Tightening the Green Belt?

Green belts around some major UK cities have been in existence basically since 1955 when local authorities were granted the power to "surround cities with rings of land protected by specific planning restrictions" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/10/greenpolitics). The idea originated in 1935 and its initial intention was for these statutory restrictions to prevent cities 'swallowing' up smaller towns on their outskirts and even to try to prevent major conurbations from merging. It was only later that they became viewed as the 'lungs' around some large built up areas, providing recreational possibilities. By far the largest is the almost 490,000 hectares of land around Greater London but there are smaller belts around Greater Manchester, Burton on Trent and even a Welsh belt between Cardiff and Newport. The whole concept of the belt has been thrown into the mix by the Social Market Foundation's claim that the Government's desire to tackle the affordable housing shortage by 2020 can only be achieved by building 2m homes on current green belt. It has been pointed out that people believe that over half of England has been developed whereas less than 14% is actually in this condition (about the same amount of land that is allocated to green belt). That fact that English Nature is reconsidering its response to the green belt concept should also make us consider what these protected zones actually consist of. In many cases, the belt is largely agricultural land without restricted biodiversity. Much of the area is neither easily accessible by the general public or organisms that we might like to share this island with. There might well be scope for attempting to develop 'wild (rather than green) belts' of reserves and parks on the outskirts of some of our cities. If this were done, we would certainly have to guard against fragmentation of habitat wherever possible. We might even wish to 'encourage' some current agricultural land to revert to a more interesting state (quite a complex management problem). I do think that there is much to be said in favour of a re-examination of the nature of the buffers between our cities. Although affordable housing will clearly be needed if populations continue to climb in certain locations, we will still have to guard against any relaxation of the current rules being viewed by developers as a green light to build on any area that they fancied! We might also wish to think whether human populations (and their distributions) are part of the problem.