To think Green Belt Areas should not be built on.....no matter what?

[jessicawessica]

Am so fed up of councils grabbing Green Belt areas in order to build new houses without taking into account the impact this has.
I live in a small village where the council have decided it's a good idea to build basically a whole new village on the supposed green belt area.
Do they not realise the impact this will have?.
New roads will need to be built in a village that already has crawling traffic. The school is full. We don't have a GP surgery, and the site they have chosen will impact greatly on our castle remains.
Anyone else felt totally impotent if this has happened in their home town?

Do you own your own home OP?

Thanks Moan v. informative. I assumed that green belt would be some form of meadow-type affair and support general insect and bird life and therefore be valuable for that, rather than anything too specific. I'll look into it further though, thanks.

Don't we need greenbelt for environmental reasons though? Wildlife habitats

My house is quite small but it has another building at the side. I cannot knock down the side building and join it onto the main house because the 1 meter wide “alley” between the 2 buildings is green belt and I cannot build on that bit even though there would be an extra metre at the boundary.

Whilst I agree with not building on the Green Belt there are several derelict houses in our area because they are not worth renovating as they are too far gone. The council wouldnt let the people rebuild so the houses were left as they were not fit for purpose.

No I do not own my home.

They should knock a couple of rows of houses down in towns and suburbs and pop in some tower blocks - no? This is a good way of increasing number of residences so why not.

I'd happily move to the Barbican Maddening if that would help?

Yeah sure that works..

Housing is such a massive problem, but no new ideas about how to house more people with less negative impact on the environment. Instead just reams and reams of identikit new homes. Tower blocks would be a fabulous idea if anyone actually wanted to live in them. We definitely need some new ideas.

In the city that I live there are loads of spaces in the cities with old derelict factories etc. Close to the city centre. There is a whole big area that would be great for redevelopment and I dont understand why they dont build houses there first. Its big enough they could incorporate a decent amount of green space as well. I dont know if it's the higher costs of development if you're dealing with contaminated land, or people just want to live in established suburbs in detached houses rather than flats? But seems mad to use greenbelt when there is plenty space

I agree that infrastructure should be built at the same time as the new houses. However I have no problem with green spaces being built on. We need more housing. And I live in a beautiful village with only around 150 houses. It wouldn’t bother me at all if more houses were built in/around the village and have said this on many occasions including questionnaires sent out by the parish council.

Only around 95% of the UK is built in. There is plenty of room, people shouldn’t all be crammed into already over crowded City’s.

What I also need to ask is what is your solution to the housing crisis? I work in a local authority and the demand for both social housing and private housing far exceeds supply. Affordability is a huge issue.

Large parts of east London just outside zone 1 would be vastly improved by replacing the existing buildings with luxury tower blocks. Lots are being built purely on the initiative of the private sector, but I feel government should compulsory purchase most of the buildings on either side of the main roads and redevelop the area completely. Going from two to five stories to 25 stories high would create more than enough gain to compensate the current occupants of the buildings, and a currently grotty the area would become much nicer. Even people who don't like high-rises can't possibly think that the current state of these areas is more attractive or well-utilised than the high-rise alternative. (It's always claimed that British people don't like high-rises, yet strangely the private sector is have no trouble finding people willing to pay to occupy two-bedroom flats costing a million pounds each.) (So what if these high-rises aren't built for poorer people, the people occupying them are leaving cheaper housing elsewhere free.)

There is plenty of room, people shouldn’t all be crammed into already over crowded City’s.

I live in a nice enclave of an area that I'm advocating rebuilding parts of. Next door to me 1800 flats in several luxury tower blocks are being built. I don't feel at all crammed, I welcome the tower blocks as a vast improvement on the ugly commercial buildings they replaced. I suspect the extra concentration of residents will help support more facilities and amenities, though I admit I can't thick of any I lack. I have lots of green space and am within walking distance of almost everything I need to live my life, including jobs. There are huge benefits to concentrating people together in a small amount of space, as long as the space has everything they need and is nicely built and maintained.

This is what being crammed into a city means to me:-

Within walking distance from my home:-
Several primary schools
A few secondary schools
Two GP surgeries
NHS dentist (and some private ones)
The major London teaching hospital where my daughter was born
Another well-known London hospital where I've been treated once.
Public swimming pool
A few parks
One sports ground
Various gyms
Tens/hundreds of thousands of jobs, many among the most highly paid in the UK (City of London.)
One medium-sized supermarket
Two places that can service/repair the car I don't really need...
Three places I can get my hair cut
Four tube stations and a couple of DLR stations
Four mainline railway stations
Countless restaurants and pubs.

There's probably more, but hopefully people are getting the idea by now.

Petty I’m glad for you, but not e Euronext living in a city has the same thoughts or experiences as you. Many do feel overcrowded.

gosh excuse typos!

How about this, Petty - live in North Manchester, seven miles from the city centre in threatened green belt between two towns which are both on the bones of their arses. Two trains an hour to the city centre, ditto buses. Nothing after 2230. A taxi back at night costs £30. Hourly services on Sundays. My 6 mile commute takes me an hour to drive - I cycle it in half that, but that's not suitable for everyone. My nearest GP is 3 miles away. I need a medication review for my HRT and the first opportunity is 34 days away. Nearest supermarket is 45 mins walk away. Nearest cinema is 6 miles away.
My area is already cramped - we have no room or infrastructure for anyone else. It's the first bit of countryside you hit if you go north out of Manchester - birds, farms, deer, owls, stables - and it's in the suburbs. If we lose this, all we'll have left is Saddleworth Moor, a load of warehouses, and exec homes with two or three cars in the drive.

Central Government gives each Council a target housing number that they have to provide within a certain period, this is called a 5 year housing land supply. Council determines the target which central government can over-ride. Council are lobbied by developers to increase the target, since the higher the target, the more need for greenfield (not the same as green belt) sites in the 5-year supply, and greenfield are cheaper to build on. Can't blame the developers - their loyalty is to their shareholders - if you want a social good, you don't just cross your fingers and hope the free market will provide it.

you cannot get planning permission if there is not enough school places, or highway capacity. True, but sites with planning permission but not yet built on aren't included - you can't object on the grounds that "Beacon's Field has planning permission for 800 houses", only for the infrastructure use from those houses already there.

I'm pissed off because my local town was designated along with two others as a single entity (can't remember the term) which means we're losing the strips of green that divide the separate townships, and the next two villages along are having major development - which means instead of feeling on the fringe of the city, we now have to drive for 15 mins to feel we're in the country.

But the alternative to expanding into the countryside is to fill in all the green spaces in towns, and that's not exactly attractive either.

I don't think it's the councils as such that grab the Green belt.
Locally there is a new development next to the River Windrush in an area prone to flooding. The locals petitioned against the developers due to fears over the impact on the landscape and wildlife.
A petition against the plans had over 2,500 signatures, before the application was rejected by West Oxfordshire District Council in 2014.
But the developers ignored the rejection and the public wishes and appealed to then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid.
Mr Javid obliged the developers. So much for the local democracy, it can be easily overruled by the powers above who are not affected by their own decisions.
As for the developers, they will ruin the Green belt, disrupt the lives of anyone living in the vicinity, and move onto another avaricious project. What do they care?

Only around 95% of the UK is built in. Figures quoted usually count everyone's back gardens as greenspace. The reason so many people are desperate to save their local greenspace is that there is so little that you have access to, even in the wider since of having a view over it as you walk along the other side of the fence.

sense not since

That all sounds great Petty, but we don't have any of that infrastructure here.
We have a small Tesco express, 1 small primary school, nowhere to get your car mended, no GP surgery, no dentist, 1 small park/recreation area, no post office, no chemist, no cinema and 1 castle.
Unless the developers are prepared to put all that in as well as a new road system, then we will be stuffed (literally).

I used to until I bought a house in a town Center. Now I’m not so sure. The area we live in is a huge borough of London. We moved a 5 minute walk from our local town and rail station which is lovely. However under the Lord Mayors plan each borough has to produce- I think, 2,400 new homes every year. Our town Center seems to be bearing the brunt of the development every year. The borough is huge and has massive swathes of green belt. It also has other council wards which don’t want anything built anywhere placing fierce opposition to the creation of schools etc that we badly need as there are nowhere near enough places.
My town Center is going to be demolished on one side and have rows and rows of up to 14 story buildings and smaller buildings also put right down one side over a massive space. The dust and debris from this plan which extends over the next 20 years will no doubt be blown down the hill towards our home. Along with the construction noise. People are being evicted from beautiful old properties with forced purchase by the council in order to build.
There are no plans to build new primaries because all new schools are created at the whim of academy chains in our borough. The council say they have no ability to create or force creation of schools to match the increasing housing development. They have said the same about the creation of doctors surgeries, hospitals blaming NHS England for not stepping forward, and nursery provision is not being extended in a planned way to go along side the homes. There should be a requirement under the London plan to provide hospital beds nursery and school places in tandem with property and only allow property to be built in this case. There is wooly wording in the plan that is easy for councils to dodge. They also have no way of supporting the new traffic created, and cannot even provide parking for the vast majority of homes to be created. It feels like our once beautiful town is being pushed past anything like sensible capacity. People deserve to live in environments that are balanced, and now I’m starting to think there has to be some strategy to build further into green belt in order to maintain a tolerable and healthy environment where there are already dense populations that will only get more dense. However I would say that any building into green bet should be heavily regulated so that any new towns and areas can’t end up like ours will be in the future. As things are I think we might end up with swathes of overcrowded grey towns that will just be miserable and empty green belt.

As part of planning, developers (generally) sign up to a Section 106 agreement. It stipulates amounts of money to be paid by the developer towards different local services, schools, library, healthcare, local play facilities, sports facilities etc. It can be worked on an amount per dwelling. The idea being that the local services and area aren't disadvantaged by the development being built.
In a lot of cases, no one would agree to large infrastructure being built upfront because of cashflow.

Shotat-
Yes this is what could happen if the local council here were interested. Take a look at the Bromley Master Plan it’s gigantic. Council won’t encourage schools. Councillors don’t want schools in their own wards because of resident opposition everywhere. They blame the nhs for not providing provision. It’s a disgrace. The library is under threat, and there is no planned parking for the majority of new homes. These massive building projects are not being properly legislated. They must have to work to rule. Given the option they just don’t.

Surely the infrastructure should be put into place first. What's the point in building new houses if the people moving into them have no access to GPs, schools, etc?