Housebuilding again - this time looking at the Green Belt (supply-side)

 A strong case from the Leader section of The Economist for hacking away at the green belt:

Britain should scrap its green belt

It has a stranglehold over the economy and protects the wrong bits of land

image: ed nix

Aug 17th 2023

Listen to this story.

 Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

Food rationing is over. People can swear on the bbc. Homosexuality is legal. Thank goodness Britain has left behind the dreary restrictions of the 1950s. Yet the green belt—16 rings around English cities dreamed up 70 years ago—not only persists but is growing. The belt doubled in size in the 1980s. Last year it grew by another 24,000 hectares, or 1.5%. The green belt was never meant to swallow up so much land, yet today makes up 12.6% of England. Another quarter is protected by national parks or other designations.

In its own terms the belt has been wildly effective. English cities do not sprawl. Just 9% of the country’s land is built on—meaning that it is hardly the concrete jungle of popular imagination. These days the government says one point is to spur investment in cities. The green belt certainly makes city life more expensive. By one estimate, house prices in the south-east would be around a quarter cheaper without it. The policy remains terrifically popular. It summons up images of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land”, a place of natural beauty and abundant wildlife. Who could object to that?

The answer is anybody who would swap the 1950s for the 21st century. Despite its name, the green belt is not especially verdant: 7% of it is built-up land that happens to be designated as green belt and only a sliver is open for recreation. Two-thirds is for farming. The country’s remaining gaps of undeveloped land where houses, reservoirs or other infrastructure can be built are ever harder to find.

That helps explain chronic housing shortages inside cities, especially in productive places like Cambridge, London and Oxford. London, lacking brownfield sites, builds less than half of the 85,000 new homes it needs each year. In the countryside the belt leads developers to “leapfrog”, putting up housing for commuters farther away from the cities where the jobs are. The result is urban scattering instead of sprawl, with less agglomeration and a jammed-up labour market. Because many such places lack good public transport, residents spend more time in their cars, leading to more emissions. By some estimates all this costs about 0.5% of England’s gdp each year.

What can be done? Ideally, England would scrap the belt. True greenfield land—the sort the public treasures—could be just as well protected by designating more of it as national parks, or areas of outstanding natural beauty or special scientific interest and the like. More of the rest would then be open for development. Building on green-belt land within 800 metres of railway stations, for example, would provide plots for 850,000 homes. Giving up just 10% of the green belt would provide land for 5m homes. Boldest of all, England could plan whole new towns, just as it once did with Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City.

Unfortunately, even politicians who acknowledge that the green belt has a stranglehold over the most productive parts of the economy are unlikely to make such a radical case. Few even dare lay the foundations for reform by challenging popular misconceptions about the green belt’s true value.

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question

Even so, planning is likely to come up in the next election. The Conservatives, stung by their struggles to reform it in the past 13 years, say that building should mostly be on cities’ brownfield sites. They would make it even harder to release green-belt land. To its credit, the Labour Party has said it would “take on the taboo” on the green belt. It claims that a lack of supply, notably of land, explains why British housing is shoddy and costly: developers don’t compete to sell the best homes because desperate buyers will take anything available. Sir Keir Starmer has yet to put flesh on his party’s plans for the belt once in government. But if he wants to preside over a stronger economy, one obvious measure would be to cut the green leash that holds it back. 

2 topics - enterprise zones and green belt

Two points from a bigger article (linked) suggesting 5 things that could help U.K. Grow. The first section, Growth Flashpoints, will give you material to use on red tape/deregulation, ideas for structural change & government assistance for that, future jobs growth. The second section on building homes may still come into Paper 3, but may also work in Paper 2, as a suggestion for reducing labour immobility/helping structural/regional unemployment, and relieving housing pressure in the South East:

1 GROWTH FLASHPOINTS

The UK needs more growth, and should secure its place in the world of the future by taking steps now to attract high tech start-ups. These will ultimately create the jobs that will keep our own high-skills people in the country and will attract high skills people from overseas.

Business entrepreneurs claim that they find regulation the biggest bugbear. Instead of developing and expanding their businesses they have to spend hours ling compliance documents and meeting the minutiae of rules imposed by both national and central government. When they employ people they complain about the amount of time and effort taken up by PAYE tax returns and National Insurance. Their premises have to meet exacting standards, and it is claimed that firms such as Apple could never have started up in the UK because they would not have been allowed to operate from a garage.

In an ideal world we would not burden our start-up businesses with the costs of regulatory compliance, but in this less than ideal world we could have small pockets where start-ups could develop unhindered. The government should learn from the successes and failures of its Enterprise Zones project from the early 1980s. The idea was bold, but its execution was limited because the civil service put too many curbs upon the new zones. Its greatest success was in London’s Docklands, where skyscrapers could be built only because it was designated as an Enterprise Zone.

The government should announce a nationwide competition to have places designated as Growth Flashpoints. Syndicates of business, trade unions and local government should put together bids to be one of the chosen sites, listing in their bids the facilities and terms they were prepared to o er high-tech start-ups establishing with the flashpoints, including buildings that would be available and transport links. They could be about one square mile in area, with perhaps four or five to be chosen across the nation.

The rules would be simple. For their first five years new high-tech start-ups within the flashpoints would pay no taxes, local or national. They would be exempt from regulations that covered premises, employment, health and safety, or the need to file compliance documents. All those working within the flashpoints would be classfied as self-employed, with employers therefore not required to o er non-wage benefits such as holiday or sick pay.

The bids put in by local areas wishing to be one of the designated flashpoints would be adjudicated by a panel of people from high tech industries, not by ministers or civil servants. And applications by would-be start-ups to set up within a flashpoint would be approved or rejected by similar panels drawn from the technology sector. 

2 CREATING LIVING SPACE

The UK’s housing shortage is not caused by lack of finance to build houses, or by lack of labour or materials. It is caused by a lack of suitable land that people are allowed to build on. It is exacerbated by some of the conditions that local authorities impose by tacking on to planning permission such things as the necessity of including a proportion of “social housing.”

It is the Green Belt created by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and revised since which prevents towns and cities expanding outwards as their population increases. Political pressures from environmentalist organizations and wealthy home-owners who have homes within it or overlooking it have conspired to prevent development. 

Some towns and cities make the problem worse by putting height restrictions on buildings erected within them, effectively meaning that residences cannot expand outward or upward, so people are having to buy beyond the green belt and commute through it to work in the city.

People have recently softened their opposition to any kind of green belt development, and this creates an opportunity for a novel approach to be tried. Government should decide to slice a mile off the inner circumference of the green belt, and add a mile to its outer circumference. Verdant land within that inner mile would be preserved, meaning that meadows, woods and genuinely green land would be left untouched. But damaged land such as disused buildings, gravel pits and the like, would be available for development,
as would prime agricultural farmland, itself not particularly green.

The mile added to the outer circumference would not apply to buildings already there, and could be added in such a way as to create more verdant, genuinely green land. This would result in a net gain of green land, in that the inner circumference of the green belt is smaller than the outer one.

Environmentalists could draw consolation from the net gain of green, while the strip of land around the inner circumference would allow a million more new homes to be built where they are needed, in towns and cities where people want to live and work.

Families presently living in the green belt could console themselves with the thought that at least their children would have somewhere to live in the future. The building of a million new homes on the edge of the green belt would put downward pressure on the prices of existing homes, making it easier for young people to become home-owners. It would break the cycle of expectation in the UK that house prices must inevitably rise, and that a home is an investment rather than a place to live, and an investment that will yield greater returns than practically any other. 

When this is no longer true, people will seek other assets in which to invest, creating opportunities for business expansion and job creation. The actual construction of a million new homes would put some strain on the supply of materials such as bricks and timber, but output could be stepped up to meet the new
demand. And the building, done over the course of several years, would itself give a massive boost to employment within the industry, creating well-paid jobs and opportunities for skilled craftsmen. The ultimate bottom line, however, is that many more people, especially young people, would gain the opportunity to become home-owners.