London must loosen the green straitjacket

I set out to write this piece with some trepidation as I know I’m about to tread on hallowed ground. Our green belt is a national institution, up there with the NHS and other great bastions of British life. And before I begin suggesting how to dismantle or re-engineer this institution, let me be clear, I am a fan up to a point. It has been one of the most successful policies of its type across the globe, not just across our green and pleasant land. As an island nation with massive pressures on finite land resources, it ensured that a rapacious post-war appetite for development did not devour our green spaces whole, and focused investment and regeneration on underutilised urban land. However, it is also of its time. Commercial landscape The commercial landscape is now very different. The principle in 2016 of delivering critical housing, particularly much-needed affordable housing, on expensive brownfield land just doesn’t add up. You can admire the morality of London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to task some private sector developers with delivering 50% affordable housing on their schemes in London, but if the right kind of land is not available and the numbers don’t add up, it will only stifle development. The old adage of “time is money” is never truer than in regeneration. Lengthy analysis of viability assessments to agree affordable numbers on brownfield sites increases costs and depletes the already meagre affordable housing numbers being proposed. Taking an example, we have a mixed-use site in Southampton with known abnormal costs. Stripping these out as per a greenfield site would deliver a profit on cost of 20.66%. The same brownfield site with abnormal costs delivers a PoC of 9.3%, and you then face a 7.85% reduction on PoC in discharging the planning compliance on affordable housing on either site. The metropolitan green belt around London is now 1.3m acres in size, stretches 35 miles out of the city in some directions, and is around three times larger than the city itself. Earlier this year, research from the Adam Smith Institute showed that there was enough space in the green belt around London to build one million homes within a 10-minute walk of existing train stations. Equally, there are plenty of patches of designated green belt that now exist as a by-product of other critical infrastructure delivery, such as new roads investment. These patches do not add to or enhance our green spaces and could be put to much better use. Quality and value This leads me to the obvious point that we do not classify the quality and value of green belt land, we simply perpetuate the generic designation on the basis of defined rings and boundaries to prevent sprawl and excess urbanisation, with declassification viewed as a radical last resort. In addition to taking a better look at the quality and classification of green belt land, I think we can also learn lessons from our European counterparts. In Copenhagen, the wedge approach to green belt has enabled the city to grow along defined infrastructure routes sandwiched between green fingers, balancing access to green spaces, with scope to expand the city to meet need, rather than being hemmed in by a green boundary. Given that it is estimated that 92% of the UK population will live in cities by 2030, we need a better strategy for managing controlled urban sprawl, and in particular to deliver much-needed housing. Not only do many brownfield sites not stack up commercially, they are also often not located to meet demand. We can re-engineer the market up to a point by creating new destinations such as garden cities and regenerating less desirable areas to bring back market appeal, but we are still going to have to deliver a substantial increase in housing in and around our main conurbations. And if we don’t take off the rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to green spaces, it is going to be more of a green straitjacket than a belt. Leigh Thomas is managing director, Kier Property