Has The 'Green Belt' Been Discreetly Abolished?

The erosion of the green belts is very sad.
Making money and meeting house building targets comes first in the minds of successive governments.

A bit more imagination and reuse of obsolete brown belt areas could greatly reduce the need to build on farmers' fields.

It certainly has here in Kent. Successive governments and local authorities seem hellbent on concreting over the entire Garden of England without any thought to the infrastructure needed to support these massive developments.

I certainly has around here…….and I often wonder how many palms were greased in the process!

That would indeed be sad, if true.

I've been driving round France for the past month, and although there are new builds everywhere, it has struck me how much beautiful countryside they still have left, even so. Nearly three times the size I believe.
The wildlife is amazing. So many red squirrels everywhere at the moment, my dog is obsessed with them, he's a larger red version. 🐿

The green belt is certainly not sacred now, but the jobs are in the built up areas, what is the point of building homes miles away from from employment. In many places now young couples with both working have to run 2 cars to access work, thats a big drain on their money and the opposite of sustainability.

something has to give as we need more housing, reading about a homeless shelter in glasgow that had no more space for people at the weekend and they had to put up tents outside on the street just to give people somewhere to sleep. people need homes and they need to be near places that they can work, with the population in the uk homes have to come first.

Yes but we need to work on food self sufficiency. We can’t do this if we give up all the farming land for building new homes most of which seem to the expensive 4 bed detached which are out of the reach of many FTB.

I live in an area with multiple houseing developments and a new town only about 5 miles away, but turn off on a minor road and you are immediately in deep country, which feels as if it hadn't been disturbed for centuries.

Yesterday we went to see a timber company on a small farm industrial site. It was about 5 miles away and we saw few cars as we drove along winding country lanes.

It is just the same where I live. A huge development which would have removed the last of the green belt between 2 areas has just been rejected. The developers who have already built an enormous housing estate had won that contract by promising to build a Primary School, playgrounds, a GP surgery and shops. The school is there but they haven't bothered with anything else. I daresay they will appeal and if the Government are brought into it will grant their appeal. There are several brown fill sites nearby. I fail to see why they cannot be used and leave our countryside alone.

There are two new developments on the edge of our village the infrastructure really can’t cope with any more. People are strongly objecting, but it is the local farmers that are selling the land.

There are a lot of small farms around where I live - mostly arable - and with changing weather patterns farmers struggle to make ends meet these days. There is a large field next to our estate that has been out of cultivation for a few of years now and there is much speculation about whether this will eventually be sold for new housing. If it is, it will not be “affordable” housing for sure and all it will serve to do is put further pressures on local infrastructure, something to which the council planning department always seems to manage to turn a blind eye when granting the necessary permissions. There are plenty of brownfield sites within the city boundary but they are not as attractive to developers or to buyers, it seems.

We are in a high flood risk area - the flooding is getting worse and much more frequent but building still goes on.

Françe is over twice the size of the UK Martav with a similar size of population.

We moved last year from East Yorkshire to North Lincolnshire.

The difference is incredible.

Beverley is now just about joined up with Hull, estate after estate.
I do not know how the infrastructure is coping.

We love to be surrounded by so much open country.

Unfortunately if the government continue their vendetta against farmers this could change.

kittylester

We are in a high flood risk area - the flooding is getting worse and much more frequent but building still goes on.

We have been campaigning ferociously for over 10 years to stop an estate of over 500 new houses being built on a flood plain here.

Our local MP has been marvellous, however this government is considering agreeing to the plans 😡😡😡

There is just not the acreage to put in the needed infrastructure and services needed.

The two access roads are already overly busy, one of which is closed frequently by accidents, which causes horrendous congestion on the other.

seasider

Yes but we need to work on food self sufficiency. We can’t do this if we give up all the farming land for building new homes most of which seem to the expensive 4 bed detached which are out of the reach of many FTB.

It's certainly not true that most are 4 bed detached, some will be especially in outlying villages but there is no work in those places working couples need housing close to work so that at least one doesnt need a car to travel. That saves a lot of cost, here there is a lot of development of all sizes close to town where a regular bus service is practical. Regular public bus services to villages isnt realistic for those who travel to work so retirement or executive houses are built, most development have to contribute to infrastructure and social housing as part of the planning agreement.

Families need homes. A very small percentage of the UK is built on.

Many of the people complaining about new housing occupy houses that were new housing 20/30 years ago.

There’s absolutely no doubt that families need homes. They also need medical centres, dentists and schools and areas where building is taking place are struggling to provide those. The junior school I volunteer in is seriously oversubscribed, as are others in the area. Classroom space is at a premium. Do builders think that these facilities will pop up like magic when they’ve finished building and gone away?

Builders are not fools, they build the type of house they know they can sell. In many prosperous areas of the south east a lot of people can afford detached 4 bedroomed houses. It may be their second or third house move so they have plenty of equity.

We used to live in area with a much higher than average number of people working in research of all kinds and high tech companies where highly skilled staff were paid salaries to match. A couple, both in high tech jobs are probably earning at least £50k each, which is a household income of £100k. They can afford a 4 bedroomed detached house.

I know, I know that there are vast numbers of people who do not earn those kinds of salaries but there are a lot who can. Housebuilding companies are commercial companies, they need to make a profit and they need to sell properties quickly. They are not charities or social enterprises.

If the government wants more smaller properties on accessible sites, which might well be loss making if built by a commercial property, then it just has to fund social housebuilding itself.

Before Mrs Thatcher, a third of all households lived in council houses. These were built because it was the only way that people on lower wages could access decent housing. On the commercial market they could only afford to rent slums. Let us get back to that. These houses gave security of tenure to those whose lives were often on a knife edge for money and work.

We are off to another meeting tonight to try & save a field, that’s a favourite with dog walker’s & families.
Lots of wildlife, bats, water vole that should be protected.
Yes could be used for AICentre we have been told, or many houses, although it is on a flood plain.
Two weeks left to object as council have obstructed getting any information. Board went up only 3 weeks ago.

I agree with Monica but I think the provision of council housing is a pipe dream now. Councils are strapped for cash and, unlike the situation in the sixties where large areas of inner city slum housing had to be cleared, in this city at least, the answer was to build a proportion of houses and maisonettes on green belt land on the edges of the city, and tower blocks and large brutalist housing schemes in the inner city, which were fine for a while but then people decided it wasn’t the way they wanted to live. As they moved out, a different less desirable demographic moved in. They became ‘sink estates’. Some of them are only now being resurrected from their former decline to be privately let, or sold.

It's not up to developers what houses are built, local housing policy dictates that depending on the location of the site.

Locally new housing is a mix of apartments and smaller houses of all sizes, to suit singles, and working couple and families, many social housing, with the emphasis on getting to work easily
Further away from town fewer smaller dwellings more retirement and executive homes, we have a lot of nymbys that don't want anything built near them and they are mostly being overruled.
The main worry of most is why so many, who is going to buy them but they are in demand and selling.

Ofcourse people need to live somewhere and live in houses too.
But if you walk around the New Town (Georgian houses) of Edinburgh in winter after dark you'll see very few lights on.
The rich folk who own these big houses often have a 2nd home where they escape to the sun.

I think an investigation into land ownership is long overdue.

I was told how many thousands of empty houses there are in Edinburgh alone.

I'll go away and look it up.

A quick AI search tells me that 7,000 houses are empty including 1500 council houses.

8½ thousand houses are currently being built. Not all suitable no doubt but surely there's a saving to be had.