Green belt

The Green Belt is a notional area around a large town designated for planning purposes to prevent uncontrolled urban sprawl into the countryside. It is a concept of planning law; the idea is for a ring of countryside where urbanisation will be resisted for the foreseeable future, maintaining an area where agriculture, forestry and outdoor leisure can be expected to prevail.

The fundamental aim of green belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open, and consequently the most important attribute of green belts is their openness. Needless to say, it is also the area which comes under most intense pressure for such development.

Today there are green belts designated around many towns and cities ringing the conurbations grown about them.

History

Various proposals were put forward from 1890 onwards to hinder urban sprawl but the first to garner widespread support was put forward by the London Society in its "Development Plan of Greater London" 1919. Alongside the Campaign to Protect Rural England they lobbied for a continuous belt (of up to two miles wide) to prevent urban sprawl, beyond which new development could occur.

The Metropolitan Green Belt around London was first proposed in 1935 by the Greater London Regional Planning Committee, whose commission encompassed Middlesex and much of the adjoining parts of Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire:

"to provide a reserve supply of public open spaces and of recreational areas and to establish a green belt or girdle of open space".

It was again included in an advisory Greater London Plan prepared by Patrick Abercrombie in 1944 (which sought a belt of up to six miles wide). However, it was some 14 years before the elected local authorities responsible for the area around London had all defined the area on scaled maps with some precision.

The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 then allowed local authorities to include green belt proposals in their development plans. In 1955, Minister of Housing Duncan Sandys encouraged local authorities around the country to consider protecting land around their towns and cities by the formal designation of clearly defined green belts: he sought a belt of some 7–10 miles wide.

New provisions for compensation in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act allowed local authorities around the country to incorporate green belt proposals in their first development plans. The codification of Green Belt policy and its extension to areas other than London came with the historic Circular 42/55 inviting local planning authorities to consider the establishment of Green Belts.

As the outward growth of the metropolitan conurbation was seen to be firmly repressed, residents owning properties further from the built-up area also campaigned for this policy of urban restraint, partly to safeguard their own investments but often invoking an idealised scenic/rustic argument which laid the blame for most social ills upon urban influences. In mid-1971, for example, the government decided to extend the Metropolitan Green Belt northwards to include almost all of those parts of Hertfordshire not already urbanised.

Criticism

Several academics, policy groups and town planning organisations in recent years have criticised the idea and implementation of green belts in the UK. Greenbelt policy has been attacked as too rigid in the face of new urban and environmental challenges. Amongst other things, it has been claimed that areas of green belt can be of unremarkable environmental quality, and may not be well managed or provide the recreational opportunities originally envisaged.

The Town and Country Planning Association, an organisation heavily involved in initiating the concept several decades previously, published a policy statement in 2002 which proposed a more flexible policy which would allow the introduction of green wedge and strategic gap policies rather than green belts, and so permit the expansion of some urban areas. The London Society, as one might expect, published a comprehensive history of the green belt (as it emerged in the first part of the Twentieth Century) in 2014. This called for a "move away from the simplistic and naïve idea that that countryside is a sacrosanct patchwork of mediæval hedgerows and towards an empirically informed position which once more recognises housing as a need to be met in locations with appropriate environmental capacity".

Notwithstanding the pressure of developers and commentators to end the Green Belt, the concept of "green belt" has become entrenched as a fundamental part of government policy, and the possibility of reviewing boundaries is often viewed with considerable hostility by neighbouring communities and their elected representatives.

Outside links

• Campaign to Protect Rural England
• Oxford Green Belt Network
• Interactive Map of England's green belts - The Daily Telegraph
• Planning Policy Guidance Note 2 for England & Wales
• SPP21 for Scotland
• Greenbelt Politics - discussions about releasing green belt land for development or urbanisation
• Academic bibliography (University of Nottingham)
• Critical of green belt policy