Oxford is a beautiful place, famous for its university and fine medieval buildings. But it also stands as symbol of Britain’s housing crisis, branded the country’s least affordable city with average property prices 11.5 times the area’s average annual wage. This is partly a story of success, with families, firms and students drawn towards the dreaming spires. Yet a significant slice is overspill from London, reflecting the intensity of property shortages in southern England.
There are many complex reasons for the housing failures that blight so many lives, as UnHerd examined in its Home Truths series last week. And it will take many years to tackle a legacy of Westminster ineptitude and local authority weakness. Yet there is one simple dragon to slay that would speed up resolution of this crisis. Green belt.
This has been recognised by Susan Brown, the new leader of Oxford City Council. In one of her first acts, she declared her desire to slacken the green belt that is stifling development. “There is no ability to build enough dwellings to meet our housing needs within the city’s boundaries,” she said last week.
She was attacked instantly by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which has long seen its main mission to be safeguarding such sacred spaces. This was predictable: the bosses and bores of this body increasingly appear like druids from an ancient sect, determined to resist change however antiquated and risible their arguments. “The very purpose of the green belt is to prevent urban sprawl,” said one local trustee.
And herein lies the problem. Green belt is an outmoded concept that is strangling cities, destroying countryside and forcing people to commute hefty distances. It was launched after the Second World War, when 15 million fewer people lived on these islands. Since then, it has grown like knotweed, now covering more than one-eighth of the country.
In the London region it is three times bigger than the capital, creating a giant doughnut that forces people to live further and further from workplaces in distant commuter towns. The same is seen in cities such as Oxford and York, with Green Belt bigger than the place it is supposedly protecting.
Almost half the land in England is protected. This includes glorious national parks and many rightly protected nature areas – yet the bulk of this is green belt. Duncan Sandys, the Tory minister behind its expansion in the 1950s, said such areas did not need to be green nor attractive since the purpose was to prevent development. So what a shame this concept was not given a less bucolic moniker; instead, it sounds leafy and lush, so few politicians dare attack something that ossified into a sanctified slab of British heritage hardly less worshipped than the health service.
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