Grey is the new green

And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England’s mountains green?

For a party that started out as the champion of the downtrodden worker, the Labour Party is rather fond of gold. As in Golden Rules which have to be met before certain things happen.

In some cases, these have worked to ensure something doesn’t happen – the five criteria which former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Ed Balls insisted on before the UK could join the Euro were never met. They certainly didn’t get everything right between them, but that was something they were right on, and they kept us out of the Euro.

Now the Labour Party under Sir Kier Starmer has come up with some more Golden Rules, this time on housing.

Brownfield development should be prioritised ahead of green belt, anything that does get built on green belt land needs to be 50% affordable housing, must include sufficient infrastructure like schools and GP surgeries, and must include a commitment to improve existing green spaces and add some more.

Within that commitment to developing brownfield ahead of green belt is the stipulation that brownfield development within the green belt should be built on first. This effectively will mean the creation of a new ‘grey belt’ – those plots of land within the green belt that would look a lot nicer with some houses on them. The derelict bus garage, the demolished warehouse units, the land that used to be a car park. Quite rightly, it’s ridiculous that the horrible eye-sore down the road that used to be a cinema should be given the same protection as the rolling hills and the 100-year-old piece of woodland and the green fields is borders.

We still don’t have enough housing in this country, and there definitely needs to be incentives to boost things on the supply side, as opposed to demand. Help to Buy, which was introduced in 2013 in the aftermath of the financial crash, was designed to enable people to get on the ladder, stimulating demand and, therefore, eventually supply. It did what it was intended to do, but in the end was just a mechanism for pushing up prices. It’s Economics 101: if you make something easier to buy, more people will be able to buy it, more people will want to buy it, and, with limited supply, this will push up the price.

Another issue we face is whether the housing that is being built is what is needed, or simply what the housebuilders and developers want to build. I’m in a pretty affluent corner of the south-east, where prices are prohibitive for anyone on lower wages. Right now, there’s a lot of development and building on what Starmer would call grey belt land. It’s all for the grey pound. All retirement complexes, some of them eye-wateringly expensive, before you even get to the annual maintenance charge. Where they think the people working in the retirement complexes’ bistros and spa areas are going to live, heaven only knows.

Of course, it’s easy for Labour say what they want to do when they’re in opposition, far easier than it is to actually do it once elected, we’ve seen that many, many times before. Plus, of course, whether this greying of the green belt actually happens does all depend on whether Starmer wins the general election, and that Rishi Sunak doesn’t manage a kind of Coventry City comeback (minus the VAR cock-up). Because that could totally happen….?