It’s nonsense that there’s no room to build in the countryside, says Rayner

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Angela Rayner has said it is “nonsense” to suggest that Britain’s countryside is too overcrowded for new homes.

The Deputy Prime Minister on Tuesday announced sweeping reforms to deliver 1.5 million more houses this decade.

Under the changes, councils will have to build on the “grey belt”, which is low-quality green belt land, in order to meet mandatory house-building targets that have been increased by 25 per cent. Ms Rayner insisted that she would not hesitate to impose house-building plans on councils that refused to meet the targets.

Kemi Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, warned that Labour’s plans would create millions of “ugly” new homes across the British countryside. Writing for the Telegraph, Ms Rayner says the severity of the housing crisis means she has to be “radical” rather than “find some middle ground”.

She says: “I know people will raise concerns about these plans. ‘Britain is already too crowded!’ they will say, or, ‘There’s no countryside left – it’s all been concreted over!’ Indeed, some surveys indicate that people believe half of England is densely populated.

“I could gently reassure them. Or, more likely, I can just say: ‘It’s nonsense’.

“Only around 10 per cent of our country is built on. The vast majority of England is still very green and will remain so under these proposals.”

Outlining her plans in the Commons on Tuesday, Ms Rayner said building on brownfield land, which is defined as previously developed sites, must be “the first port of call”. But, she admitted: “It’s only part of the answer. This is why we must make a more strategic system for green belt release to make it work for the 21st century.”

Independent analysis suggests brownfield sites can carry a maximum of 1.4 million new homes, meaning at least 100,000 of Labour’s proposed houses will have to be built on the green belt.

Furthermore, a report by Lichfields, a planning and development consultancy, found that most of the available brownfield land is in areas with low housing demand. There are enough brownfield sites in London for 386,600 new homes, compared with projected demand for 427,700 over the next five years. Similarly in the South East, previously developed land will only be able to require a maximum of 386,600 out of the 427,700 houses needed.

But in the North West, North East and Yorkshire and the Humber there is more brownfield land available than the demand for new homes.

A separate report by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England found that there is only enough brownfield land for 1.2 million new-builds.

The Government published figures on Tuesday showing that house-building targets have been increased in Tory seats but slashed in London.

North Yorkshire, which includes Rishi Sunak’s constituency, has been handed the second biggest increase in the number of homes it must deliver. The target for Suella Braverman’s seat of Fareham has risen by 60 per cent. While in Waverley, represented by Jeremy Hunt, it has almost doubled.

Councils that exhaust their supply of brownfield sites will have to hit their targets by building on a new category of green belt land called the grey belt.

Labour initially said the grey belt would consist of low-quality land, such as abandoned car parks, wasteland, former quarries and golf courses. But the party published a definition that opened the door to reclassifying much more green belt, including disused fields and lower-value agricultural land.

Create Streets, a housing think tank, has estimated that 3 per cent of the green belt could be converted to grey belt – enough land to accommodate the 1.5 million homes.

Labour officials also confirmed their intention to remove from planning rules the requirement for new-builds to be “beautiful”.

Speaking to MPs, Ms Rayner admitted her reforms were controversial but added: “We are facing the most acute housing crisis in living memory.”

The Deputy Prime Minister will vow on Wednesday to press ahead with plans to build a wave of new towns. She will unveil a “new towns taskforce” that will identify sites for the settlements, many of which will be extensions to existing towns and cities.

> Angela Rayner has said it is “nonsense” to suggest that Britain’s countryside is too overcrowded for new homes.

And she’s 100% correct.

Most of the “countryside” isn’t really natural and anything that’s close isn’t accessible to most people anyway.

Unless we see expanded infrastructure it’s unlikely we will see significant benefits.

What I mean is when building a house it’s not like opening Google earth and seeing swathes of green and thinking ‘great, 2,000 home estate there and that’s that for this year’s

We build along existing roads, into or from an existing city or town. These roads are often badly maintained and also congested. If they build right out of town in a country field then they’re using country lanes for the entire estates traffic as an example.

The solution is to build along existing heavy capacity infrastructure and hope that we can tac it on. So a new junction on a motorway for example – problem is that these are already over capacity, and I don’t think we are going to see a new motorway run for example London to Norwich so we can add three new towns there.

What we need is to build along existing railways, between the Northern cities or London. Then we can use lighter roads as daily commute be done via rail and it goes through the heart of countryside anyway so you free up a lot of possible land compared to roads. This is the way, and it fits nicely with green goals and railway nationalisation. Normal a roads in or out, but they won’t be congested as you can rely on the train networks for leisure, commute, and holiday.

We should not be building on fertile farmland, but there are plenty of other places to build.

Keep the bigger developments for the cities but the solution should be (lots and lots) of smaller developments in towns and villages rather than enormous developments that don’t have the infrastructure to support them.

You could build thousands of smaller developments, the benefits to building little and often are exponential rather than enormous estates that completely upend an area.

I really hope Labour are angling here towards a proper revival of the New Towns projects. I’ve always thought its a bit ridiculous we seem to keep wanting to pile more and more and more people into a handful of major cities like Birmingham and Manchester that already can barely handle the demands on their infrastructure, where any works to expand cause *massive* disruption to millions of people, when there are fucking huge stretches of land around Northumbria, the Scottish Borders, and the West Midlands/Herefordshire way that seem to be basically empty real estate compared to the rest of the country. You could put homes and facilities for a couple of million people in these areas and I think it’d barely impact the feel of how green these parts are.

The native population has a falling birth rate so why are we needing to build so many homes exactly? 🤔

I’m in favour of sensible housing but this should primarily be high-density, urban housing and any mass expansion of towns or villages in what is left of our destroyed countryside should be an absolute last resort. 

I took a train from London to Glasgow, saw a few sheep

Labour need to stop pretending there are enough disused petrol stations in the green belt to build vast housing estates on. ‘Grey belt’ is the real nonsense. Their policy inevitably means increased urban sprawl and large estates on green fields on the edges of big cities with no infrastructure or public transport.

There should be a punative tax on properties left vacant for more than 1 year. All those investment properties that sit empty would be swiftly rented out or sold. The same should go for developable ‘land banked’ sites. On top of that there are huge areas of brownfield land in the north which could be used for housing.

Can’t stand her but she isn’t wrong

Why do we preserve so many fields for the sake of it?

No one visits lovely countryside towns to look at flipping fields.

Build towns but make them beautiful

Stop bashing your local landlord with 10 houses and bash the corrupt planning laws that have presented houses from being built

the native population birthrate is going down. there shouldnt be a need to build more houses

Honestly we just need to start building higher in our cities where people already are

For the people who know this stuff better than me, how messy would it be to own a house within an apartment style building?

Only if Labour could get rid of their godawful Towns and Plannings act 1947, that shit has damaged more then helped in any way.

Import voters , destroy the green belts to build houses for them. Standard labour policy.

Its not just homes, you need extra roads, schools shopping areas, then the leisure areas, it’s always expanding out, even if you take onto an existing area, you’re putting pressure on to them