Greater London is enclosed by the M25 orbital motorway, roughly circular in shape and 177km long. Most points on the M25 are 25-30km from the city centre or about 17-18 miles. The M25 encircles virtually all of the built-up part of the city with a population over 8 million, the largest in western Europe. Outside but partly inside is the so-called green belt, is where housing development is restricted or banned altogether. The M25 does not correspond precisely to the boundaries of the green belt – about four or five miles is inside the orbital for most of its length.

Dublin is a much smaller city and the orbital M50 motorway is mostly 9-10km from the centre. Outside the M50, and even inside, an unintended green belt has emerged where zoning rules restrict would-be developers of residential accommodation. In both cities there are delays and obstacles to housing supply well within the orbital motorways; suitable sites within the cities can stay derelict for decades and local politicians have made careers out of opposition to the expansion of housing supply.

The result, not surprisingly, is that housing has become unaffordable and people on modest incomes cannot aspire to home ownership in either capital. Rental costs in Dublin are drifting out of reach – a young Polish couple of my acquaintance, both working, recently gave up the ghost when asked for €2,300 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Milltown. They moved to Geneva in Switzerland!

London’s green belt is enormous; the land area closed to development is four times the area of the city itself. For England as a whole, no less than 13% of the land area is designated green belt and housing is unaffordable in many smaller cities and towns, especially around the southeast. London’s housing problem could be addressed by rezoning just a small portion of its enormous green belt, as well as better use of the derelict sites inside the city proper.

One should never under-estimate the agenda-setting power of language. The term ‘green belt’ is ideologically loaded and is used in order to mislead. It evokes pastoral images of grassland, contented cows munching in sunlit summer pastures, jolly picnics, cricket and warm beer. The website of the lobby group Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) is festooned with idyllic images of carefree city kids enjoying a day out in an imagined countryside of grazing sheep. In the immediate vicinity of London, this landscape no longer exists.

The reality is that livestock farming is impractical in the neighbourhood of big cities and most of the land used for agriculture around London is tillage, or arable as they say in England. The green belt is mostly a brown belt and the same pattern is emerging on the edges of Dublin. Much of London’s green belt is taken up with intensive mechanised farming, loss-making golf courses, dreary industrial estates and low-density, over-priced housing. Just about every parliamentary constituency in the green belt is shaded Tory blue on election night – it could more accurately be dubbed the blue belt.

Under pressure

Local authorities in the London outskirts and elsewhere around England are under pressure to zone more land for housing. They have been doing so but at snail’s pace. Last Monday, in The Guardian, one of their regular columnists Simon Jenkins added his voice to the rising chorus of complaint, noting that over the last decade a total of 24,000 residential units had been built on green belt land. That is 24,000 in the whole decade, or 2,400 per annum.

“If we value rural Britain, we can’t build houses all over it,” he opined. With 13% of the land area of England in green belts (let’s leave Scotland and Wales out of this) and at say six units per acre a total of 400ac per annum has been used, out of a green-belted total of 32m acres. To concrete over the green belt at current rates would take 80,000 years. It would also accommodate an extra 192m dwellings and a population increase of about 400 million, versus today’s population in England of 53 million.

The opposition to a coherent land use policy in the southeast of England is hysterical. Unfortunately it is echoed word-for-word around Dublin, without even the consolation of a true-blue Tory party to blame.

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