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Daniel Hannan is the Director-General at the Institute of Economic Affairs
I am lucky enough to live on the Hampshire-Berkshire borders. Every year at this season, as the colour comes into the leaves, I am struck by how exquisite this island is. Our fields are not, as in most of Europe, rectangular strips divided by wire fences. They curve and undulate with the contours of the land, their borders marked by old hedgerows.
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In Britain, unusually, we don’t place agriculture and natural beauty in two separate mental categories. When we think of our loveliest landscapes, we rarely think of wilderness. An American might think of the Rockies, a German of the Black Forest, but we tend to conjure in our minds fields and copses softly sculpted by cultivation.
To see how fortunate we are, look at, say, the Netherlands, where the population density is similar to southern England’s, but where there is remarkably little of what we would consider unspoilt countryside.
How do we ensure that our green spaces aren’t smothered under concrete? The short answer is that we need to think again about where to build houses. In particular, we need to ask why we have made it almost impossible to build on land that is neither beautiful nor accessible to the public, but which happens to be near towns.
No one seriously denies that we need more space for people to live in. The rate at which we create new housing stock has been falling, as a percentage of our population, since the Sixties. We build fewer new housing units, in proportionate terms, than any country in Europe. Result? Our homes are more cramped and more expensive than pretty much anyone else’s.
As well as damaging our quality of life, planning restrictions damage our national productivity. High rents for businesses drive up the price of the things they sell. High rents for employees push up their salaries but not their disposable income – never a good combination for an economy that wants to stay competitive.
It has become commonplace to point out that high prices are bad news for young people, who will never be able to buy a home. True. But other negative consequences, though less visible, are as severe. We rarely stop to consider how excessive housing costs contribute to our low savings ratio, or to the unusually long hours we work. The British pay nearly half as much again in rent as the French, Germans, Belgians or Dutch. That’s a lot of overtime.
We all like the idea of spacious countryside and we fear that new houses might clutter it (though, even in the Home Counties, around 85 per cent of land is wholly undeveloped). We are less likely to notice the costs involved in not building – costs that fall hardest on the working poor.
Why, left-wing activists like to ask, do people use food banks in a country as wealthy as ours? Well, comrades, it’s not because food has become more expensive: as a proportion of household income, its cost has halved over the past 50 years. Over the same period, though, house prices have risen by an extraordinary four and a half times over and above inflation – a rise unmatched in the developed world.
Politicians diagnosed the disease some time ago, but shied away from prescribing an effective cure. The Tory Help to Buy scheme shifted the problem, giving some people an advantage and thereby reducing availability for everyone else. Labour’s rent controls restrict supply even further – more of the medicine that sickened the patient.
The problem will remain until we can build houses on land that was arbitrarily designated as green belt.
A few years ago, the IEA found a way to dramatise how misleading that name is. It took to photographing parts of the London green belt: rubbish dumps, car washes, petrol stations.
To be fair, the green belt was never supposed to be pretty. It was supposed, rather, to provide cities with neighbouring space. But that space is hardly an amenity: a Londoner wanting to spend a day in the countryside might go to, say, the Kentish Downs, but is unlikely to want to visit the scrubland around Ealing. And protecting that scrubland means far more intensive building in London – in other words, smaller gardens and fewer parks and playing fields.
Here, then, is a solution to appeal to the eco-minded. Let’s set aside a half of all green-belt land for green residential development – that is, development where at least half the land is either gardens or parks. Let’s rewild the other half. Deal?
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