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'Bulldoze local blocks on housing' - there goes more beautiful green space then!

29 replies

Rainyday35 · 11/10/2023 16:01

I'm not a tory but quite honestly i'm nervous about what a Labour government would mean. This statement alone from Starmer today seems quite bullish! Where i live we have had many new houses/flats built but the prices are so obscene noone can afford to buy them! Don't think it's property that is the problem, more the price!

OP posts:
MintJulia · 11/10/2023 19:08

On the contrary, @Emmalin agricultural land is cheapest to develop because there are no clean up costs. And that's exactly what Labour is proposing.

StowOnTheWold · 11/10/2023 21:03

BristolBlueGlasses · 11/10/2023 16:56

But isn't the land around towns and cities precisely what green belt is? A buffer to prevent urban sprawl. Expanding existing settlements by 10% will by definition be building on that buffer.

Building there will not protect the 10% countryside around our towns and neither will it improve transport, infrastructure or quality of life for the people who live on the fringes of those areas now.

Hear hear to what @enchantedsquirrelwood said above.

You might find it useful to look at where Green Belt lies in England. It is a buffer to prevent coalescense and only applies to England. Capital G and capital B is normally used as it has a legal definition.

https://urbanistarchitecture.co.uk/resources/green-belt-map/

Green Belt is not 'green land' which is a loose term to describe something that is neither brownfield nor Green Belt and nor protected land such as National Parks. Most green land is farm land and because land is used in some way you will find farmland adjacent to all other land unless it is unusable such as marshland. A golf course is brownfield incidentally and so is disused quarry that could be a nature reserve one day.

Broadly, when we talk about green land we are talking about building on farmland. Going back to my earlier post, is it better for us as a nation to (1) build on Green Belt (2) build new towns in the middle of nowhere or (3) build on those green fields adjacent to existing settlements (ie non-Green Belt). My view is (3) is the better option for a variety of reasons but mainly the loss of our natural world and the loss of the perception of tranquility fundamentally changes our places. We still have some tranquil areas as opposed to many built up countries such as the Netherlands.

Note that building out 10% of half our settlements is equal to the number of new homes that Labour will pledge. With no new towns. And if we look at only half of these then we can ensure those Green Belt settlements are in protection.

@enchantedsquirrelwood raises some excellent points. I will come back to this thread a bit later.

There are though many brownfield sites that could be used for housing. The majority of new out of retail parks built in this Century are half empty. These are not traditional High Streets, so they are a failure of planning and retail to keep track of each other. There is no joined up thinking anywhere.

In fact, they have built enormous sheds on green land the other side of the retail parks to store goods for Amazon because people want home delivery. Who gave them consent for that when they could have repurposed the existing almost redundant retail parks? We know it is 'easier' to build on green land because it is cheap and has no recycling costs.

There is much for Labour to get to grips with here. It will be a challenge and one they can rise up to, but they need to be aware they are dealing with a few very rich and powerful people in the property sector who play a very hard game when it comes to controlling land in England. Most of these people run private family companies out of the public domain and have more money than they could ever need. These are the people lobbying the Conservatives to abolish Inheritance Tax. These make up the majority of the 4% who rightly pay it. I know who they are.

Green Belt Map - Updated for 2023

Interactive Green Belt map covering all local authorities in England. Just type in the postcode to see if your site lies within the Green Belt in 5 seconds.

https://urbanistarchitecture.co.uk/resources/green-belt-map

StowOnTheWold · 11/10/2023 21:15

DoraSpenlow · 11/10/2023 17:06

Please no more big estates on fields, we can't move around here for building sites (Somerset - I don't recognise Taunton any more). It's the same where my brother lives in the South east. All seemingly on agricultural land. They are just about to start developing grazing land near me. Tragic.

But is it better to build out Nether Stowey 10%, Wellington 10%, Cannington 10% etc, etc. than add say 25% to Taunton?

Or build a completely new town in the middle of Somerset - perhaps "Hemyock Keynes"?

If a new town has to go somewhere it is more likely to be Somerset, Suffolk or Oxfordshire than Sussex, Surrey or anywhere else on the edge of the M25.

25 acres on the edge of Taunton is not really tranquil anymore, but 25 acres in the Blackmore Vale still is.

I am against new towns and in favour of expanding existing places. The problem is it the cost unless Labour can do something about that. Which they have alluded to.

StowOnTheWold · 11/10/2023 21:20

Emmalin · 11/10/2023 17:12

I can only speak for my town, but all the sites I'm thinking of here are owned by developers but not built on, for years. They buy it and put it in the books as an asset. So no one else can build on it, and they won't, because they want assets to borrow against.

They release it when they can maximise profit based on economic conditions - growth in house sales, competitive interest rates, national economic performance, ABC consumer types etc.

Most developers have landowners locked into a 5 or 10 year development agreement. If they have 10 landowners locked into a particular area, they can cherry pick which site to bring forward based on each local area plan. The 5-10 year lock in means they hold land back under a legally binding contract.

And yes, you are absolutely right developers do not give a stuff about house owners.

The Help to Buy Scheme pumped an enormous amount of public money into the first time buyer market. It was well thought out but a bit naive. Government did not imagine housebuilders would plunder the scheme by raising house prices to leave the cost neutral in buyers' hands.

Just leave this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Fairburn#:~:text=In%20March%202017%2C%20Fairburn%20agreed,being%20asked%20about%20the%20bonus.

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