Towns surrounded by green belt land have already done more than elsewhere to accommodate housing (Britain needs new homes: loosen the green belt, 22 September). Even if we use only a small fraction of green belt land, large-scale additional housing will be supported by existing roads, destroying the natural breaks between town and villages, and causing endless urban sprawl.
In many areas, the existing roads cannot cope with traffic. I live in Guildford, the sixth most congested place in the UK. We are under great pressure to build a lot of housing, because successive governments have lacked the foresight and imagination to ensure that all parts of the country have sufficient housing, jobs and the infrastructure to match. We can’t just think of “putting houses where the jobs are” – we also need to think about encouraging employment where there is the room, and cheap land, to build housing.
In short, we need to build so that housing, transport and employment are sustainable. Over-burdening the already stressed areas will not work long term.
Mike Hurdle
Councillor, Guildford Greenbelt Group
• Jonn Elledge’s comment piece is a good argument for greening the green belt, not building new homes in it, even a small bit of it (3.7% according to Elledge). It is by increments that we lose what we value. Contrary to his claims, we can accommodate the new homes we need within our cities by selectively and creatively building on brownfield land. We can do this without losing the green spaces within our cities, although we may need to modify the way development is financed and relax the requirements for 18-metre separation and in-curtilage parking, all of which would, in any case, bring contemporary planning in line with the best of our 19th-century streets. This is not only a problem with our green belts: all city edges are under threat by squanderous development practices that make our countryside more remote and our cities less liveable.
Dr Lorens Holm
Director, Geddes Institute for Urban Research, University of Dundee
• Land is not the problem. The UK’s biggest housebuilders are already sitting on hundreds of thousands of plots of land with planning permission for housing. Without radical policy changes, such as rent controls, prioritisation of low-cost housing and even – potentially – restricting sales of UK housing to UK residents, the million new homes Jonn Elledge imagines would simply feed into the currently insatiable international investment market in housing, exacerbating the lack of affordability for those who just need somewhere to live.
Frances Holliss
Emeritus reader in architecture, London Metropolitan University
• Danny Dorling’s findings, as published in his book All That Is Solid, show that there is little evidence of a shortfall in the housing stock. The crisis we suffer from is largely the result of acute maldistribution; an economic structure that encourages maximum consumption of a scarce resource, by those with the means to command the market, at the expense of the many with little or no access to capital. Land value taxation is one mechanism that would swiftly and relatively painlessly provide a counterbalance to this vicious cycle of ever-increasing disparity of wealth distribution.
Kate Macintosh
Winchester, Hampshire
• Jonn Elledge’s article is right in principle, but infers impractical implementation: are his piecemeal brownfield areas capable of servicing homes with water, gas, electricity and drainage? Don’t his moral arguments point to sustainable new towns?
A related point is access to our wonderful green belts: hedgerow-to-hedgerow country lanes are given over to motor traffic, often speed unrestricted, and one cannot advise family walking or cycling. There are footpaths, true, but can we create a network of farmer-friendly routes with healthy, and even staycation, spin-offs?
Alan Doel
Potters Bar, Hertfordshire
• Far from lacking parks, London’s green belt contains many landscaped estates of former great houses and country parks. As for the agricultural land having limited access, a glance at an Ordnance Survey map shows that most of the green belt, including agricultural land and golf courses, is crisscrossed with rights of way. There are good reasons why so many people love the green belt. It is not helpful to rubbish a planning achievement that brings daily pleasures to millions of people who live in or near the protected land and which provides the huge population of inner London the chance to visit a country-like environment cheaply. Besides, building did not stop completely in the 1950s and today’s London green belt council map is smothered with so many dots representing present or proposed developments that one could be forgiven for thinking the current controls too lax.
Margaret Dickinson
London
• Not for one moment do I wish to minimise the difficulties young people today face with getting somewhere to live, but I do not recognise David Willetts’ picture of housing life (Ex-minister says young people face a ‘housing catastrophe’, 20 September) in the 1960s and 1970s.
I moved to London in 1971, and found that the rent and associated costs ate up at least a third of my income. For that, one would get, typically, half a bedroom in a flat-share between five or six people, or a small bedsit furnished with attic-stored relics from the 1940s or 1950s. Heating and hot water were in short supply, and often provided by lethal geysers and dodgy electric fires. Frequently, rental properties were overpriced dumps, particularly in the trendy areas of the time. The more acceptable and affordable property was often a long tube or bus ride away from the action.
Houses might have been much cheaper than today but the travelling costs ate into the household budget just the same. Perhaps our perceived easy time also owed itself to the far lower living standards and expectations we had at the time. Most of us were a lot more shabby than chic, believe me.
Deirdre Mason
London
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