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Podcast episode 121: Grey Belt

Episode number 121 of the podcast is available now via this link or from Apple and Spotify.

I was in London recently and took the opportunity to catch up with friends of the podcast Catriona Riddell, Shelly Rouse and Nicola Gooch at Soho Radio Studios. One topic, the hot topic of the past few weeks, dominated the conversation.

“Labour pledges housebuilding drive on Grey Belt with ‘golden rules’ to boost public services, affordable homes and improve green spaces”, so announced a press release dated 19 April.

"Keir Starmer has today set out five ‘golden rules’ for Grey Belt housebuilding, pledging to deliver affordable homes, boost infrastructure and public services like schools and GPs, and improve genuine green spaces.

While reiterating that Labour will always take a 'brownfield first' approach to housing development, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner are also pledging to release some land currently classed as Green Belt to build the homes Britain needs.”

On a visit to a housing development today, the pair will outline Labour’s plans to create a new class of 'Grey Belt' land to ensure grey and poor-quality parts of the Green Belt are prioritised, and that any development benefits local communities."

Plenty in there then for us to get our teeth in to. We discussed the practical issues associated with creating a new class of designation and how that might rub up against, for example, mandatory BNG. We also talked about how Grey Belt might interact with a mechanism for cross-boundary strategic planning, which Matthew Pennycook has said that Labour will introduce to overcome housing delivery challenges around towns and cities with tightly drawn administrative boundaries. All of that, as you will hear, led us on to local plan reform and what the next version of the NPPF looks like, as well as a remarkable statistic from Shelly on how much a local plan costs to prepare.

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