If you were to state that 12 to 13% of the UK is developed and we need 5 million homes in the next 20 years, that there’s demographic of people having to wait into their 30s to afford a home due to demand, then solely on that I would get a JCB revved up ready to go.
However we are very centric beings and location is all. You probably could not make London work it you could move it to the North-East coast!
Green belt is largely established to protect areas around our developed towns and cities. Some areas I can think of (it was in the Guardian today) are Birmingham, Coventry and the SE (London). Exceptions are other green belt areas are set aside for prosperity like the New Forest.
It is precisely the fact that developed want to nucleate around these areas that the green belt was established to choke and why it is no under such strain.
The solutions are not obvious.
One can loosen the green belt and let development be near were it wants to be.
Less effective would be build new settlements on non green belt land (and we have been here before). East Anglia for example, is not green belt according the paper today and with all that flat land, building houses, roads and infrastructure should hold few barriers. But again back to the point above, you would need to get people to want to move, live and commute wherever you develop.
You always make everyone speak English and have a united Europe. I’m sure the French don’t need all their land 🙂
One last thought. Birmingham at the momment is getting pretty good at sending people up! City living is all the rage and new skyscraper/tower developments are making use of a small footprint to increase population density. We’re already accepting smaller houses, why not change our building styles also?
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