four - Why it matters where we build: environmental constraints

Summary

In November 2012, the Planning Minister, Nick Boles, told BBC Newsnight: ‘In the UK and England at the moment we’ve got about 9% of land developed. All we need to do is build on another 2–3% of land and we’ll have solved a housing problem.’ Leaving aside the detail – whether he meant England or the UK; whether 9% was the right figure for either – the insouciance with which Boles suggested building over an area of countryside the size of Cornwall was alarming. His remarks provoked a powerful (if factually wobbly) response from the high Tory philosopher Roger Scruton:

Mr Boles tells us that only 7 per cent [sic] of our country is built upon, so what harm to add another 3 per cent? But much that is not built on is mountainous or uninhabitable. The small remainder has been protected for 100 years by legislation – not as an economic concern, but as an immovable part of what we are. Take away that 3 per cent, and you take away the heart of England. (Daily Telegraph, 1 December 2012)

I am on Scruton’s side, but Boles had a point: most of the UK, even most of the South-East of England is remarkably undeveloped. For a politician whose main concern is to get stuff built, all that land with development potential, seemingly doing nothing very much, represents a failure. For others, the fact that our rich, crowded country has managed to retain so much countryside is something to celebrate.

It is also a reason to avoid scaremongering about its loss. That is why in my time at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) I tried to ban the evocative phrase, ‘concreting over the countryside’. Travel around most of England and it is clear that we are far from losing the countryside to concrete.

But that is not to deny the fact that we are losing large areas of countryside. CPRE regularly reports that an area of countryside the size of such-and-such city is being lost each year. For instance, government figures show that in 2015/16, 15,405 hectares of greenfield land were developed, an area over twice the size of Nottingham. Until 2010, the government had a target that at least 60% of new housing should be built on brownfield land. This was comfortably exceeded for years.