Protecting Green Belt makes housing crisis intractable

When you hear the phrase "Green Belt", do you think of beautiful rolling fields and bucolic pastures with dewy grass straight out of a classic image of English countryside? You might be forgiven if you do.

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The very words imply something beautiful and precious and when they hear politicians talking about building more houses and sacrificing the Green Belt for construction, many recoil in horror at this vandalism.

We've seen in recent by-elections how powerful this sense of horror can be. In Chesham and Amersham in 2021 the LibDem candidate overturned a huge Tory majority with a swing of 25.2 per cent. Her campaign was based almost entirely on opposition to the government's Planning Bill, describing it as "a developer's free-for-all".

The obsession with protecting the Green Belt has taken hold of the English psyche, which is one reason why the housing crisis we face is so intractable.

Hanging onto it has been a huge factor in contributing to the crisis, helping to halve the rate at which we have increased our housing stock since the 1960s.

THE most severe housing crisis is in London and the South-East, which also has the most Green Belt land. There are 35,000 hectares in London and another 75,000 hectares within the M25.

If a quarter of that was built on it would mean over a million homes more than enough to meet London's housing needs.