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Sadiq Khan should be bold. He should rethink the green belt

No aspect of planning policy is quite as divisive, or as misunderstood, as the green belt. Covering some 16,000km2, England’s 14 green belts occupy one-eighth of England’s total area (equivalent to three-quarters of the area of Wales, if that’s your preferred unit of measurement).

London’s metropolitan green belt alone stretches from Haslemere in Hampshire to the North Sea—a distance of some 100 miles—and with an area of over half a million hectares is over three times larger than the city itself.

Although its origins precede the Second World War, the green belt was formally established by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which allowed planning authorities to protect open space with this designation. And while the policy has been extremely successful in achieving its original objective of constraining urban expansion, three-quarters of a century on, it’s surely time to reform this anachronistic policy and ensure it meets the needs of the modern world.

Among the marshes of estuary Essex and the undulating hills of Hampshire, there are motorways, waste transfer depots, landfill sites, distribution centres, poultry farms, golf courses and car parks that are all protected from development by the simple virtue of their presence within the green belt. Many areas of otherwise undeveloped space are of limited quality too.

One of the most prominent obstacles to a sensible discussion is the fact that the arguments for and against the green belt have become so utterly polarised. Listening to both sides of the debate, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we face a simple binary choice between the preservation of dwindling landscapes and concreting over every last inch of them. And yet, the green belt has actually grown in recent years. It’s preposterous to claim that it’s under threat.

While we can’t lay the blame for our pitiful national productivity solely at the feet of green-belt policy, it’s clear that our inability to build – whether it’s homes, railways or solar farms – in the places we need, is partly a product of misplaced constraints on development.

Lobby groups like the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) insist that any rethink of the green belt isn’t necessary, but these claims simply don’t stand up to scrutiny. Its latest State of Brownfield report confidently concluded that 1.2 million homes could be built on brownfield land alone, but this is only a quarter of the current shortfall, and certainly insufficient to meet future demands. Furthermore, many of the areas it proposed for new housing aren’t even in the places where need is most acute. I’m not aware of many CPRE members upping sticks from leafy Surrey to the post-industrial wastelands of northern Britain.

There’s a common misconception about the purpose of the green belt in the public sphere, with many mistakenly believing that its purpose is to protect precious rural landscapes. Close to where I live, campaigners against the Cockfosters car park development argued that planning permission should be refused because it would be visible from the green belt, as if the prospect of catching a glimpse of it whilst hurtling along the M25 was a prospect so horrific it didn’t bear thinking about.

In a poorly researched article in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins recently pondered why there wasn’t the same level of protection for the country’s rural parts in the same way that our cities are preserved by Conservation Areas. Any architect or planner could have pointed him towards a whole bunch of protections: AGLV, AONB, Ancient Woodland, SSSI, Ramsar and National Parks, to name a few. Rural areas in fact benefit from far more protections than our towns and cities do, but this is indicative of a wider misunderstanding of planning policy, where green belt is wrongly conflated with other designations that actually do pertain to landscape quality and biodiversity.

It is true that too many open spaces have been relinquished to low-quality, car-dependent sprawl, and nobody – other than the volume housebuilders – wants to see more of that. But, despite what the CPRE claims, we cannot build the homes our country needs on brownfield alone, so some release of open space is inevitable and probably desirable.

There’s a compelling argument that green-belt policy is actually damaging the valuable open spaces that the CPRE is keen to protect. Because building homes is so difficult in places with large areas of green belt, developers target sites beyond it, creating their unsustainable car-dependent sprawl on the outskirts of settlements instead.

Likewise, building new homes on brownfield land far from public transport makes little sense when we could instead cluster them around stations in rural areas, and as an added bonus, give millions of families convenient access to the countryside – something the CPRE claims to support. Not that this should be a free-for-all. Any release of green-belt land for development must be accompanied by robust masterplanning and design codes to ensure that when land is set aside, it is done in a way that is sustainable, accessible, and responsive to local character.

The amount of green belt that would need to be lost to provide a million new homes is so small that it’s little more than a rounding error. Even with modest densities, we’d lose just 1 per cent of the green belt to deliver a million homes. That’s a price worth paying.

Labour’s recent pronouncements in this respect are welcome – if vague . But there are encouraging signs from planning authorities, such as Enfield, that are prepared to tackle this challenge head-on. And emboldened by a lacklustre field of opposition candidates, the mayor of London might revisit his blanket opposition to green-belt release in the next iteration of his city-wide spatial plan. We can but hope.

It’s surely time to set ideology aside and face the fact that an evidence-based review of green-belt policy is long overdue. If we’re to have any chance of facing the challenges of the coming decades, we need to roll up our sleeves and, maybe, loosen our belts.

This article originally appeared in the Architects’ Journal.

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Rural stations are the key to building 1.2m homes in the right places

Perhaps we’ve been desensitised to the stark realities of the housing crisis, with the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the baby boomer generation (which, we need to remember, lived through very little genuine hardship in the post-war years) prevailing. But in other any functional democracy where 3.6 million young adults remained at home due to generational housing inequality, this would be a national scandal. According to some estimates, we are millions of homes short of where a country with our population should be.

The fact that none of the mainstream parties have yet to articulate a plan to address this crisis is a damning indictment of current political discourse. Not only is this a social failure, it’s an economic one too. Productivity in the UK is woefully low, with young people unable to relocate to where jobs are, or otherwise struggling with extended commutes. Worse still, a generation is delaying starting families as housing costs, employment precarity and overcrowding threaten to detonate a demographic time-bomb which nobody seems willing to defuse.

I live on the northern fringes of London, the final stop before the railway plunges into the capital’s green belt. In less than 30 minutes I can be in central London, on one of six or more trains that run every hour. There are many similar lines that extend out of London, providing convenient access both to the city and countryside for those who live close to them. It’s difficult to think of more appropriate locations for new homes.

Resistance to urban expansion is often (rightly) based on a fear of perpetuating low-density, car-dependent sprawl on the outskirts of our rural towns and villages. So it follows that, in order to create new homes less dependent on private vehicle ownership, we should instead look to optimise development around existing public transport networks. But how many homes might we build? And where?

Using various publicly-accessible data sources, I mapped every train station in England and examined the constraints on development around each. Anywhere at risk of flooding was excluded, as was land within national parks, existing urban areas, or those sites protected by landscape designations because of their quality or scientific interest. Green belt, though, I considered fair game: regardless of what the CPRE claims, it’s increasingly clear that we cannot deliver the homes we need on brownfield alone, and a pragmatic review of green belt policy is long overdue. Drawing an 800m radius around each station (equivalent to a 10 minute walk) and extracting constraints, I arrived at a pleasing 777 stations with development potential.

Not every one is close to a population centre, and some are used by only a handful of passengers each year. As there’s no easy method of measuring current or potential frequency of service, I pegged target densities to passenger annual numbers. Those stations closest to major cities were assigned 75 homes per hectare, those in remote areas much less. But even at modest densities this reveals a huge potential for delivering the new homes we need.

A case in point: Ashwell & Morden sits mid-way between London and Cambridge, with frequent services to both. Yet look at it on Google Maps and you’ll see the station is surrounded by little more than open fields. It’s not even in the green belt of either city. Even at modest densities, this site could accommodate 7,000 homes for some 30,000 people. Development of this scale, supported by a decent masterplan and robust design coding, could provide social infrastructure and sustainable travel for residents. And rolling out a similar approach to the rest of the country could be transformational in providing high-quality homes in sustainable locations such as this.

The familiar complaint from those in comfortable circumstances that we risk ‘concreting over the countryside’ doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when – even with these additional numbers – we’d lose less than 0.4 per cent of England’s rural space in the process (Britain’s roads take up around three times this area).

The coming general election could be a turning point in whether we take genuine steps to address generational inequality, particularly in respect of housing delivery. Building homes around rural stations won’t go the whole way to achieving this but, combined with other bold ideas, it could play a part.

This article was originally published in the Architects’ Journal.

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Croydon’s Conservative Mayor has put suburban resistance before home building

Announced with considerable fanfare in 2018, and becoming formal planning policy the following year, Croydon Council’s Suburban Design Guide supplementary planning document (SPD) was London’s first – and, even now, most ambitious – attempt at encouraging its woefully sparse outer areas to do more to meet the city’s housing needs.

The publication made no bones about its intentions. “The evolution of the suburbs to provide homes that will meet the needs of a growing population,” its introduction stated. It went on: “It must however be recognised that delivering approximately 10,000 homes in the suburban places of Croydon will result in an evolution of the existing character of suburban streets, and that the increased density of homes can impact on the amenity of existing residents if not properly managed.”

The guide was rightly heralded as a progressive and practical attempt to deliver new homes in those places best able to accommodate them, and it was quickly celebrated as an exemplar for how to sustainably densify the city’s fringes. Croydon’s in-house spatial planning team took home a planning award in 2019 and the guide was highly commended at the New London Awards the same year. From a personal point of view, it was an important reference for my architectural practice’s own small sites SPD in Lewisham, which was adopted by the council a year ago this month.

However, just three years on, Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide is no more. In May, the borough’s voters elected Conservative Jason Perry as their first Mayor. He had promised that one of his first acts if he won would be to revoke the “dreaded” SPD, which he claimed has “destroyed” Croydon’s character and led to the “destruction” of homes – a peculiar claim given the huge number of dwellings it had in fact enabled in a relatively short time.

The SPD had been produced in response to Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, which was first published in draft in 2017 but not formally adopted until March 2021. The Plan enshrined the need for the boroughs to consider the importance of small sites in meeting London’s housing needs. For the first time, every London planning authority was tasked with finding ways to encourage development on sites with a total area of less than a quarter of a hectare (roughly one third of a standard football pitch), with a ten-year small-site housing target set out in unequivocal terms.

Not only was this to be a way of delivering much-needed homes, the Plan also acknowledged the importance of nudging small-scale developers back to a market that had become dominated by a handful of volume housebuilders since the 2008 financial crash.

Inevitably, the draft Plan’s publication was met with hyperbolic outcry: a “war on the suburbs” is how Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff described the proposals, oddly failing to recognise that small-scale infill development tends to deliver a higher proportion of family homes than small flats; another bête noire of his.

After a robust challenge from several outer London boroughs, Khan was forced to dramatically reduce the small sites housing targets and blunt the “presumption in favour” the Plan had demanded. Having been required to deliver the highest absolute number of homes on small sites of any of the London planning authorities, Croydon Council received the greatest net reduction, with its ten-year target reducing from 15,110 to 6,410 – a drop of nearly 60%.

Croydon is one of London’s least dense boroughs, even when its 2,300 hectares of Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land are excluded from the calculation. At 65 people per hectare, it has around a third the population density of Islington. Its number of homes per hectare is broadly the same as other similarly sized outer boroughs, such as Barnet and Kingston. And, like those boroughs, it clearly can accommodate many more.

In its defence, Croydon has delivered a lot of new homes in the last decade and a half—more than any other borough—so it’s perhaps fair to argue that the council had indeed “played its part” in meeting the city’s housing need. Yet the figures are misleading. Much of Croydon’s new development is concentrated in the urban centre, where clusters of tall residential towers have sprung up around East Croydon station within easy reach of central London.

This is good. Less good, however, is the quality of much of this new housing. Until halted by the implementation of an Article 4 Direction, more new dwellings were created under dubious permitted development rights, which allow commercial buildings to be cheaply converted to residential outside conventional planning permission, in Croydon than in any other borough. It’s not a statistic to be proud of given the sub-standard quality and small size of many of them. Until the introduction of the Suburban Design Guide, the leafier southern wards had got away without making much of a contribution.

Aware of the inherently risky nature of small sites, and that developers interested in taking them on are less able to absorb the cost of delayed or unpredictable planning decisions, the guide presented a series of suburban intensification methods which, if employed, were highly likely to be nodded through.

The acquisition of a pair of suburban semis – of which Croydon has many thousands – could easily lead to their replacement with a small block of flats at the front of the plot and mews houses in the rear garden. In this scenario, there could be a net gain of up to ten homes with no loss of family housing. The guide demanded that new development be no lower than three storeys – a not unreasonable request if we are to have any hope of densifying London’s laughably sparse peripheral areas.

Of course, this inevitably meant that some areas of the borough would experience some change, but that is a small price to pay for living in this great city. There would be benefits too. As the guide’s introduction made clear, higher housing density inevitably attracts local amenities and better social infrastructure – shops, restaurants, schools, healthcare and community facilities – that might actually mean suburbanites wouldn’t need to hop into their giant SUVs quite so often.

It’s no surprise that those areas most resistant to the principle of intensification tend to lie on the city’s fringes, and often consider themselves to be residents of the Home Counties rather than London. The Green Belt itself is often declared as an unnecessary and anachronistic constraint on the capital’s growth. There is some truth in this, but we should start by turning our attention inwards a little: it is the sparsely populated “greyfields” of outer London we need to tackle first.

The citizens of the suburbs must accept that the evolution of local character is a small price to pay for easy access to everything this wonderful city has to offer – and that it is also their duty to enable others to do the same. Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide was a valiant and progressive attempt to achieve this. We should mourn its passing.

This article was originally published by OnLondon.