Saving the Fields of Old England

Andrew Motion in the Guardian

Today is the centenary of Laurie Lee's birth and a fitting moment to reflect on Cider with Rosie's evocation of an England "which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years' life". Today, many feel the gigantic upheaval he witnessed is being followed by another, which is producing the biggest changes to the countryside within our living memories.

It is a defining moment, crystallised by a threat that faces Lee's countryside. Even as I write this, government planning inspectors are deciding whether to allow developers to build a housing estate in the green fields of the Slad Valley where the book was set. This is despite the local council's rejection of the plans. Similar things are happening all over the country.

That's precisely why the government have to intervene. Because "similar things" means no-one builds housing. It's a tragedy of the commons problem.

David Cameron recently visited the valley and said he understood the book's "wonderful links with this very special part of the world". But on the subject of the proposed development, the prime minister observed: "New houses have to be built so we have to make choices about where they will go."

He is right: there is a choice. We need to build more homes, but our politicians are failing to show the vision and ambition of their predecessors – the men and women who acted to protect our commons, national parks, green belts and footpaths.

Because their predecessors weren't faced with development hitting the problem of green belts. Oxford has pretty much expanded to the edge of its greenbelt. It's why Mini are recruiting in Swindon for staff to commute to Cowley (it would make more sense to move the Mini plant to Swindon, but that's another story).

I understand that MPs are inevitably pulled towards the immediate wishes of voters concerned about economic growth. But politicians have always been beset by day-to-day challenges, not least the postwar governments, which faced huge problems of reconstruction but still managed to introduce protection for landscapes, nature and heritage.

That's just hilarious. Post-war planning almost entirely ignored heritage and nature. There's all sorts of buildings from the 1960s and 1970s that got thrown up with almost no consideration of how they fitted into the existing aesthetic. Old buildings were knocked down to make way for a new golden era of Le Corbusier influenced eyesores (some of which are now protected, you monsters).

We need to recapture some of that inclusive, progressive and enlightened thinking. It's not an alternative to sound economic and social policy; rather, it can be the foundation of such things.

Our democratic, locally led planning system was part of the great postwar settlement for the countryside – together with national parks and green belts – but it has been steadily eroded by recent governments. To address the problems the country faces, we will need more land-use planning, not less.

Bollocks. It's been steadily eroded by homeownerism. When people were pro- building houses, you could leave it up to local democracy. If you travel to some of the large villages that I knew as a boy, you can look at the architectural styles and see that there was a massive amount of building from the 60s to the 80s, followed by the odd tiny development since. More land-use planning would make things even worse.

There are enough brownfield sites in England to accommodate 1.5m homes close to jobs, services and infrastructure. We must make these homes affordable, without compromising on quality.

Developing disused sites will both improve our towns and cities, and help us safeguard the countryside. This matters. Contact with the natural world is not just a pleasure, it's a necessity, and a part of what makes us who we are.

Governments are already in favour of this. This is current policy, started by Prescott. Stop pretending that this isn't current policy.

Englishness is tricky to define, not least because it tends to shun large gestures and rhetorical flourishes. But traditional attitudes, such as pride in our countryside, exist in a wonderful, big melting pot of Englishness, together with our pride in absorbing new cultures and our refusal to make Englishness an issue of race or birthplace.

Satish Kumar, Benjamin Zephaniah, Marina Lewycka and Anish Kapoor have all signed the Campaign to Protect Rural England's "save our countryside" charter. But too many politicians lack the courage to stand up for the countryside. That is a shame.

Brown people like the countryside, too. Who knew?

As we approach the general election next May, we should also give thought to the big, over-arching questions. How do we want to live? What sort of country do we want to live in? We should be thinking of houses as homes not investments, of other marks of national progress than mere economic growth, and of the importance to everyone's life of beauty and wellbeing.

Indeed. So, why is the CPRE against building, when this would help to destroy investments and give more people homes? Why is it in favour of sticking VAT on building which will kill off new builds and only having LVT on unused sites? If you want to reduce building, you'd introduce LVT which would encourage people to move away from the south of England and to cheaper bits of the country where there's plenty of land.

Each year, an area of countryside the size of Southampton is "randomly despoiled" by covering it with concrete according to Nick

"Today, simply relaxing planning controls wouldn't just see creeping suburbia: it would allow random development on any countryside that someone would sell".

“Giving a cowardly wink to developers won't build the houses we need. They are already sitting on 400,000 unused planning permissions, yet they choose to "land bank" to build their balance sheets rather than new homes. It's the economy, stupid, that will determine when the construction firms actually construct".

Nick Herbert, minister of state for policing and criminal justice and Conservative MP for Arundel and South Downs, takes to the pages of the G, and in passing repeats the allegations about land-banking that the industry is always at pains to try and dispel; to point out that Letting developers vandalise the countryside won't solve the housing crisis

"There are enough brownfield sites for 1.5m homes, yet speculative developers are being encouraged to submit applications on open countryside regardless of emerging local plans, which carry little or no weight. Communities that have put hours of work into their plans have watched them torn up by random development, licensed by government inspectors".

So one minute Housebuilders aren't building new homes "because of the state of the economy" - presumably they think no one can afford them, hence Nick's fellow Minister Mark's splendid schemes to help would be buyers out; and the next they are throwing them up all over the countryside whilst planning inspectors pretend not to notice ...

"Today, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, dismayed by the random despoliation of precious landscape, launches a Save Our Countryside charter. Its president, the poet Sir Andrew Motion, calls for the defence of "our great inheritance". A laureate before him, Wordsworth, asked: "Is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?" The answer, if the goal of winning the global race will licence any expediency, is no."

Update : the Mail is running with :Rural charter will challenge developers to stop the Government 'destroying the English countryside'

"Since 1989, an average of 26 square miles of undeveloped land – an area larger than Southampton – has been lost to building projects every year".

Hurrah! The people have spoken, so let us hear no more of this

nonsensical idea! 

The findings were welcomed by the National Trust, which opposes the Coalition’s strategy.

Ingrid Samuel, its historic environment director, said: “The poll suggests that half the population doesn’t want the countryside destroyed for the sake of economic growth. At a time when everyone is worried about jobs and the economy, that’s an extraordinary statement of love for the countryside. What’s important is that we have a planning system that gets houses built where communities need them, not just where it’s convenient or cheap.”

And lining up alongside the NT we find the CPRE, who have spotted where the next housing boom will occur, if the DCLG gets its way.

Neil Sinden, director of policy and campaigns at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), said: “Is the planning system an obstacle to providing more homes? And is another housing-fuelled economic boom a long-term solution? For CPRE the answer to both is a resounding ‘no’. There are planning consents for hundreds of thousands of new homes which are not profitable for housebuilders to build due to the economic climate.”

So, just to be clear, a poll run by ComRes which interviewed 1,001 adults by telephone between 26 and 28 April should serve to dictate national housing policy, because it produced "the right result" according to the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Nick Boles, a Planning minister, who wants to see the amount of  developed land increased by up to a third, said: “Our reforms will help build the homes and jobs this country needs in a way that safeguards the countryside and maintains protections for green belt and other natural areas.”

By up to a third?  Now you have to say that is a scary sounding target, so I am not surprised that the NT and the CPRE are up in arms at the prospect.  If only someone knew how much of the green and pleasant land is already blighted by having been developed, then we would know what that "by up to a third" actually implied.  Concreting over all our remaining countryside I would guess, judging by the position of the National Trust and the CPRE.  

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (291)

Paragraphs 3.16 to 3.23 of the CPRE's report on "property taxation" of 2005 are all fairly positive about LVT, then we get into the "ah, buts"...

3.24 An LVT appears to have desirable incentive properties for using vacant sites close to existing amenities, and encouraging the upgrading of the existing stock.(1) One concern is that the land-value tax increases pressures to develop all land;(2) there may be added incentives to develop on greenfield sites(3) which would also be subject to a holding tax.(4) Also, the LVT may lead to “concrete jungles” in urban areas, since the holding costs mean fewer land-owners are willing to maintain open spaces.(5)

1) Correct.

2) Nope. What does he mean by "all"? For sake of argument, let's assume we stick with existing planning rules. As LVT is based on the annual site premium assuming optimum permitted use, LVT on land without planning would never be more than its agricultural value of peanuts.

3) Not true, in fact quite the opposite. Agreed, it is much easier to build houses on greenfield sites (no demolition costs, fewer neighbours to impeded things, but the costs of extending all the utilities connections and so on are higher).

However, the main driver for this is, in the absence of LVT, that the land value uplift is enormous. If you own farmland and are given planning permission, its value goes up a hundred-fold, the landowner/builder, taken together can earn an extra £50,000 - £100,000 for each house they build compared to...

... a builder who buys urban land for a price which already includes the value of the planning permission. He can only earn money by actually building houses, which is difficult, risky, expensive and so on, there is no windfall.

So the town spreads outwards while the centre rots. See this fine article by an Lib Dems ALTER member in the Daily Mail.

With LVT in place, the incentives would be entirely the other way round. There would be no windfall gain on rezoning greenfield, and there would be pressure on owners of empty or derelict buildings in urban areas to bring them back into use ASAP, or, in extremes, knock them down and start again.

Would things automatically be perfect? Nope. Would they better than now? Yup.

4) Who says? What "holding tax"? Does he mean LVT? In his footnotes, he says "This problem could be reduced if agricultural land were exempted from the LVT." Surely he knows that if agricultural land subsidies were scrapped, the rental value of UK farmland would be so close to zero as to be barely worth taxing (under a full-on, fiscally neutral LVT only system, the tax would be about £16/acre per year, about one-tenth the average value of food produced per acre).

5) This is a town planning issue rather than a tax issue, but realistically, how many privately owned "open spaces" (which I take to mean public parks etc) are there, which have actual planning permission for development (and are not subject to a restrictive covenant etc) but where the owner generously lays some paths and benches and flower beds for the general public instead?

Answer, pretty much none*. So the problem is non-existent.

Under LVT, there is a trade-off, if a private owner (like the original owner of Leicester Square) says that he is happy for his land to be used as an "open space", then what is the rental value of that plot? More or less nothing, might even be negative. So what's the LVT? Nothing.

And as we know, open spaces in urban areas vastly add to the rental value of surrounding plots, so there is an overall net increase in rental values if some land is left "open". So given a reasonably sane council which wants to maximise LVT receipts, they would make sure that ten or twenty per cent of land is set aside as public parks, bowling greens, five-a-side pitches etc.

* Developers are not totally stupid either, one of the reasons why the original owner of Leicester Square [might have] placed the restrictive covenant on it was because he also owned the surrounding plots, so he gained £2 in extra rental value from those for every £1 he "lost" by not building on the square itself. It is unfortunately only larger developers who can take this wider view, if you only have one plot, you've no incentive to turn it into a park, in which case it is the planning authority which has to take the wider view.

Chief Homey Objects to building on the Greenbelt

From The Guardian

There once was a man called Motion
who had a homey devotion
"Build houses for the peasants?
That would be most unpleasant
Can't they just move their ghastly selves across the ocean?"

(which is still a better poem than anything he wrote)

More NIMBY insanity

From the BBC:

Half of the UK's population cannot see many stars because the night skies are still "saturated" with light pollution, campaigners have warned. Some 53% of those who joined a recent star count failed to see more than 10 stars in the Orion constellation...

The problem remained despite attempts to curb street lighting, they said. They said that in 2010, local authorities collectively spent more than £500m on street lighting, accounting for 5% to 10% of each council's carbon emissions.

£500m = £8 per person, seems like splendid value to me. Of course, the cost per person of lighting up rural areas is far higher and the cost per person of lighting up urban areas, so if they want to turn off the street lights in rural areas, then great. I can't be bothered to do the workings, but I don't think you get much "carbon emissions" for £8 a year, do you?

UPDATE: Kj in the comments has done the workings. Street lighting causes about 0.4% of total CO2 emissions (to the extent that you worry about them), i.e. 35 kg out of 9 tonnes per person per year.

Emma Marrington, a rural policy campaigner for the CPRE, says: "When we saturate the night sky with unnecessary light, it damages the character of the countryside and blurs the distinction between town and country. But this isn't just about a spectacular view of the stars; light pollution can also disrupt wildlife and affect people's sleeping patterns."

WTF?

According to the ONS, only 19% of people live in rural areas and 81% of us live in urban areas. So if 47% of us can see enough stars, then the chances are that nearly everybody in the countryside can, as well as one-third of people in urban areas; that's the price you pay for better safety at night.

And how does street lighting at night "damage the character of the countryside"? It's a safety thing for pedestrians and motorists. Like I said, they're free to turn the lights off if they want, so all they'd see at night time would be... absolutely nothing, pitch blackness (I quite like the appearance of streetlights threading their way across the hills and valleys, but maybe that's just me). Would do that do enough to unblur "the distinction between town and country" for her?

The wildlife can managed just fine and if she has problem sleeping, then she might try buying thicker curtains, they're good for thermal insulation as well, so win-win.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The FT:

Sir, Claims by the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the National Trust (Letters, August 25 and 30) that the government’s proposed planning reforms pose a serious threat to the countryside are baseless scaremongering.

If we were to build 250,000 homes a year for the next 25 years, we would largely solve England’s housing supply crisis, help make housing more affordable and generate local economic activity and jobs in the process. Yet even if a much higher proportion of these homes were built on greenfield land than over the last decade, after 25 years they would cover only 1 per cent of England’s land area. The anti-development CPRE and National Trust put protecting every blade of grass ahead of providing decent homes and our economic well-being.

It is primarily younger people who will pay the price of protecting this 1 per cent...

John Stewart, Director of Economic Affairs, Home Builders Federation