I have a letter on the Green Belt in the Times, a response to a piece by Tim Montgomerie criticising the Conservatives for their ‘appeasement of the nimby vote. A near-theological protection of green belt land explains why millions of young people can’t afford to buy a home. Planning restrictions remain the most impoverishing form of red tape in British public life.’
I admire Tim Montgomerie’s concern for people in need – he wrote a passionate article earlier this year about the humanitarian imperative to rescue economic migrants trying to get to Europe. But on UK housing, I wish he would move beyond the glib, unevidenced assumption that releasing more greenfield land must result in more housing. I wish, too, that he would try harder to understand why people – reasonable people – might object to new housing, and what might need to change to persuade them to accept it. Simply condemning them achieves nothing.
Here is the full version of my letter (the printed version is slightly shortened).
It is depressing that Tim Montgomerie peddles the line that we need to build on the Green Belt to resolve the housing crisis (It’s a myth that Tory modernisers won the day, May 14).
CPRE has established that there is enough suitable brownfield land for at least a million new homes, much of it in London and the South East. No one has contested these figures. The problem is not land, it is getting the houses built.
The major house builders have plenty of land with planning permission, but they dribble out supply. The small builders who once built two-thirds of private sector homes, now build less than a third and their market share is falling. And the state, which built over half the houses when we comfortably built over 200,000 homes every year, now builds very few. It spends on housing benefit, much of which goes to buy-to-let landlords, what it used to spend on building homes.
Meanwhile, for all the protestation of politicians that the Green Belt is safe, it is being it is being steadily eroded across England while brownfield sites go to waste. Tim Montgomerie should stop taking his lines from the developer-funded, anti-planning think-tanks. We need more houses, and some of them will inevitably go on greenfield sites. But we need to build with care. Simply dismissing those who care about the countryside as Nimbys is playground politics.
CPRE viewpoint 
“steadily eroded across England while brownfield sites go to waste”
Can you point to a single year when the area of green belt protected land has fallen?
“brownfield land for at least a million new homes, much of it in London and the South East. No one has contested these figures. The problem is not land, it is getting the houses built.”
Yes and the CPRE is yet to explain how to make these financially viable without massive public subsidy. In fact the main CPRE prescription of further restricting land supply makes them less viable and less open to smaller builders.
The CPRE is as guilty as any think-tank of promoting a single ideological solution and trying to make it fit any given problem.
Greenfield vs Brownfield might be a hugely successful marketing campaign but it’s just hot air, solves nothing and has whipped up the public into an anti-homes frenzy.
Lawrence,
Planning permission has already been granted for over 210,000 houses to be built on green belt land in the next 15 years.
I would call that erosion of the green belt.
Thank you Shaun, it is a line I have been shouting for long enough. Years ago I was speaking to a rep of a big house builder and he challenged me to point out brownfield sites in my local town. I named several and he shut up. Also I am a big believer in local authority owned houses available for long term rental. It worked inbetween the wars and after the Second World War until the sell off.
Shaun,
Thank you very much indeed for responding to Montgomerie’s piece in The Times.
I read the article and was depressed at Montgomerie’s dismissive attitude to the green belt whilst presenting no evidence supporting his attitude.
Unfortunately a number of commentators adopt the same shallow approach to the subject.
If anyone doubts that brownfield can be developed viably, may I invite them to my parish of The Stukeleys where they will see great strides being made by Urban&Civic in developing a major brownfield site into an enterprise campus with 8,000 jobs and a new residential community of 5,000 homes. The site is a large disused Cold War American airfield – and as complicated as any site could be in terms of clearing it of its past. If it can be done on such a complex site, it can be done anywhere.
Why does Shaun Spiers always write articles with scaremongering headings like this? The Green Belt is 1.7 million hectares – 13% of England’s area – that’s enough for at least 50 million homes. But we only need 1 million homes to make up the deficit of the last few decades and then we need to build 250,000 a year to meet future population growth. So to claim that THE Green Belt (i.e. all of it) is at risk of being destroyed is just drivel. Why not stop the scaremongering and accept that just a tiny, tiny fraction of the GB is what is being talked about? Take Cambridge – with a tight Green Belt it has 40,000 driving into the city every day causing pollution and misery for all concerned. Yet the city is surrounded by so-called green belt that has no aesthetic, agricultural or amenity value. I could show you dozens of scrubby fields occupied by horses. This is not a sustainable approach to planning. Let’s create compact cities that meet the needs of their residents and are allowed to grow organically with proper infrastructure, creating new green lungs that are accessible to the public. Let’s put an end to the polluting jumping of the green belt that is a symptom of an outdated policy.
“then we need to build 250,000 a year to meet future population growth”
250,000 a year until when? It’s a straightforward enough question and yet appears never to be addressed.
Well Alfred,
Unfortunately, Shaun & the CPRE establishment cant bring themselves to campaign against never ending Population Growth, which spurs eternal housing demand, which demands ever more countryside should be developed.
So the answer to your question is, if you accept CPRE’s stance that Population Growth should not be campaigned against or resisted, FOR EVER.
CPRE accepts growing housing demand should be accepted FOR EVER.
So how can CPRE be trying to protect the countryside – it just doesn’t add up – does it ?
Robert, the relationship between population growth and housing demand is less clear than you suggest; the relationship between CPRE’s campaigning on population and a decline in its the growth would, I believe, be almost non-existent.
The government is already committed to limiting immigration, and is finding the job harder than it anticipated. What more should it do? The easy answer is to withdraw from the EU and throw up the drawbridge. I don’t think its for CPRE to advocate a policy of that sort (and many of our members would leave if we did). What about limiting benefits to families with two children or fewer? Again, such things are beyond CPRE’s remit (and personally I don’t want to be part of a campaign to promote child poverty). A major push to limit the size of families? Again, rather beyond our competence, whether you do so through encouragement, coercion, or simply (which seems to work best) combating poverty. We have enough fights on our hands without taking on the Roman Catholic church or supporters of human rights.
The government and, judging from the election campaign, all the other parties want to slow or stop the UK’s population growth. It is not an easy task because you can’t consider population growth in isolation from lots of other social, economic and ethical considerations. CPRE has its work cut out trying to protect the countryside, and although that challenge would change in some ways if our population started to decline, it would not go away.
Colin, a headline is a headline, not a thesis, and this was a statement of the obvious: we don’t need to destroy the Green Belt to solve the housing crisis. Perhaps you’re cross because for the second time in ten days you’ve agreed with something I’ve written.
But does anyone want to destroy the Green Belt? They can speak for themselves, but some free market zealots in think-tanks like the IEA, the Adam Smith Institute and, to an extent, Policy Exchange sound as if they regard the planning system as a relic of post-war socialism that now needs to be swept aside so that markets can perform their magic of bringing harmony and all good things. So I think they want to destroy the Green Belt. What about those who just want to get rid of the rid of the horses or golf courses (personal note: I loathe golf); build estates around train and tube stations; develop any field that looks ‘scrubby’? I would argue that they want to destroy a large part of the purpose of the Green Belt, not least its permanence.
There is mechanism for reviewing Green Belt boundaries and CPRE branches have participated in such reviews and, on occasion, supported redrawn boundaries. CPRE Cambridgeshire, for instance, has previously supported Green Belt release. But should the Cambridge Green Belt be redrawn every ten years as the town grows inexorably? And should the same apply to Oxford, London and other cities? If you think it should, and the pressure for urban regeneration – as well as investment in low demand towns and cities – is eased, hasn’t much of the purpose of the Green Belt been ‘destroyed’?
On 11 March 2014 Shaun Spiers wrote a blog entitled ‘Population – should CPRE say more?’
See https://cpreviewpoint.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/population-should-cpre-say-more/
In that article he admitted that CPRE should have spoken about the consequences of the then emerging high level of immigration under Labour: “I regret that we were not bolder eight or ten years ago in pointing out the consequences for land use of the then Government’s growth-driven support for higher immigration. ….. But we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc’.”
That statement led to critical comments from members pointing out that CPRE had rejected members’ calls for it to do something on these lines when the problem emerged. Only after 10 years when the effects were clear was the mistake admitted.
This current blog, like that earlier one and others where population is referred to, tends to obfuscate the subject by talking about population control, child benefit reductions and so on.Yet it was clear in the 1980s and 90s that the indigenous population’s birthrates and rates of household formation were falling, and earlier projections of large population growth (those made in the 1960s by the OPCS as it was then called) were wrong. The much greater projections being made now by the ONS are the result of the scale of immigration and assumptions being made about the effects of both higher birthrates of immigrants and further in-migration. As Migration Watch has shown for a long time now, without this in-migration and its secondary effects we would not be facing the current scale of threats to resources, services and the countryside.
So it is unfortunate that in the above responses Shaun Spiers again raises the bogey of limiting family size and other old chestnuts and overlooks what he himself wrote a year ago. He has both said that CPRE should have pointed out the consequences of immigration policy (‘We should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses…. ”) and now says on housing that ‘we need many, many more houses’. It is not surprising that CPRE members who follow these subjects don’t have that much confidence in the Chief Executive!
CPRE Local Supporter,
Thank you for this clear and timely reminder of the failure of Shaun Spiers to provide leadership on this issue 10 years ago – nothing changes except for the frantic powers of obfuscation deployed in an effort to justify hanging on to his job as the organisation’s CEO.
I’m sure there are CPRE members who don’t have much confidence in me, but I’m not going to take much notice of someone who hides behind an alias and may not even be a member.
On the substance, you do not address my point that CPRE would not have any real influence over the size of England’s population even if we wanted to campaign on the issue (we really don’t have that sort of power). On immigration, I pointed out that the government is committed to limiting immigration but is finding the task harder than it anticipated. I doubt any government would find it easy – during the election even UKIP found it hard to say what impact its policies would have on net immigration. The question of how to limit immigration, if that is what you want to do, is a difficult one. I asked ‘what more should the government do?’ Whatever the answer, it is likely to take us into areas way beyond CPRE’s expertise or remit.
I do not know the identity of CPRE Local Supporter, but Shaun Spiers complaining about their use of an alias is a bit rich when it was he who set up the ‘ViewPoint Rules’ to allow an alias to be used.
‘It was he who set up the ‘ViewPoint Rules’ to allow an alias to be used.’
Robert, you over-estimate the attention I’ve paid to the ‘viewpoint rules’ – I think they were devised by Word Press – just as you over-estimate CPRE’s ability to influence the size of England’s population and our credibility in pontificating about issues such as asylum, immigration, the tax and benefit systems, and family planning. The fact is that almost all contributors to this blog give their names. It is also the fact that your last two contributions ignore the substance of the argument. Finally, it is worth saying again that CPRE’s position on population is not mine alone: it has been debated countless times by CPRE’s board, policy committee and branches.
Shaun, perhaps CPRE Local Supporter works in CPRE Head Office, subordinate to you.
Who knows, but it would be a legitimate reason to use an alias.
Just to remind readers again, on 11 March 2014 Shaun Spiers wrote a blog entitled ‘Population – should CPRE say more?’
See https://cpreviewpoint.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/population-should-cpre-say-more/
In that article he admitted that CPRE should have spoken about the consequences of the then emerging high level of immigration under Labour: “I regret that we were not bolder eight or ten years ago in pointing out the consequences for land use of the then Government’s growth-driven support for higher immigration. ….. But we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc’.”
The latest responses (above) by Shaun Spiers seek to divert attention from this important statement, by asserting that as the Government can’t reduce net immigration, whatever CPRE might have done would have had no effect. But a change in stance in 2004 would have added to pressure to impose effective immigration controls and not allow Eastern European EU member states unrestricted access – which would have cut net migration considerably. It was then that the mistakes were made which the countryside and small towns are now paying for.
One assumes that Migration Watch made an approach to CPRE National Office for support in 2003 or 2004 and were turned away.
This is getting tedious. I’m flattered (if a little unsettled) by the fact that you scrutinise my blogs so closely, but I suggest that anyone else who is interested in this increasingly strange debate about what I did or didn’t do 10 years ago, what I should or shouldn’t have said, the influence CPRE might or might not have had, should read the whole blog posting from which you selectively quote. The blog explains again why I do not believe CPRE should get heavily involved in debates on the UK population. But to continue the quotation:
“… we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc.’
“We would not, however, have campaigned against the Government’s policies, because the rights and wrongs of immigration go far beyond CPRE’s remit. It would be perfectly in order for a government to acknowledge the environmental impact of immigration and still conclude that it wanted more immigrants – for economic reasons, perhaps, or because it concluded that the free movement of people was the natural corollary of the free movement of capital. Others might argue for British jobs for British workers. Some people welcome diversity, others hate it (some just hate foreigners).
“And so on. These issues go well beyond the protection of the countryside, and I know from several debates on the issue (yes, we do debate it) that it divides our members.”
I do not believe that a statement by CPRE that more immigration would have environmental consequences would have significantly added to the pressure on the then government to impose immigration controls. Nor do I believe that CPRE’s members as a whole would have wanted us to add to such pressure as there was. Most believe now, and certainly believed then, when we debated the issue at length, that this was not a debate in which CPRE should get involved.
As for Migration Watch, I do not recall any approach from them in my time at CPRE.
Shaun,
You say any past campaign by CPRE to influence the size of England’s population growth would have been ineffective – your justification for not pursuing the matter.
However the policies CPRE did actually adopt have failed to prevent 700,000 houses being scheduled to be built in the countryside (including over 200,000 in the green belt) suggesting the policies that were adopted have been ‘spectacularly ineffective’.
So using the logic you employed to justify not campaigning on population growth,, will you be dropping all existing policies ?
Shaun Spiers may find comments on the subject of immigration and what he said CPRE should have done 10 years ago ‘tedious’. He introduced it himself, though, by writing in March 2014 at
that CPRE should have spoken out about the consequences of the then emerging high level of immigration under Labour: “I regret that we were not bolder eight or ten years ago in pointing out the consequences for land use of the then Government’s growth-driven support for higher immigration. ….. But we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc’.”
As was commented a year ago, there would not have been any need for CPRE to have gone beyond making that type of statement. It would not have needed to ‘campaign against immigration’. If CPRE had made the view expressed above clearly, in 2004 or 2005, other bodies and some politicians would have picked up the subject, quoted CPRE, and pursued it themselves. CPRE itself would not have needed to go any further.
It is interesting that Migration Watch don’t seem to have approached CPRE in the last 10 years about the consequences of immigration, although for the countryside and planning they are rather obvious. Perhaps it was because Sir Andrew Green was warned that Shaun Spiers was a Labour Party member and ex-Labour MEP and would not be sympathetic?
It is risible to suggest that a statement by CPRE to the effect that a rising population has implications for land use would have had a significant impact on public policy on immigration. Actually I did make such a statement nine years ago in a letter to the Guardian – http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/aug/09/immigration.immigrationpolicy – and in various other letters and articles around that time. I’m not aware of any other leader of a mainstream green NGO has said more on population than I have. I’m afraid the only people who have taken much notice are people within CPRE who want me to go further.
It is also risible to suggest that Migration Watch would be stupid enough to steer clear of CPRE because it’s chief executive was once a Labour MEP.
Finally I repeat the point I have made ad nauseam in these increasingly tedious exchanges: I am not solely responsible for CPRE’s policy on population, it has been discussed countless times by the board, policy committee and wider membership. If you do not like it, and if you are a CPRE member, I suggest you ask your branch to raise the issue at next week’s AGM.
In March 2014 at
Shaun Spiers wrote on this Blog that CPRE should have spoken out about the consequences of the then emerging high level of immigration under Labour: “I regret that we were not bolder eight or ten years ago in pointing out the consequences for land use of the then Government’s growth-driven support for higher immigration. ….. But we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc’.”
He made spent several responses to that Blog and this one trying to justify not having spoken out ‘eight or ten years ago’. We now learn that he did say something like this for CPRE publicly nine years ago, in 2006. The letter in the ‘Guardian’ to which he gives a link above was published on 9 August 2006, and reads as follows:
“Any attempt to define “an optimum level for immigration” (Report, August 7) needs to look beyond issues of the economy and social stability, important as these are, to take into account the environment. The government’s sustainable development strategy commits to respecting “environmental limits”. The UK is one of the most densely populated and built-up countries in the EU, and some English regions are already close to reaching the limits of their capacity to take further development without serious damage to the environment or quality of life.
“Population levels have critical environmental consequences – land taken for housing and infrastructure, waste production, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption all tend to be directly related to population – though, of course, how much each of us consumes matters a great deal too. We should also consider the global environmental consequences of immigration – will people moving to the UK have more or less “green” lifestyles and smaller or larger families than if they remained in their country of birth?
“A mature debate on population and immigration would be welcome, but let’s not frame it exclusively in terms of the economy or social stability.
“Shaun Spiers
Chief executive, Campaign to Protect Rural England “
Whether Shaun Spiers made similar statements in ‘various other letters and articles around that time’, as he asserts, is not supported by a search. However, internet search engines won’t find everything.
The August 2006 ‘Guardian’ letter shows that CPRE then had the makings of a clear policy. Yet no one seems to remember the letter. An explanation may be that it was published in early August, was not put into any CPRE magazine at the time, and 2006 was before people generally read newspapers on-line as they do now. Mr Spiers evidently had forgotten he had written it, as he spent several months last year replying to comment on his March 2014 blog seeking to justify CPRE never having stated what was in fact in the ‘Guardian’ in 2006, and only offered the link this month.
Migration Watch and UKIP would probably have agreed with that letter, then, and no doubt would today.
CPRE’s stated position on immigration in 2006 as set out in the ‘Guardian’ letter was a reasonable basis for taking the issue further at a time when it could have made a difference. But Shaun Spiers had forgotten it until this month. As Alice says at the start of Chapter 2 of Alice in Wonderland, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’.
Mark, you’re becoming obsessed. Wishing CPRE had been bolder eight or 10 years ago (the owl of Minerva and all that) doesn’t mean that I or CPRE were silent at the time. I wrote that letter to the Guardian, which I’m fairly sure would have been publicised through the weekly round-up to branches at that time (I’d be grateful if you could check for me). I wrote an article in the Guardian – http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jul/19/comment.comment – in July 2007 that moaned that my correspondence about the issue was being republished in the newsletter of the Optimum Population Trust (now Population Matters). I wrote a piece in the Field magazine in November 2007 and another one for Country Life around the same time. All of these letters and articles (and there may be others I’ve forgotten) would, I think, have been promoted through the weekly round-up.
I was engaged in debates on population at this time, and as well as arguing that CPRE should not get involved in campaigning on the issue, I generally made the point that a rising population has environmental consequences. Amazingly, my articles appear to have had little impact even on CPRE local supporters, let alone on the wider world.
More significantly, the idea of a national population policy was posited in a CPRE discussion paper on the 2026 vision, widely debated internally and republished in November 2007 – http://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/cpre/about-cpre/item/download/520, p. 39. After intensive debate, CPRE branches decided they did not want to take a line on population, a process described on pp.10-11 of this document: http://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/cpre/about-cpre/item/download/515. As I say, I am not the sole arbiter of CPRE’s policies. If you wish to complain I suggest you raise the issue at this week’s AGM, or ask your branch Chair to do so.
Hi Shaun, good article. In Bristol, we are finding pressures for new housing are quite challenging, with the occasional request for development on quite inappropriate sites within conservation areas. The latest attempt by a public school, Colston’s, to develop luxury housing on playing fields adjacent to Eastville Park is particularly ill-considered , especially as we are learning just how much brownfield is readily available in East Bristol. Keep up the good work in this area.
Regarding population control, I’m afraid that eventually decisions will have to be made, not just in the UK but globally. Western democracy has traditionally allowed itself to be largely controlled by the business interests of capitalism. I’m not against immigration and I’m not particularly against capitalism but I think that capitalism, as we know it, needs to constantly increase it’s customer base which means it has to encourage population growth and needs people to become wealthier in order that they consume more , with the natural aim of increasing market share and profit growth. As we are on a finite planet with finite resources, this is simply not a sustainable model. However, I have no idea of an alternative that doesn’t involve draconian restrictions on what we can and cannot do (except for the wealthiest x% , of course). In the long run we’re all doomed! In the short term, concentrate on re-using land previously built on and saving the good stuff until the last possible moment.
All the best &etc.
I would agree that major decisions cannot just be decided on what is best for business – business should be a servant not a master.
This applies as much to the subject of the UK’s relationship with the EU as to the issue of population growth
Shaun,
I have (courtesy CPRE Local Supporter) just read your very good August 2006 letter to the Guardian re Population.
However that was 9 years ago, population pressures have grown considerably worse in the UK since then and you don’t seem to have taken to the ‘national stage’ to the same extent since.
Is it not time to resend your letter to the Guardian for publication now, or have CPRE national executives decided to quietly back away from this subject ?
The exchanges above are helpful because Shaun Spiers has now offered links to what was being written by him in 2006-2007. It was his statement in the March 2014 blog that triggered the debates on that blog –
“I regret that we were not bolder eight or ten years ago in pointing out the consequences for land use of the then Government’s growth-driven support for higher immigration. ….. But we should have spoken out and said ‘if you pursue this policy, we will need more houses, more energy, more food etc’.”
He has now shown where he did say this, more or less, at that time.
It should be noted however, that Spiers’s article in the ‘Guardian’ in 2007 at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jul/19/comment.comment
while interesting barely mentions immigration. It did not say that immigration would be a major driver for population growth, whereas it is now seriously affecting household projections (as Migration Watch warned it would).
Readers now can see for themselves both what Shaun Spiers wrote in 2006-07, and that he still obfuscates “a national population policy”, which is not politically supported, with the need for an effective policy on immigration, the issue of major public interest. See comments above on May 29, 2014 at 01.20 and 09.08 hrs.
These exchanges have probably served their purpose now, having brought this all out.