Angela Rayner's great hope for finding space for 1.5m homes over the next five years is the Grey Belt. It is a particularly uninspiring term which could really do with some PR magic.  In fact, she now has only four and half years.  How time flies when you are not building anything. 

Greenbelt designation surrounds our prosperous and popular cities, introduced after the carnage of WWII to prevent urban sprawl and stop towns coalescing, and to encourage re-development of urban centres.  Without it some predict that London would by now have spread as far as Reading, but what may have been a useful, albeit blunt, tool in the 1940s and 1950s may now look like the planning equivalent of a using a handle to start a car. 

The noble purpose of greenbelt may also have been hijacked along the way by unscrupulous councillors keen to secure the votes of pearl clutching suburbanites desperate to ensure that their edge of town location and façade of rural gentility remains in perpetuity.  Land in the greenbelt by and large became worthless as it’s presumed hope value for imminent redevelopment into Metroland II faded into nothing; green fields now inside the M25 were to remain as such despite mounting pressure for an increasing population to be housed. 

An absurd situation, we can all agree, but the political will to take on the NIMBYs simply hasn’t been deemed a fight worth having until now.  Instead of having a fundamental review of greenbelt, which would be a sensible thing to do, they have decided not to redesignate or take land which simply doesn’t need to be there out of greenbelt  but to place the onus of promoting such land on a developer rather than the Local Planning Authority.  It is the developer who must argue that the greenbelt field is suitable for housing and is in fact grey, not green.  This has the advantage of the local council being able to say that it wasn’t their idea and puts zero onus on them to have to review their own designations.  It isn’t great for the developer though, who must take on all the risk. 

So, how do you turn green into grey?  

The first is our old friend the PDL test:- you are allowed limited infilling or partial/complete redevelopment of whatever was there before IF this would not cause substantial harm to the openness of the greenbelt.  Now, there have already been cases on this where a gap between houses was held not to be infilling (which you might think was the very essence of infilling).  It will to a large degree depend on who your decision maker is and what they think limited, substantial, or even openness means at that point.

If you are not PDL and you really are a field, then there are some more tests:-

The Golden Rules

Even once you get this far, you must still satisfy the Golden Rules:

It’s the final push, if you are still with me and you and your field have got through the tests and satisfied the Golden Rules then you are … drum roll … “Not inappropriate Development”.  Worst trophy ever …. It’s a bit like providing an employee appraisal that says “not wholly unsatisfactory”. Hardly a glowing endorsement. 

Anyway, you are not “inappropriate”, well done you.  If you are Major Development, and your Golden Rules are being delivered these will significantly weigh in your favour.  That’s not to say it’s a yes, merely it’s a ‘definitely maybe’.

Last step, I promise. In a final roll of the dice, you need to demonstrate with your field that ALL the usual development management considerations i.e. design, amenity, highways, ecology, sustainability etc are suitably addressed.  Then and only then, will you and your sorry field have a grant of planning permission, with conditions, and obligations. 

Quite the ordeal and with significant obstacles designed to trip you up on the way having spent a shedload of cash. The House of Lords thought the same, albeit more eloquently put, when they said they expected the amendments to make little, if any, difference to the release of land for house building. 

There may be the odd site here and there that does get through this process, but we doubt there will be many. And certainly not enough for 1.5m homes.  Until they fundamentally review all greenbelt, require a long-term (30yrs plus) pipeline of sites and take the power to designate away from local councils not much is going to change. Any suggestion of building on greenbelt is tantamount to announcing you want to turn a Constable painting into a Dickensian slum – until we can get away from this, I think we are stuck.