Britain is experiencing the greatest population growth in its entire history, and much of that is concentrated in London. Never before has a British city gained more than a million people in just a decade. Extraordinary times call for a more serious response.
We can’t maintain quality of life, and quality of place, unless we have enough homes to live in. The housing crisis is not an abstract future threat, it is here now and it has a daily human cost.
London needs to use its brownfield land; it needs to build higher, to intensify, and to release underused industrial land and commercial buildings. All of that is a given. But it will not be enough. To understand the scale of the problem, consider that the GLA’s recently announced housing zones will each give us only four weeks’ housing supply. Such initiatives are welcome – essential in fact – but they are only just the start.
What else can be done? The London First, Quod and SERC report published this week – The Green Belt: A Place for Londoners? – looks at one of London’s largest land uses, the 22% of the capital reserved as green belt, and asks whether we can really still justify keeping every inch sacrosanct.
This analysis shows that the green belt in London is a real mixture – from the beautiful and precious, to the frankly underused and inaccessible. You might be surprised to hear only a quarter of the land inside London’s green belt (that is, within the area of the Greater London Authority) is environmentally designated land, parks, or land with real public access.
There’s no question that cities need open spaces, and lots of the green belt has real intrinsic value – either rich in wildlife, or providing the public with essential amenity and recreation. But what of the rest? What
about the fenced-off fields used for intensive agriculture, the paddocks, or the 2,500ha set aside for golf – more than twice the size of Kensington and Chelsea?
If we want to protect the quality of London for the growing number of people who live in London, then we can’t continue to rule out sensible reviews of the green belt boundaries.
Planning policy says green belts should “check the unrestricted sprawl” of cities, and “safeguard the countryside from encroachment”. These
are important and worthwhile aims but we need to ask about application of that policy within London itself.
The alternative to rigid green belt protection is not a free-for-all, it is a considered review of the boundaries. The National Planning Policy Framework already says this should be done in exceptional circumstances – and a city growing by a million people every 10 years is truly exceptional.
Barney Stringer, director, Quod
