Not all of the green belt should be “preserved in aspic for ever”, the government’s building design tsar has said, as he warned that with all but the highest earning young people priced out of buying, “desperation … to get more homes built is just going up”.
Nicholas Boys Smith, a former Tory adviser appointed by Michael Gove to run the Office for Place, which will advise on planning for new communities, said not all of the green belt “of low or no agricultural or amenity quality” should be protected for ever.
Building on the green belt is a politically sensitive topic and has previously sparked Conservative backbench rebellions against planning reforms where MPs fear losing seats if green space is threatened.
On 19 December, Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, responded by announcing councils would no longer have to redraw green belt boundaries to satisfy housing targets as long as they could justify “departure from assessed housing need”.
Boys Smith is not advocating for mass development on the anti-sprawl buffers but said: “We have not built enough over the last five, 10, 15, 20 or 30 years. As a society we have fallen out of love with the future and we have … under both political parties failed to build enough homes.
“Clearly we need to look at the quality of land within green belts and need to think which of this should be preserved.”
In the 1990s Boys Smith was an adviser on welfare policy to the Conservative social security secretary, Peter Lilley, and in 2006 he advised George Osborne, then shadow chancellor, on tax. He has been a McKinsey consultant and an investment banker and set up the urbanism thinktank Create Streets in 2012.
His critique of decades of planning failure is that too much of what has been built is unloved by the public and that attempts to slash planning red tape have slowed development by increasing uncertainty about what can and cannot be built.
Community-led design codes would provide a clear template for what is acceptable and ensure the public is happier with what is built, he believes.
He said that when running consultations at community events and online, with pictures of potential streets and houses, “you get a pretty strong 70 to 90% majority on most types of things”.
This kind of planning consultation to create design codes was previously championed by King Charles when he was the Prince of Wales, through his Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment.
Boys Smith is an ally of the king’s view that traditional urbanism provides the best template for new homes. He wants to see more streets and squares lined by traditional housing and mansion blocks using limited palettes of materials and patterns.
He appears to have persuaded the Labour leadership too. Keir Starmer announced in October that a Labour government would build new towns, based on new design standards to speed construction. Journalists were briefed that Labour was keen to see “Georgian-style” townhouses.
The Office for Place was launched in July by Gove and has been tasked with helping draw up design codes for different areas that could speed up the planning process for millions of new homes by providing a fast track if builders stay in line with the codes.
Boys Smith said he opposes more volume housebuilding that involves “chucking a cul-de-sac in a field” and wants codes drafted with community and council involvement so the public can “require what they find beautiful and refuse what they find ugly”.
Twenty-five towns and cities have developed codes including one for 900 homes in Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. Over the county border, in Buckinghamshire, the Conservatives lost a byelection in Chesham and Amersham in 2021 amid criticism that they were encouraging too much housebuilding.
Boys Smith believes the codes should accelerate housebuilding by allowing developers to avoid the current planning consents and get building faster and with less risk.
While 178,000 new homes were built in England last year, the most since 1989, this was well below the more than 300,000 widely accepted as needed annually.
Boys Smith also said that “in the north we need to fall back in love with lots of town centres that have been hollowed out over the last 60 or 70 years”.
He named the towns of Grimsby, Halifax and Rochdale, and the city of Sunderland, as places where policymakers should seek to encourage “more people to want to live in, work in, set up businesses in, bring their families up there”.
“People have remarkably strong sense of place, even if they don’t quite realise they do,” he said.
“If you show them pictures of how you think houses should look, unerringly a really strong majority plug for the thing that feels and looks local.”
The approach presents a challenge to the major volume housebuilders and Boys Smith admitted: “My heart very often sinks when I see new development.”
He added: “It will become harder to build the same house in Cumbria as in Cornwall, so that might be a disadvantage to housebuilders.
“The house you build in Yorkshire does need to feel like it’s in Yorkshire. That may create more cost. I would argue it’s creating more value as well.”
People like to see “variety in pattern and texture, material that feels local, decent ratio between the height of the street and the width of the street”, he said. It produces “a tighter version volume housing with more sense of place”.
“I remember a very moving conversation with a lady of West Indian background in Tottenham when she said: ‘I want a place with a heart,’” he said. “You can get a colonel in Hampshire who basically says the same thing.”
In response, the Home Builders Federation said: “Builders are keen to work with local authorities to create schemes that respect local vernacular, whilst being mindful of the need to ensure they are viable to deliver.”
Boys Smith denied that his approach may have a better chance of success because it aligns with principles of urbanism that have long been espoused by the king.
But he said: “I think what the king or the Prince of Wales said on placemaking was right and can be shown to be right and that that is actually now widely accepted … the average Guardian reader and the average Telegraph reader is actually going to agree on much of this.”
Nicholas Boys Smith’s favourite places … and a couple he really doesn’t like
Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Wiltshire – “It’s in the old [1973] Hovis advertisement by Ridley Scott of a boy pushing a bike. It’s so outrageously unbuildable now.
“When you poll people on their favourite streets, it’s often a curve on a hill. You get the sinuousness of the curve and the view. It’s an exquisite place.”
Utrecht in the Netherlands – “It’s the town that has had the most dramatic effect on me. It’s beautiful. Street trees everywhere. Very safe.
“Although I’ve cycled in London and various other places, the sense of liberation as you cycle around Utrecht and a whole bunch of other Dutch cities is absolutely life-changing. You’re completely safe, you can go anywhere.
“It’s a perfectly sized city, quite compact, and within not many minutes you’re going from the city centre into the suburbs and out into the countryside.”
And his least favourite?
“The train station at Swindon is of grotesque ugliness and the Walkie-Talkie [skyscraper] in London. Those are two very ugly buildings.”
• This article was amended on 2 January 2024. The Conservatives lost a byelection in Chesham and Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 2021, not in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, as an earlier version said.
