We need to build houses on a third more land, says planning minister
Whenever I drive past concrete urban sprawl on the edge of cities and larger towns I reflect that the greenbelt is suffocating people rather than protecting the countryside. This is especially the case with less than 10% of England being covered in buildings. Those in affluent areas who site how much brownfield lad could be developed miss the point (counter-urbanisation) that people dont want to live in dense cities.
I have to say I therefore find the comments set out in this article reasonable and compelling-as long as we dont somehow end up with the Government allowing developers to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”! A third more of the country needs to be developed and a halt has to be made to the construction of “pig ugly” modern housing, the planning minister, Nick Boles, has warned. The remarks will alarm defenders of the British countryside, but Boles insists this expansion is quite possible without building on protected greenbelt land. Housing has now been identified across the government as possibly the single quickest route to boosting growth, as well as one of the greatest failures in policy for the past 20 years.
The government has announced successive ideas to boost housebuilding, but many of them are long term, or are being held back by complex financing rules. Some cabinet ministers are fighting for an increase in capital investment dedicated to housebuilding in the autumn statement next week. Boles, seen as a social moderniser in the Tory party, has recently admitted that the government needs to focus rigidly on hard-edged economic issues.
On BBC2’s Newsnight, he says the “right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in” is a basic moral right on a par with a right to education. “We’re going to protect the greenbelt but if people want to have housing for their kids they have got to accept we need to build more on some open land. In the UK and England at the moment we’ve got about 9% of land developed. All we need to do is build on another 2-3% of land and we’ll have solved a housing problem.”