Labour’s green belt policy remains a grey area

It’s all change at the top as Labour finally gets it hands on the keys to No 10 after being locked out in the cold for the last 14 years – and they’ve wasted no time in rolling up their sleeves and getting down to business.

There was no leisurely lie-in for the new government on the post-election weekend.  Rather, the new cabinet held their first meeting at Downing Street on the Saturday, with the new PM, Keir Starmer, saying that they’re “hitting the ground running”.

Taking him at his word, Rachel Reeves delivered her first speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Monday outlining the steps the new government is already taking on the economy.

The headline-grabber was planning reform. Reeves intends to make it easier for projects to get the go ahead. She said that Labour would end the “absurd ban” on new onshore wind farms in England and bring them into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) regime, so that decisions can be taken at a national not local level.

Similarly with house-building, Reeves said Labour will not accept a status that “relegates the national interest below other priorities”. To achieve its aim of 1.5 million new homes in England over the next five years, it will bring back mandatory targets for local authorities, create a task force to unlock stalled sites, fund 300 additional council planning officers and introduce the concept of ‘grey belt’ to identify land for development within green belts.

Reeves’ five-year target implies 300,000 homes will be built annually but construction ‘starts’ in England fell 22% to only 134,780 dwellings in 2023-24 as higher interest rates took their toll. The lion’s share of these – 104,310 – were private sector starts with housing associations and local authorities contributing 27,490 and 2,980 respectively.

On those figures, it is hard to see how the overall total can be more than doubled without all three contributors lifting their output substantially. As Fiona Fletcher-Smith, chief executive of L&Q, a major housing association, told Housing Today: “The private sector alone cannot deliver the homes London and the country need. Not-for-profit housing associations, with the right support, can play their role.”

Writing for LocalGov, William Nichols of the planning consultancy, Lanpro, agreed that delivering 1.5 million homes would be “a very tough challenge” and pointed out that reclassifying green belt land as ‘grey belt’ would “inevitably face opposition from environmental groups and local residents.”

Meanwhile, right on cue, the Countryside Council for England called for clarity on Labour’s definition of ‘grey belt’ and said green belt is “next door for 30 million people” living in towns and cities and “crucial for food security, nature recovery, climate change mitigation alongside mental and physical wellbeing”.

Opponents of green belt development are often dismissed as NIMBYs but they do appear to have public opinion generally on their side. A YouGov poll following Reeves’ speech found strong opposition to the policy, with two-thirds (67%) against and less than a quarter (23%) viewing it as acceptable.

It looks like Reeves has a communications mountain to climb that is as steep as the increase in housebuilding she wants to achieve. She acknowledged this in her speech but made clear that, if persuasion fails, the government will not “succumb” to pressure “by always saying no” to development proposals.

As planning is a devolved matter, Labour’s ‘grey belt’ policy applies only to England. However, as Reeves was speaking, the prime minister was meeting Wales’s first minister Vaughan Gething in Cardiff and declaring that they were “resetting relations” between the two governments “to deliver change for the people of Wales.”

What this will mean in practice is not yet clear, but it seems unlikely it will involve a change in policy on green belts given that the Welsh Government’s legislative programme announced last week includes an Environmental Principles and Biodiversity Bill that will introduce legal targets to protect and restore biodiversity.

It will certainly be interesting to see how Reeves’ planning reforms and Gethings’ biodiversity bill emerge from their respective parliamentary processes. But, in the meantime, private housebuilders, housing associations and local authorities will be pressing on with their development projects – and they will certainly need to hone their messaging to take stakeholders with them.

This article was written by our chief executive, Angharad Neagle, and featured in the Western Mail on 15 July 2024

Freshwater’s sister company, Waterfront Conference Company is hosting a one day conference on Planning for Infrastructure in Wales on 3 October. More details can be found here.