Leaked analysis of a proposed new national housing formula reveals Tory-run local authorities outside London overall should deliver more than 30,600 extra houses every year. 

In contrast, Labour-run town halls would be asked to deliver 1,500 fewer homes each year. 

Areas such as Oxford, Epsom and Ewell, Sevenoaks and the Isle of Wight could all see a surge in house building, while Salford, Newcastle and Liverpool would see a large decrease.

The warning comes as around 30 Tory MPs are said to have joined a WhatsApp group aimed at opposing the plans, reports The Sunday Times.

Under the Commons Act 2006, land that has been used for informal recreation for at least 20 years by local people without challenge or permission can be registered as a village green. Once registered, it is protected from development.

Fears that the land might be built upon saw the Moorside Fields Community Group attempt to register the fields as a village green in 2008. The group won its case in the high court and the court of appeal. But the supreme court judgment, by a majority of three to two, has reversed the earlier decisions.

“This is a deeply worrying decision as it puts at risk countless publicly owned green spaces which local people have long enjoyed, but which, unknown to them, are held for purposes which are incompatible with recreational use,” said Nicola Hodgson, case officer for the Open Spaces Society, which campaigns for the protection of town and village greens. “We urgently need a change in the law to ensure our precious green spaces are protected.”

The county council, which owns the land, had objected on the grounds that the fields might be needed for the expansion of the local school. Some parents feared such a move would open up the school playing fields to the wider public, something that constituted a threat to pupil safety. Handing down its judgment in favour of the council, the court also quashed a separate attempt to grant three hectares of a wood in Surrey, owned by the NHS, village green status.

The ruling is a major setback for open space campaigners who have enjoyed mixed fortunes down the years. A House of Lords decision in 1999, approving the right of the village of Sunningwell in Oxfordshire to register a strip of land as a village green, saw similar applications mushroom across the country.

But the introduction of the Growth and Infrastructure Act in 2013 stipulated that land which had been subject to planning applications could not be granted village green status, staunching the flow of further registrations.

“This ruling reflects what’s going on at a broader level in our society,” Bebbington (local campaigner) said. “Every bit of green space has to be available for development because suddenly land is gold, especially to local authorities that don’t have any money. These spaces are community assets that help to keep us healthy and they are very important. They connect communities but they are taking them away from us.”

Swathes of green belt in the heart of England have been earmarked for new homes for people who may never exist, in a trend fuelled by the drive to double the number built annually nationwide, campaigners have warned.

Fields bordering ancient woodlands are among more than a dozen sites, around Coventry, which have been released from anti-sprawl protections. They will be ploughed up to build more than 11,000 new homes based on population growth predictions that demographers warn are likely to be over-inflated.

The city council believes it needs land to accommodate 42,400 new homes in the next 12 years, based on population predictions by the government’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), which predict the population will surge by almost a third between the last census, in 2011, and 2031. Green belt in neighbouring areas, including Warwickshire, Nuneaton and Rugby, has also been earmarked for housing to help Coventry meet its target.

Analysis presented at the British Society of Population Studies, in Cardiff, on Tuesday suggested homes earmarked for open fields were being planned for “ghosts”, because there is no wider evidence of the sharp predicted population growth. Just 15,000 new homes were needed, requiring the loss of far less green space.

Relaxing green belt restrictions would be highly unpopular with voters, campaigners have warned, after Boris Johnson promoted several advocated of major planning reform to his Cabinet.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England is expected to publish a new poll showing that 63 per cent of the population oppose changes making it easier for homes to be built on green belt land – the protected zones across the country designed to prevent urban sprawl.

£200million Government fund to pay for more homes on industrial land has resulted in the opposite effect, with fewer homes built on brownfield areas than before it was set up.

Official Government’s land use change statistics show that the proportion of new homes registered on previously developed land has fallen by 4 percentage points since 2014, when the fund was set up.

Yet over the same period the number of new residential addresses on supposedly heavily protected Green Belt land has increased by the same proportion – 4 per cent.

Separately, over the same period – 2013/14 to 2016/17 – the proportion of new residential addresses on the protected Green Belt land increased from 3 per cent to 4 per cent of all new homes built.

The Government’s record on building on brownfield sites was attacked by Labour which said minister’s commitment to building on brownfield sites was “hot air”.

The £200million fund was announced by Brandon Lewis, the current Tory party chairman and then then-Housing minister, in August 2014 so “councils across the country can now team up with developers and bid for government assistance to build thousands of new homes on previously-developed land”.

Mr Lewis published bidding criteria to create 10 housing zones on brownfield land, each able to deliver up to 2,000 new homes each.

The new zones, which will be outside London, should be large enough to deliver 750 to 2,000 properties and would help councils boost housebuilding on previously-developed land while safeguading the countryside, he said.

Councils are expected by Government to establish and have a plan to meet an ‘Objectively Assessed Need’ (OAN) for housing in their area, which takes into account issues such as projected population growth and future employment opportunities. Yet planning rules also state that this number should take into account constraints such as protected countryside.

CPRE research today shows that, since 2012, 24 councils out of the 62 local authorities for which there is clear data have heeded national policy and established housing targets in approved local plans lower than their OAN, with the majority reducing their targets due to environmental or countryside constraints. These include Chichester, Lewes and Wealden. Chichester reduced its target by 23% and Lewes by 30%. Other local authorities, such as Brighton, Watford, Hastings and Crawley, have reduced their targets by 50% or more (see Fig 1 below).

Other councils, however, have pursued the full OAN despite a high proportion of their land being protected countryside. In East Devon, the planning inspector accepted the local authority’s contention that OAN of 17,100 houses should be met in full because of high expected levels of job creation in the district. In Christchurch and East Dorset, where the local plan meets the objectively assessed need for 8,490 houses over 15 years in full, 84% of the area of the plan is covered by Green Belt, AONB and nature conservation land.

The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has “unlawfully discriminated” against Romany Gypsies wanting pitches in the green belt, the high court has ruled.

In a ruling likely to affect many other Travellers, a judge said both human rights and equality laws were breached by Pickles and his department “calling in” cases which would normally be considered by his planning inspectors.

The judge said Pickles was operating a legally flawed policy of “recovering” for his own consideration appeals by Travellers who claim there are exceptional circumstances for allowing them green belt sites.

Mr Justice Gilbart, sitting in London, said an inspectors’ decision was normally received within eight weeks of the end of an inquiry – but it could take six months or more for a decision letter for a called-in case.

No attempt had been made by Pickles and his ministers to follow steps required by the 2010 Equality Act to avoid indirect discrimination, and “substantial delays” had occurred in dealing with the appeals in violation of article 6 of the European convention on human rights, said the judge.

His test-case ruling was a victory for two Romany Gypsies – Charmaine Moore, a single mother with three children who is under threat of eviction from a site at North Cudham in the London borough of Bromley, and Sarah Coates, a disabled woman also with three children fighting to live temporarily on green belt land at Sutton-at-Hone near Dartford, Kent.

The judge said Pickles’ department had “coined and developed” a practice in 2013 and 2014 of calling in all, and then a majority, of green belt Traveller cases – most involving Romany Gypsies or Irish Travellers – “which discriminated unlawfully against a racial group”.

Without being prepared to openly challenge greenbelt and without taking the view that people should be allowed to live in rural settlements I fear we will end up with an increasing divide between the urban poor and the rural rich. Still I know many Hinterland readers will have different views. The article which has provoked these ruminations is about Northumberland and it tells us:

Northumberland County Council says a failure to keep pace with an ageing and increasing population has meant it is behind Government guidelines on housing numbers.

In a bid to plug the deficit, the council is proposing to “delete” green belt land around Hexham, Prudhoe and Ponteland “in order to deliver the level of economic and housing development required”.

Boundaries around Morpeth are also earmarked for adjustment in a consultation paper released by council leaders this week. Tensions are already high in rural areas of the county as a string of controversial developments await their fate around Darras Hall and Ponteland.

Last night Hexham MP Guy Opperman criticised the “attack on green belt” land and said the consultation paper meant his “worst fears were could be coming true”.

A spokesman for Northumberland County Council last night insisted the consultation was ongoing but said it was acting to ensure “the right amount of development in the right places to help it to thrive economically”.

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.”