Releasing more green belt land will allow developers to reap bigger profits while our cities stagnate

It has maintained the openness of the countryside around the English towns and cities it embraces, and has been copied the world over, from Canada and Australia to India and Korea.

The Council for the Protection of Rural England believes government policy on green belts in PPG2 does not need to change, but we need to be more confident in applying it. The most important qualities of green belts are their openness and permanence, and their purposes are to: protect the countryside around urban areas from sprawl; encourage urban regeneration; prevent towns from merging into each other; and to protect the countryside setting of historic towns and cities.

Developers and others constantly call for changes to PPG2 or a shift of green belt boundaries. But this misses the fundamental point: green belts need to be permanently open and green as a starting point for allowing them to realise their potential.

Not all countryside within green belts is conventionally beautiful or of high nature conservation value. David Miliband, the secretary of state for the environment, rightly pointed out in a speech to CPRE in March 2007 that ‘there is the potential to put the green back into the green belt’. Improving the quality and usefulness of our green belts, and protecting openness, needs a commitment to their permanence. After all, planning to improve a landscape or create a new wildlife habitat can take between 50 and 100 years.

The success of green belt policy is clear. Without it, Birmingham would have absorbed places such as Coventry, Bromsgrove, Lichfield and Tamworth. If London had not stopped sprawling after the 1930s, it might have expanded 50 miles outwards like Los Angeles and absorbed Brighton, Cambridge and Reading.

Green belt land offers opportunities for people in towns and cities to have easy access to the countryside – especially important at a time of rising health concerns over obesity and how little exercise people take. With time and patience, our green belts could truly realise their potential as tools of social and environmental justice, but development threats must be firmly resisted.

If green belt boundaries are repeatedly shifted outwards into the countryside, their function is lost. Releasing more green belt land, in practice, will simply allow developers to reap bigger profits from building on green fields while our towns and cities will be left to stagnate, as happened in the West Midlands during the 1980s.

The CPRE agrees that more affordable housing is needed, but without releasing green belt land on a large scale. Much of the need for new housing can be provided by making better use of brownfield land in our towns and cities. This also allows more environmentally friendly lifestyles as urban brownfield land is closer to public transport and other social and community facilities. In 2005 there was more than 28,000 hectares of brownfield land suitable for housing, capable of yielding over a million new homes. These government figures also ignore the smallest sites. A study for the CPRE by Llewelyn Davies Yeang in 2006 found that brownfield sites could deliver an additional 60,000 homes in London alone.

In some cases new affordable housing can be built in our villages, and can help support the rural economy. The CPRE believes that these schemes can work where they are in keeping with the character and scale of the village, and with countryside assets such as green belt.

We can also make better use of the 660,000 empty homes in England. New powers for local authorities, such as Empty Dwelling Management Orders, offer greater potential to make empty homes available to those who need them. Councils such as South Oxfordshire are already beginning to use these powers.