By Colin Wiles, housing consultant.

The MHCLG, sorry, DLUHC has published the latest statistical analysis on the green belt, and it makes for interesting reading.

If you have followed my previous blogs and articles, you will know that the green belt has long been something of an obsession of mine – alongside golf courses and pony paddocks – not least for its inflationary impact on land values and house prices.

To re-cap, the green belt amounts to 12.4% of England’s total land mass – that’s 1.614 million hectares out of a total 13.064 million hectares.

About 8% of England is built upon – and that includes everything: roads, houses, factories, retail parks, warehouses, etc.

So, there is significantly more land devoted to the green belt than to the built environment. It is estimated that the actual footprint of homes amounts to about 1.1% of England’s total land area – a useful statistic to quote next time a NIMBY accuses you of wanting to “concrete over” the countryside.

When you add up the green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty, national parks, and sites of special scientific interest, a whopping 37% (4.9 million hectares) of England’s land mass is protected against development.

To add a further recap, the purpose of the green belt is nothing to do with aesthetics or public access; it exists to prevent sprawl, protect the setting of towns, and encourage brownfield development within urban areas. In fact, much of the green belt is not open to the public at all.

In the London Metropolitan Green Belt, the campaign group London First estimates that a paltry 13% has public access and only a fifth (22%) has environmental value and public access combined. Take a drive around the north-east quadrant of the M25 and you will see vast tracts of ugly green belt land used for pony paddocks and scrap yards.

The DLUHC analysis shows 54% of Havering (the main borough along this stretch of motorway) is green belt land. In fact, a fifth (22.1%) of London’s green belt land is green belt and 7.1% of this is golf courses, many owned by local authorities, something I wrote about recently for HQN.

All of England’s green belts are clustered around 16 urban cores but the London green belt is the largest at 508,410 hectares (almost a third of the total for England).

Numerous reports have called for a re-designation or re-evaluation of green belt land around the capital and other urban cores, because they tend to mummify development and increase densities.

It was our very own Octavia Hill who first proposed a green belt for London in 1875, at a time when the capital’s population was under four million. Had she succeeded, places like Cricklewood and Brixton would still be villages surrounded by open countryside.

The notion seems absurd, and yet the creation of the London green belt in 1947 has achieved the same result, stifling London’s organic growth and exacerbating the level of commuting across the green belt from settlements in the counties surrounding London.

The same outcome is seen in places like Cambridge, York, and Birmingham. Not a good policy for battling climate change.

The Greater London metropolitan area was set in stone in 1965 when the 33 London boroughs were created, and this at a time when London’s population was 7.5 million.

It is about to hit 10 million and yet these extra 2.5 million people are expected to live within the same footprint as in 1965, with a rigid green belt hemming them in. No wonder parts of London are taking on the appearance of Gotham City.

In the capital, there is a further 75,000 hectares of green belt land outside the GLA area but within the M25, and yet many people see the M25 as London’s actual boundary.

London First did a study of London’s green belt a few years ago and found that 60% of it is within two kilometres of a train station – that is a moderate walk or a short cycle ride.

If you allowed development of this land using the principles of exception sites, you could grab the uplift in land values and develop more than a million affordable homes, alongside genuinely accessible parks and other open spaces.

To cut a long story short, few people in England have a proper understanding of the extent and purpose of green belt land.

You will hear references to “the green belt” about land that is nothing of the sort. The present fetishism of the green belt is anti-growth, anti-housing, anti-people, and bad for our climate and our economy.

Even if you permitted a mere 1% of the green belt to be developed, it could provide, at densities of 40-50 to the hectare, around three quarters of a million homes and still leave 99% of the green belt untouched.

It is something that our sector leaders should be fighting for.