Amid new targets of 1.5m new homes over five years, the Labour party has pledged to review the planning rules which dictate where housing in England can be built. The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has said that “a common-sense approach” to deciding quite what land is worth protecting and what can sensibly be used to create more housing was crucial.
This may put Labour at odds with many Conservative politicians in the UK, who have long defended the greenbelt, the protected land that encircles the country’s largest cities, including London, Newcastle and Manchester. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’s latest long-term plans for housing prioritise urban development of brownfield sites (abandoned or underutilised industrial land) over so-called greenbelt “erosion.”
The notion of “concreting over the countryside,” as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has put it, is politically loaded. Yet, elements of the Conservative party itself are beginning to see that this oversimplifies the issue. As former housing minister Brandon Lewis has said at a fringe event at the Tory conference, the concept “needs to be reviewed and changed”.
