“It seemed a good idea at the time.”
That must surely be one of the most common laments the human brain has ever created: You’ve heard one or two examples over the years I don’t doubt. The sort of ‘good idea’ that persuades someone to invest all his life savings in a company registered abroad with the promise of an unbelievable rate of return and absolutely no risk whatsoever. Obviously too good to be true - but it seemed a good idea at the time. The question I’d like to address this week is whether the green belt falls into that same category.
Not only did it seem a good idea back in 1938 when it was first introduced for London. It was a good idea. Those were the days when England’s big towns and cities – especially London - were expanding at such a rate there was a real fear that the countryside would be swamped. The green belt would act as a buffer between town and country. It began to expand when the Town and Country Planning Act was passed in 1947 and today England’s protected green belt covers more than 6,300 square miles. That’s about 13 per cent of the country’s land area.
And on one level it has been an undoubted success. We have been saved the fate of many countries where it’s perfectly possible to drive from one sprawling suburb and find yourself in the outskirts of another town or city having seen barely a green field. So, for those fortunate enough to live in a pleasant home knowing that the countryside was within a short drive, it was unquestionably a good idea. And it still is. But rather less so for those who are trying desperately to buy a house or even a flat and simply cannot afford to.
This is where the ‘good idea’ runs into the ‘at the time’ buffers.
Put simply, we need more homes. The government has promised to build 1.5 million of them by 2030. At the risk of stating the all-too obvious, new homes need land. And there is simply not enough out there. Or, rather, not enough in the right place at the right price. And the blame for that has been laid in large part on the effect of the green belt. That’s why the government has just announced that councils are to be given the power to buy green belt land with the intention of granting planning permission on it.
At first sight this is a classic win/win scenario. It’s obviously a win for the landowner who sees the prospect of a decent profit on a chunk of land that’s been sitting there doing very little for decades. It’s also a win for the developer desperate to build houses on it and for the young couple even more desperate to find somewhere to raise their family.
But here’s the question. What is a ‘decent profit’? An acre of land in the green belt that is worth a thousand or two without planning permission might easily be worth a million or two if it’s in a desirable residential area and has planning permission. Is that ‘decent’ or is it an outrageous rip-off that must, in the end, be financed by the hard-pressed young couple desperate for somewhere to live and the local authority funded by everyone who pays a council tax?
Who better to ask than Churchill? And, yes, I really do mean Winston Churchill. I’m grateful to the Times columnist Emma Duncan for drawing attention to his intervention in the great green belt dilemma even though he’s been dead for sixty years. Churchill, it seems, had no problem with houses being built on the outskirts of a town or great city to house the burgeoning population. What he did have a problem with was “the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts … watches the busy population making the city larger, richer, more convenient … and all the while sits still and does nothing”.
During that time, Churchill pointed out, “roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs 100 miles off in the mountains — and all the while the landlord sits still. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist contribute and yet, by every one of them, the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community; he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.”
Bear in mind as you read those words that the man who wrote them was not exactly a fully paid-up member of the ‘soak the rich’ club. Quite the opposite. He was born into wealth and lived a life of great privilege. But what he was defending with those words was what he saw as simple fairness.
And that is precisely the question being raised by a Labour government three generations later. Here’s how Duncan puts it: “At the heart of this argument is the question of whether the value of land belongs to the owner or the state. The answer is less obvious than it seems because the value of land is determined principally by the policies, actions and investments of the state. Agricultural land is cheap, but if the state invests in infrastructure and gives permission for development, its value increases. The same acre in the southeast of England can be worth £10,000 as farmland and £1 million if allocated for development. The state was responsible for £990,000 of that.”
But, as she concedes, you might say that if the landowner happens to have a piece of land on the edge of a city, good luck to them: “They had either the nous to buy in the right place or the good fortune to inherit it; and the state has no more right to expropriate them than it does to take away the profit of somebody who bought a fast-rising stock cheap.”
Churchill answered that with a question of his own: Why should a landowner reap enormous benefits when he has made no contribution to the cost of those benefits? Costs which have been met in the main by the state or the local authority. In other words: the taxpayer.
And that is precisely the question being raised by our new government generations on. Its solution is to
impose a cap on the amount of profit the landowner can make from the sale of their land. Those who refuse to sell in parts of the country where there is the greatest housing need could find their land bought off them at a ‘benchmark’ value that would be lower than the market value of similar sites outside of the green belt.
There is, of course, another ‘belt’ out there. It’s called the ‘grey belt’, and you see it almost everywhere you look in our largest towns and cities. The term was coined by the Labour party to describe “poor quality and ugly areas” - including disused car parks and wasteland - on parts of the green belt. Those who defend to the death the sanctity of the green belt say these are the areas that should be approved for development before we even think of intruding into our genuinely green land.
Where do you stand in this debate? Do you agree that our shortage of new and affordable housing is so serious that we must consider developments on green belt land? Or do you accept that that should be only a last resort and we should tackle the grey belt first? And where do you stand in terms of the vast profits that some landowners might realise if the green belt planning laws were revised? Should there be a law limiting the extent of those profits even if it results in less land being made available. Or should the law be changed to enable local authorities to make compulsory purchase of green belt land an option?
In short: do you believe we are facing a housing crisis and Winston Churchill had the right approach before most of us were born?
Let us know.
