded that “remediation of land is also expensive and any costs to individuals, businesses and the taxpayer need to be justified.”
But even the Green Belt land already positively identified as contaminated is considerable. Via Freedom of Information requests, I identified the following with over a hundred acres:
But when it comes to potentially contaminated land there was much more:
Those examples specified above come to over 54,000 acres. Land released for development can typically provide around 20 homes per acre. So that’s equivalent to a million homes. It may well be that in some places decontaminating the land would be prohibitively expensive. Or that development might be impractical for some other reason. On the other hand, there were plenty of local authorities who did not reply – or replied telling me they didn’t have a clue how much of their Green Belt land was contaminated or potentially contaminated. Others who did reply stressed that was only what they had identified in their records and their might well be more. Perhaps it is over 100,000 acres. Enough space for two million homes. The average cost of cleaning up contaminated land is £250,000 per acre. That should be commercially viable – especially as noted above that some of it will be public sector land and thus could be sold at a discount, in view of the environmental benefit.
It seems to me that if you offer to replace land that is not merely ugly but poisoned, with land that has been restored to health and used to provide beautiful housing and gardens, then some of the NIMBYS might be won over. Do our politicans really have to be all that courageous to endorse this proposal?