Jennifer Smith, 17 February 2019, Tags:
Not enough! The Conservatives are not ‘safeguarding’ the Green Belt but in effect reserving it for future housing.
Set up mainly to protect the countryside and prevent urban sprawl, Green Belts have been given protection for decades. This is now being challenged by the Government in its efforts to free up more land for housing.
Thousands of homes have already been approved in the Green Belt around Greater London. It is under threat across Surrey. Councils such as Mole Valley, Reigate and Banstead and Tandridge are considering allocating land for housing, including a huge scheme at Redhill Aerodrome for circa 8,000 new homes.
The tragedy is that building more homes will not resolve the housing crisis – because it’s about affordability.
Our area has one of the UK’s highest gaps between house prices and incomes, at around 12 times salary. So families and key workers are finding it more and more difficult to secure ownership of a decent home. Evidence shows that if we were able to build 300,000 homes a year nationally prices might only fall by 5-10%. Locally, such homes will still be unaffordable for many.
Local Plans set out where we will plan to build and Reigate and Banstead Council has said that without new homes, children of local residents “will be forced to move away”. Let’s be clear, this issue will not be solved by building executive homes in the Green Belt.
We need genuinely affordable homes, and that includes those for social rent. Developers should not be able to avoid providing them (using the viability test). In Reigate and Banstead, the Green Party has identified potential development sites that, combined with higher densities, will deliver more homes, in the urban areas, reducing any case to ‘safeguard’ large Green Belt sites for future housing.
