Green belt 'not sacred' says Policy Exchange

Michael Donnelly, PlanningResource, 26/08/2008.

Green belt: not a rural idyl

The green belt is "not sacred" and should be built on to allow more affordable housing, the Policy Exchange think tank has said.

Writing in Total Politics magazine, Policy Exchange chief economist Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich said even the term itself is misleading and the government should tackle the "myth" that land is a scarce resource in England.

He said the debate around the green belt should be conducted in a "less emotional" tone and local communities should be given more power to decide where homes are built.

Hartwich said: "Why is there such a gap between perception and reality? Perhaps because people have been told again and again that open land is disappearing.

"England has no lack of open space. Even if urban areas were expanded by 10 per cent this could be achieved by using less than one per cent of the total land mass. That would still leave 89 per cent of the country untouched by development."

More than 1.6 million hectares in England, 12.9 per cent of the land, are officially classed as green belt, he said.

But Hartwich said the green belt was not a rural idyl and much of it was instead home to industrialised agriculture.

Hartwich's comments come a week after a policy exchange report suggested that the north of england is beyond recovery and that people living in the north should move to the prosperous south.

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