A Plan for York

The idea of a green belt has and enormous emotional pulls on most of us. Green belts are associated with peace, beauty and the production food that sustains us. We hold images in our minds like the landscapes of Van Gogh, Cezanne and Constable. For me, the archetypal image is the view from the ridge of Burham Downs looking south over the fields of the Weald of Kent. (However, this area isn’t actually designated as green belt.)

In our minds green belts prevent the sprawl of the urbanisation that pollutes the natural world. They transcend everyday perceptions. They are not in the eye of the beholders but are “things of beauty that are a joy forever”. They are ideals, independent of who perceives them. Designating an areas as greenbelt land sanctifies it making rational reasoning difficult.

We do not ask the question “Who benefits from green belt policies?” Timothy Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute gives an answer. The benefits of green belts are mostly to the upper middle class:

“But that’s the whole point of the green belt(s). In order to stop any housing or other economic growth anywhere near where upper middle class people who make their living in our most important cities might want to live. That’s the whole point of it all.”

As I said in Greenbelt in the York Local Plan (December 2018):

“The proposed green belt in The York Local Plan creates a lock on large scale housing development, making changes difficult for the next twenty years or more. It has the effect of preserving the planning gain captured by land owners and rewarding home owners by increasing the value of their property.”

I also noted that in the survey the Barker Report commissioned, greenbelt is ‘Land on the edge of towns and cities’. This survey found this was of concern to just 15% of respondents while ‘urban parks and playing fields’ were a concern to 48%. The survey method – three votes for each respondent – blunted the message: Parks, local to where people live, are very much more valued than green belt land.

In 2024 the government made proposals to define a subset of Green Belt land that is suitable for development. It called it “grey belt land” to describe “low quality” green belt land. It was introduced to address the UK’s housing shortage and the rigidity of existing green belt protections. It weakens the grip that green belt policy has on a new version of the York Local Plan.

In 2003 I wrote Greening the greenbelt. Here is an extract:

“The problem

Green belts are mechanisms for restricting the supply of planning permission. Green belt policy is usually regarded as the one strong weapon planners have against developers who would destroy our environment; our environment which is free for us all, rich and poor, to enjoy. But, in reality, it:

— Increases in the value of land with planning permission
— Gives massive rewards to the affluent (owners of property and land)
— Penalises the poor and the young
— Rewards those that pollute the most – the affluent
— Protects green fields of monoculture with little biodiversity”

For a fuller discussion see Greenbelt in the York Local Plan (2018).