Just 4% of the Green Belt can solve the UK housing Crisis 

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Great video. After an agonising 3 year long appeal with our local council, against all the odds, we were able to get planning permission to build a modest house nestled amongst woodland in the greenbelt. But boy did we have to fight for it. We are grateful the gamble paid off and we get to build the house of our dreams but they certainly made us jump through hoops whilst we chased that carrot on a stick. We feel like it shouldn't be so difficult to get planning for people to put a roof over their head, especially when you are clearly going above and beyond to not only preserve the natural surroundings,but enhance and protect it. We would love to see more people like us do the same thing.

The issue is the lack of new council owned social housing. Don't matter where you build them if they don't include lots of those. Also you need to remove right to buy.

As an American, it's never made sense to me how few Sky Scrapers there are in the UK. Even london doesn't have anywhere close to as many as comparably sized North American and Asian cities. If you tear down a block of run of the mill townhouses, you can easily replace them with a skyscraper that has 10 times as many units. Why not do that if the lack of housing is the problem?

The greenbelt is BS. We were recently knocked back because we wanted to build a garage within the domestic curtilage of our house because apparently it would "spoil the openness of the greenbelt, yet the guy who owns the green field next door (who objected to our planning application - but whose wife sits on the parish council) - has built multiple structures on his field, some of similar size to the garage we wanted to build - and the planning office haven't said boo, despite me pointing out all of this development during our site visit. I gave countless examples of where similar development had been allowed in the local area - including an almost identical garage, in an almost identical location on the house opposite to ours (which was even approved by the same planning officer who rejected ours proposal). Funnily enough - the people allowed to build this garage also have links with the parish council. All the greenbelt does is stop legitimate homeowners who follow the rules from developing their properties - whist those in the know, or with friends in high places are allowed to do what they like.

A welcome and thought provoking video. I live in a suburban new development south of Aberdeen. I love it. Why? Because I have a warm home that is cheap to heat, without rattling windows, with modest but sufficient off street parking. It's fashionable to knock such developments, but the fact is they sell well and satisfy the requirements of a home as a machine to live in. There is far too much sentimental guff categorising old houses as having character or charm, when they are high maintenance and their only real benefit is proximity to infrastructure (often overloaded like roads) because of when they were built.

Interesting and relevant. Worth a watch.

in the east midlands then housing growth (and there has been a lot of it) is mostly on what used to be farm land, with some being on floodplains, and some being brownfield. We see examples of larger towns and cities mopping up smaller communities in a constant outward growth. Thing is, it is not solving the "housing crisis", in the sense that house prices are still rising due to demand, as we see the continuing inward migration growth. What we don't see is the consequent growth in "public" services - schools, medical facilities, front line responders, etc. And local transport remains patchy at best. And of course we are seeing less farming, so less local produce in the shops, and less farmers/farms. Coupled with more and more pointless regulation from whatever government ministry is currently seeking to make farmers lives difficult.

Thank you Neil, you are right!

Good explanation, seems fair to me.

great vid, can't believe it only has 600 views

Ok, so you are trying to deal briefly with a very complex issue. Firstly the planning system is broken and it will not be fixed by more building on the Greenbelt. People should not be priced out of home ownership but there are two primary ways of dealing with it. Firstly, people will generally move to where they can earn a reasonable living but our economy is now too biased towards the south-east. Government could change the tax system for company/job location which would move more jobs to areas with cheaper housing and land. They could also bias personal tax in a similar way. Secondly, you only mention greenbelt and brown sites but most urban areas (except perhaps large cities) have plenty of un and underused land because so many towns were built when land was cheap. My own town of Hastings is one such. In the past when land was cheap developers could afford to have large gardens or leave parcels of land which had poor ground (steep or less stable for cheap foundations). The uselss planning system, which largely only recognises standard developer houses finds it hard to deal with 'different' (contemporary?) designs on infill sites because they only know estate houses or copying the past. We will only get past this when somebody defines what makes 'beautiful' buildings and town planners understand, and work with, the design process. Living in existing urban areas is of course much more sustainable than on outer suburbs.

The housing crisis is also a crisis of public health and family finances. The single best thing you could do to vastly improve life for the majority of people in this country is build enough homes. The green belt is nice but the cost in actual human suffering is so high. I think we should be willing to give a little bit of it up

Totally agree on the greenbelt. The first priority should be building higher density housing around transport hubs with good access. SO many golf courses should be paved over with provision for actual public parks. It would be nice to see a zoning system with presumption in favour of building, let's say with approved typologies. Local Authorities should be more proactively masterplanning real, connected, joined up streets and making sure they are adoptable and then get construction companies in, a la the New Town in Edinburgh. Not sure why we allow developers to buy up any field, provide extremely limited ingress and egress and build rat warren cul de sac developments where people are cut off from their neighbours and amenities. I don't think planning is the only limitation, although reform would be good. Car dependent sprawl is an issue, and thought needs to be given to making sure the right mix of amenities, services and transport links are there. Developers don't want to shoulder this or even plan for it very well. We need more muscular Local Authorities or regional planning networks. Local Authorities also need more spending power to build social housing. Management should be insourced from housing associations. Liz Truss, for what it's worth, was a prominent supporter of planning liberalisation until she got a whiff of power and never mentioned it again. I think that the political will to upset elderly homeowners and rural voters is just not going to be there for some time. Maybe Starmer will prove me wrong.

in a wfh economy, workers do not need to live near London

But I thought the issue is everyone wants to live in London. Because all high paying jobs are only in London. It is strange that even UK's 2nd largest city Birmingham is in a long-but-possible commuting distance from London which will improve with HS2

Immigration is the issue. It’s ruinous.

Housing crisis or immigration and housing policy failures?