6 August 2015
Fading Icons: Belting the Green Belts
by J.R.Thomas
From the consultative process-ridden, consensual lobbyist-polished, days of the first quarter of the twenty first century it is difficult to imagine the vigour of Clement Attlee and his post-war government. What energy, what dedication, what strength of purpose, what clarity of vision, that first unfettered Labour government possessed! It is astonishing how much got done – and with such legislative elegance – in five years. The National Health Service created. New social security and educational systems introduced. Great swathes of private enterprise, including the railways, much of commercial road transport, the coal industry, ship building and steel, taken into public ownership. The National Parks set up, the armed forces stood down but at the same time substantially reorganised and rearmed. India given her freedom. Britain’s place on the world stage adjusted to take her into new relationships in Europe and in the new United Nations. This all by a cabinet of ageing men (and one woman), exhausted, one might think, after six years of fighting the greatest war the world had ever seen. One might not agree with everything, or even anything, that this extraordinary reforming government did, but the speed and expertise with which they did it leaves one quite astonished.
And it was not just those great headline winners that were pushed through. Our modern building control and planning system was largely created, throwing off, almost as an incidental, what we now know as the “green belts”. Not that this was a new idea. Indeed it was a very old idea indeed; as far back as Elizabeth I the concept of protecting the countryside from development had been mooted to prevent the construction of slums inhabited by the dangerously disenfranchised poor, but later with the hope of protecting towns and cities from rapid growth and highly pollutive industry. Then, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, the growing wealth of the middle upper working classes and their desire for much improved housing brought a new concept – the suburb. In these new residential developments houses became bigger, and lower, with gardens and wider streets and pavements, local shopping parades and railway stations, so the sprawling rivers of stone and brick and tile took up more and more of the countryside around the existing urban areas. The cities began to wash over and finally drown the towns and villages around them, all absorbed into one great mass. London was the most dramatic, but Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and especially the hugely wealthy Birmingham were beginning to form serious stains on the map of green Britain. Newcastle upon Tyne, a beautiful Georgian city become a centre of engineering enterprise and excellence, was made hugely rich by Armstrong and Parsons, by shipbuilding and military expertise. That wealth flowed into all levels of local society and into the need for premises and housing. The geographic constraints of the hills of the Tyne valley forced this onto the river side and down the river right to the sea, absorbing as it went Wallsend, North and South Shields, Tynemouth, Gateshead, Jarrow. By 1914 that long valley seemed like one city, the visitor then, as now, could not distinguish where one ancient village had ended and the next had begun.
In the 1930’s the formulation of a green belt plan for London had begun but little progress was made before the outbreak of war. In 1944, with the end of war in sight, Patrick Abercrombie, the great town planner, began detailed planning to protect a belt of undeveloped land (largely unbuilt on and certainly of a rural nature) almost completely surrounding the metropolitan edge of London. In 1947 the Town and Country Planning Act gave local authorities the power to designate green belts and, in the next ten years, many were created.
Another great Abercrombie innovation, new towns, was introduced at about the same time to rehouse people from the overcrowded slums in the cities, especially in the East End of London, to sylvan rural surroundings outside the green belt. This turned out to be less of a crowd pleaser than Abercrombie and the politicians expected but the green belt proved hugely popular –especially with those who lived in or close to it, whose rural surroundings were preserved, perhaps for ever, and whose properties grew ever more desirable – and valuable.
Although not having the pickling effect of the National Parks, created at much the same time, the green belts have very successfully preserved a pleasant rural edge to most cities and prevented further mergings and urban spread. They have been considerably extended, with public support – the London green belt now includes most of Hertfordshire and large tracts of Surrey, and has extended from Abercrombie’s original six mile belt up to thirty five miles in places. It covers well over a million acres.
Not surprisingly, the policy has never been popular with developers or indeed with many of the landowners who own the green belt land – as with the National Parks, one of the reasons that the green belt generally attracted such all-party support was that the land remained in private ownership. Land which can be released from green belt designation is usually enormously valuable, simply because it adjoins continuing green belt and is by definition in an area where development land is scarce. Many proper and improper devices have been used to try to get land released, from the “national interest” argument – especially when that can be equated with the developers interest, as it has been recently south of St Albans where a large area of land was released just before the recent general election to build a railway freight depot, to the simpler methods of offering a benefit for the loss – a playground or a road in return for a housing estate Another method, always cheap and sometimes successful, is simply to let an area of land get overgrown and be used as a scrapyard and dump, or a travellers site. In return for restoring some of the land, the landowner gets permission to build on the rest. Local authorities have got wise to this – although they are not above using it themselves.
It does not take a an economist to work out that if large amounts of building land are taken out of the supply chain, then the value of the remaining buildable land goes up. As house prices rocket in London, the call for more land supply has become ever louder. Any government, and especially a Conservative government, can see through one eye that the south east – but also some attractive towns elsewhere such as York – need more housing. They also can see through the other that taking that land from the only possible place, the green belt, (there really is not much buildable brown land in practice) may be the solution, but the political cost from the suburban voters and Tory supporters is going to be very painful – especially in such marginal seats as York and St Albans. The National Trust, increasingly political in its conservationist activities, has already run one successful campaign with the active support of bodies such as the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the Daily Telegraph, and the Woodland Trust, none of which could be characterised as natural lefties.
With 220,000 homes needed, mostly in the south-east, this is going to be a very major theme of the next five years. The green belt, for the first time, is likely to shrink. The theme of the government’s first term was “localism”, with power devolved to local decision makers. In this matter, that has not helped anybody. Local decision makers who release land for development trigger great local outcries which simply bring in the planning inspectorate and ultimately force the decision up to the planning minister. And those councils who turn down development proposals find that the developer goes straight to appeal and, again, in comes the planning inspectorate. Now, at least, perhaps we can answer the question posed in this sheet as to why Eric Pickles, whose desk all this was landing on until May, decided to retire.
