Cllr Henry Higgins is the founder of Blackridge Planning Insight and a councillor in Hillingdon
Earlier this year the government published its Land Use Framework for England. It is the most important document about British land use in a generation and it has received almost no political attention. Most commentary focused on the housing implications. Almost none addressed the food security crisis that sits directly behind it.
Here is the fact that should be on the front page of every Conservative policy document on housing and planning: almost 14,500 hectares of England’s best agricultural land has been permanently lost to development since 2010. As of 2024, there was space for more than 1.4 million homes to be built on almost 30,000 hectares of previously developed brownfield land. We are building on farmland while leaving brownfield empty. We are simultaneously creating a housing crisis and a food security crisis from the same policy failure.
The Land Use Framework states clearly that food security is national security. It commits to safeguarding the best farmland from permanent land use change. It acknowledges that three of the five worst harvests on record have happened this decade. What it does not do is connect these commitments to the housing delivery programme running in parallel, which continues to approve development on Grade 1 and Grade 2 agricultural land because brownfield sites are harder to develop, and taking the easier option carries no real penalty.
The UK is approximately 65 per cent self-sufficient in all food. That is a reduction from 75 per cent in the 1980s. For indigenous food the figure is 77 per cent, but that headline masks some alarming specifics. Self-sufficiency in fresh vegetables is at its lowest since records began in 1988, at 53 per cent. A quarter of currently farmed land could be lost by 2050 under current land use trajectories, potentially leading to a 32 per cent fall in domestic food production. Separately, eighteen of the top twenty countries the UK imports fruit and vegetables from face moderate to severe climate change risk.
These are not projections from environmental campaigners. They are government statistics and peer-reviewed research published by the Science for Sustainable Agriculture think tank in September 2025. They describe a slow-motion food security crisis that is developing in plain sight while policy attention is focused elsewhere.
The 2022 wheat price surge driven by the Ukraine conflict and the 2025 coffee and cocoa price increases driven by weather failures in producing regions both illustrated the same mechanism: global events translate rapidly into UK food price rises when import dependency is high. Britain imports around a third of the food it consumes, a share that has been rising for decades. The trajectory is not sustainable.
There is a genuinely conservative argument to make here, and it is not the one being made. The current debate treats housing and food as competing priorities that require a careful political balance. The bold conservative argument is that they are not competing at all. They require exactly the same policy answer: brownfield first, with legal force.
There should be an absolute statutory prohibition on development of Grade 1 and Grade 2 Best and Most Versatile agricultural land. It should not be Food Security guidance, nor a policy preference, but a legal prohibition that would simultaneously protect food production and force the housing delivery system to confront the brownfield pipeline it has been avoiding for decades. The planning system currently treats productive farmland as a planning zone with a slightly higher bar for development. It should treat it as a strategic national
asset equivalent to a reservoir or a power station. It should be something you simply do not build on.
This is not a new idea. France and Germany both have higher agricultural self-sufficiency than the UK, in part because they treat productive farmland as exactly this kind of protected asset. Britain’s planning system has never made this step. Every government has preferred the flexibility of guidance over the clarity of law. The result is 14,500 hectares of irreplaceable agricultural land lost to development since 2010, while more than 1.4 million homes’ worth of brownfield remains unused.
Almost 14,500 hectares of England’s best agricultural land has been permanently lost to development since 2010 – enough to feed the combined populations of Liverpool, Sheffield and Manchester. As of 2024, there was space for more than 1.4 million homes on almost 30,000 hectares of brownfield land that was not used.
The practical answer to the land use conflict between housing and food production is a statutory three-zone land use hierarchy that ends the competition by specifying it clearly. Grade 1 and 2 agricultural land is absolutely protected from permanent development: there should be no housing, no solar farms, no warehouses, no exceptions. Brownfield land has
absolute priority for development with automatic planning permission, no delays, no conditions. Grade 3 and 4 land is the zone where mixed use is permitted. This is for agrivoltaics, new garden cities and managed rewilding, but only where food productivity is maintained or improved through yield uplift.
This is not complicated. It is a four-box classification that resolves every current land use conflict with a single framework. What it requires is the political will to give it statutory force rather than treating it as planning guidance that the next Secretary of State can override with a paragraph change to the NPPF.
A Conservative Party serious about national resilience, food security, energy security and housing security, should be making this argument as a coherent whole rather than treating each crisis as a separate policy domain. The land use conflict between housing and food is not a problem requiring a clever balance. It is a false conflict requiring a clear hierarchy. Brownfield first is the housing policy and the food security policy simultaneously. That is the Conservative argument. It is not currently being made.