Release of 2% of green belt land could provide 2.5m homes, says report

The report, named The Green Noose (60-page / 343 KB PDF), said that the protection of green belt land inflated house prices, increased the need for transport and encouraged urban densification, placing pressure on valued green spaces in urban areas. It said that much of the land within the green belt was intensively farmed and of low environmental quality compared to the more biodiverse urban green spaces being lost in order to preserve it.

The ASI said its preferred policy initiative would be to entirely abolish the green belt and to protect areas of environmental, heritage or amenity value through means other than green belt designation. It said that this policy, or alternatively the removal of green belt designations from all intensive agricultural land, would "solve the UK's housing shortage and stimulate economic growth without the loss of any land of environmental, heritage or amenity value".

The ASI said removing green belt designations from intensive agricultural land within 0.5 miles of a railway station "would go a long way to solving the housing crisis in the medium term". It calculated that "simply removing restrictions on land 10 minutes' walk of a railway station would allow the development of one million more homes within the green belt surrounding London alone".

"Britain faces an acute housing crisis, especially around its major metropolitan centres," said Tom Papworth, the author of the report. "Yet land is available in abundance. It is a myth that Britain is densely populated or highly built-up compared to similar countries. London could meet its additional housing need for the next decade on just 3.7% of green belt by building only on intensive farmland within half a mile of an existing railway station."

"Official justifications for green belt policy are based on ambiguous or confused concepts, while the popular belief that green belts are environmentally beneficial and enable citizens to access green space is untrue," said Papworth. "In fact the opposite is the case: green belts are actively harmful to the environment as a third is intensive farmland and it necessitates more road and railway construction; protecting green belts puts pressure on urban green space which people visit far more regularly."