Posted by Paul Cheshire, SERC and LSE
The planning
system is supposed to safeguard amenity, our wild places and the environment. I have already exposed how it signally failed to protect the shifting sands
of Menie from the Trump golf development. I also argued here that refusing to allow any development on Greenbelt
land inevitably led to ever higher house prices, a more volatile housing market
and to the loss of environmentally valuable or amenity-rich places such as ex-MoD
land, grounds of former hospitals or recreation grounds (owned by government or
the planning authorities themselves, who in cash-strapped times face a a grave
temptation to develop).
These problems
are nicely illustrated by recent worries about the future of the nightingale. Suddenly
conservation groups have woken up to the imminent loss of the the most important breeding site for nightingales in England. Simon Jenkins (who is also President of the National Trust) rightly and powerfully lamented the
coming loss - blaming it on "planners’ inability to tell a woodpigeon from a
nightingale". The bitter irony is that he is tragically and dangerously wrong in his diagnosis.
One might argue that among the
culprits, the conservation groups themselves have inadvertently played a
leading role in getting us in to this mess. We desperately need land for
housing. Thanks in large part to the misguided campaigns of conservation groups
our planning system has been systematically not providing such land for two
generations, pushing house prices and rents beyond the reach of young people.
Why does this
mean that conservation groups share in the blame? Because not only have they
been the most vocal and influential lobbyists against relaxing the planning
restrictions on land release by one iota, but they have enthusiastically
supported ‘building on brownfields’. Apart from being no solution to the
housing land crisis, brownfield land is very frequently amenity-rich. The tragic
irony is that the nightingales chose to breed on ex-MoD land (the Lodge Hill site on Medway’s HooPeninsula). So it is exactly
the type of land the National Trusts and the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds (RSPB) favour for development.
.
When the debate
and lobbying against the draft National Planning Policy Framework was in full
swing about back in 2011, the CPRE, RSPB and National Trust joined forces to campaign
against any relaxation of planning restrictions. No building on the Greenbelt! Build
only on Brownfield sites! were their cries. The case of the nightingale
provides just one example of the unintended consequences.
Worse, perhaps,
is that the true enemy of our threatened wildlife like the nightingale is not
housing but agricultural intensification, boosted by rising agricultural land
prices. Back in 1969 (in an article with John Bowers) I argued that as farmland becomes more expensive, so every scrap is used more and more
intensively and the wild things are forced out. But the reason farmland prices
have been rising so extravagantly (11,000 percent in the past 60 years, according to the Telegraph) is no longer mainly agricultural subsidies (as
it was in 1969), it is the handy 100 percent tax avoidance value of farmland that the very rich use to pass on their
money to their heirs. There is now more bio-diversity in
back gardens than on English farms.
There is no need
for affordable housing and nightingales to be in conflict. They are brought
into conflict by two terrible policies: tax loopholes for farmland and not
enough land available for housing because of urban containment policies and
building on brownfield obsessions. We can and should have both wildlife
habitats and houses. The problem is the blanket preservation from development
of land whose value is mostly for avoiding taxes: intensively farmed
agricultural land surrounding our big cities.
To solve our crisis in the supply
of housing land we need release just a tiny proportion of our greenbelts of the
very lowest environmental quality. To put all of this in context, greenbelts
cover an area nearly half as big again as all our developed land put together
and we certainly would not need to build on ‘all of it’ – or anything remotely
like - to make a big difference to housing affordability.
In fact, this
can even be win-win. Providing houses where people want to live with the gardens
people seek would improve the
existing environment and increase bio-diversity! Intensively farmed land has a
negligible - even negative - environmental value and is almost sterile from the
point of view of wild life; take a look at the 2011 National Ecosystem Assessment. That is the sort of land we should be allowing houses to be
built on. The vehement opposition to building on any intensively farmed greenbelt
land fails to recognise it for what it is – almost worthless from a social,
environmental or amenity perspective.
Just a tiny fraction would solve our
housing problems and take all the pressure off rare habitats like the Hoo
Peninsula and other ex-MoD land. That may be legally ‘brownfield’ but is mostly
a wonderland of semi-natural habitat. If you want to hear another iconic
songbird – the skylark – visit a tank range. The public needs ex-MoD land to be
preserved in its semi-natural state and as much access secured as is possible. We
need this almost as much as we need more houses near jobs.
