November 2019
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for London’s Green Belt had published a report “A Positive Vision for London’s Green Belt”
In the Forward to the report, Crispin Blunt MP, the APPG’s Co-Chair writes:
The APPG for London’s Green Belt was set up in response to rapidly increasing pressure for development on Green Belt Land that has escalated over the last few years and is now reaching a crisis point.
As a society, we have to decide whether or not we value Green Belt sufficiently to prevent its erosion and subsequent disappearance in the coming decades. To give some context to the scale of the threat, in 1940, the greater urban areas of London and Los Angeles were similar. Since then, without any Green Belt protection, Los Angeles has sprawled to the extent that it now cover an area that would stretch from Cambridge to Brighton if it was overlaid on the UK.
Over the past eighty years, the London Metropolitan Green Belt has therefore served its purpose in prevent urban sprawl, and maintaining a green lung around our capital city.
This paper outlines the many positive reasons why the Green Belt is so important, and why it should be protected and its natural assets maximised. It is not purely a pleasant backdrop to our capital, but a living, breathing environment that serves a wide range of vital functions, including absorbing CO2, improving public physical and mental health, protecting the capital’s food security, promoting active recreation, and contributing to UK biodiversity, forestation and soil quality.
We have therefore highlighted the positive impact that Green Belt has on climate change, landscape and biodiversity, access and recreation, health and wellbeing, food and agriculture.
We have chosen to focus on the positive benefits of London’s Green Belt as we hope that the argument for its protection will then speak for itself.
The main threat to the Green Belt is from building development. Whilst there is a recognised housing shortage in the UK, inflexible new-homes targets for local authorities are encouraging them to take Green Belt land, which developers prefer, rather than brownfield. There is more than enough brownfield land in our urban areas to fulfil our housing needs. Unfortunately, developers make a greater profit from building large homes on Green Belt land than they do providing affordable housing on brown-field urban sites.
We would therefore argue that the National Policy Planning Framework needs to be reviewed and amended to ensure that the gradual erosion of the Green Belt does not reach epidemic and terminal proportions so that this vital asset is much better protected from inappropriate development. Once Green Belt has been developed, it is impossible to get it back again.
The Paper makes a number of proposals as to how we can start to work together to maximise the benefits of this valuable resource and how we can build resilience and structure to ensure its long-term survival for the benefit of our society and the environment.
Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all the organisations and individuals that have contributed evidence and materials to enable this paper to come together, and also special thanks to CPRE and LGBC who have helped the APPG drive this agenda forward so effectively.