Jerusalem Cannot be Built on Green and Pleasant Land

Where will you be in 1,600 years’ time?

Barring a lifespan rivalling Methuselah, we will all be long dead. Who can predict what nations will rise and fall in that timeframe. But, it will also be the time at which the greenbelt, if current trends continue, is fully concreted over.

Surely, this is not a justification for blocking new development on greenbelt land? We could increase development tenfold and see no noticeable change to the nation for decades. Yet, an unholy coalition of eco-warriors, socialists, and pensioners in leafy villages have united to impede the a nation battling to keep housing costs down and get infrastructure built. This is, of course, not limited to the greenbelt. Cries rise up whenever any building is proposed, no matter where and when. In this article, I will argue that the greenbelt artificially drives up prices and restricts growth, and that if we want to see any change to growth, we must be far more lenient about building and planning.

Firstly, I feel it is only right to alleviate concerns about the environmental impact of this proposal. It is true that within the greenbelt, there are many areas of natural beauty, forests, and fields. There are also car parks, wastelands, and rubbish dumps, which cannot in any circumstance be claimed to add to the environmental impact. Furthermore, there are hundreds of beautiful areas, such as the Lake District, which are not contained within. The greenbelt was not designed to prevent development on environmentally beneficial areas – the aim of the Attlee government was to prevent the expansion of cities (more on this later). It is perfectly possible to protect the land within the greenbelt which is environmentally friendly, while allowing development on the countless wastelands within.

To change tack somewhat, consider a game of musical chairs with 1,000 people. You take 100 chairs away, and survey those who did not manage to get a chair. There may be five or ten who did not want to play the game, so would not have got a chair even if there were enough. But, perhaps there were twenty who were too slow due to illness, twenty with mental health problems, ten with permanent disabilities, and the rest who just happened to have bad luck. If you were trying to explain why those people did not have a chair, those factors would be the answer. But, solving them would still leave 100 different people without a chair. The reason why 100 people are without a chair is because of a lack of chairs. This logic can be applied to homelessness. When explaining the cause behind why certain people are homeless, mental health, illness, disability, and countless other factors are adequate. But the cause behind homelessness in general is fundamentally a lack of houses – solving that issue must come before any further action. By allowing more development and houses to be built, we will get more people into permanent accommodation, increasing employment and in turn the economy.

“If we want more housing, why does it need to be as an extension of cities? Can’t it be elsewhere?” might be the response to this. We, as Conservatives, want lower taxes – I can’t see any objections to the readers of this blog to that. I would assume that we also want efficient public services. Complaints about trains, buses, and doctors are very easy to come by in the UK. But, in order for both these things to be true, there needs to be high density. It is prohibitively expensive to build extensive sewer and transport networks across large areas, far more so than in cities. Even the pro-greenbelt CPRE acknowledges that cities bring huge benefits in the form of density. However, restricting the expansion of cities through the greenbelt policy prevents density. It forces new settlements to be built elsewhere, which itself needs new publicly funded infrastructure, rather than adding it into existing networks.

Additionally, cities provide great locations for businesses to invest. There is an ample supply of labour in a close proximity and plenty of potential consumers to sell to. The UK seems to be the only nation preventing the most prosperous part of itself (London) from expanding and allowing more businesses to set up shop there. The OxCam Arc could have provided millions of acres for labs, R & D sites, and distribution centres to benefit the country, but baseless opposition from many different interest groups prevented this. If the US can allow Silicon Valley to develop into the technological powerhouse, why can’t we encourage the same between two cities filled with academics and educated students?

Quite simply, the greenbelt is stifling economic growth and development in the UK. If we want to achieve Truss’s vision of a robust economy, the only way to achieve this is by allowing the things necessary for growth to be built. I am not advocating building on Ben Nevis or the shores of the Lake District, not least because these areas are not in the greenbelt. We cannot treat all greenbelt land as equal, and forbid construction from millions of hectares of land, right where housing and infrastructure is needed the most. The costs of construction would fall, again reducing taxpayers' burden – how much of HS2’s costs so far have been fighting in the courts?

The final verse of the beloved patriotic hymn “Jerusalem” reads “I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green & pleasant Land.” With all respect to William Blake, Jerusalem was not built on brownfield land. It was not a natural rock formation. It involved humans altering the environment to suit their needs. If we want Jerusalem to come to fruition in the UK, we must do the same thing. We must not conflate the greenbelt with natural beauty, nor sit around expecting houses to spring up from the ground. We must have the courage to do what is necessary to build a better nation for our citizens.

Alex Elliott (The Secretary, Brasenose) is going into his 2nd year reading PPE

Image Credit Wikimedia Commons, License