Britain’s largest conservation charity warns the government’s push to overhaul planning laws and accelerate home building risks undermining the country’s green belt areas.
The National Trust said the Labour government’s definition of lower-quality “grey belt” areas that would be targeted for home building was too broad, and could harm “some of the most valuable ‘green’ land to local communities”.
The Trust said in evidence to the House of Lords, reported in The Times, that it was “concerned with the significant breadth of green belt land which could be interpreted as grey belt”.
“Sites that are surrounded by built form, dominated by urban land uses or small sites between towns are often among those most utilised by urban populations to access nature or recreation, nor are they necessarily ‘grey’.
“These oases in a desert of urban grain are likely to be among the most important areas,” the Trust said.
The trust said it could lead to “the potential for a patchwork of piecemeal development across green belt areas [which would] result in a cumulative impact that serves to undermine the green belt as a whole”.
The reaction comes after deputy prime Minister Angela Rayner announced that councils would be forced to give up swathes of the green belt to help the Labour government achieve its immediate housing targets, a part of its push to build 1.5 million new homes in five years.
Under the plan, grey belt land would be defined as “green belt land which makes a limited contribution to the green belt’s purposes”.
Local authorities would have to review green belt boundaries, and on Wednesday it was reported Labour’s plans would greenlight home building to an area of the green belt larger than Surrey.
On Wednesday, Ms Rayner defended the plan, saying the government would not shy away from taking “bold and decisive action” to fix the country’s housing crisis.
“We must all do our bit and we must all do more. We expect every local area to adopt a plan to meet their housing need. The question is where the homes and local services people expect are built, not whether they are built at all,” she said.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “We owe it to those working families to take urgent action, and that is what this government is doing.”
However, Kevin Hollinrake, shadow housing secretary, said Labour’s plans to build 370,000 new homes a year would “bulldoze through the concerns of local communities”.
“If Labour really want homes to be built where they are needed, they must think again,” he said.
Liberal Democrat housing spokesperson Gideon Amos also said the plans would ignore local communities.
“The new homes we need must be genuinely affordable and community led, not dictated from Whitehall diktat,” he said.
The government said it would require developers to provide infrastructure, including GP clinics and public transport, for green belt developments, and it wants a “brownfield first approach” to planning and construction.
Councils will receive and extra £100m and 300 additional planning officers to smooth the process.
