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Welcome to the grey belt – the answer to more housebuilding?
One of the Labour government’s first moves to unstick housebuilding was a new designation of ‘grey belt’, or low-quality areas on the green belt where it would now allow homes to be built. Ellie Brown visits one site that has just won approval to find out more
Government has moved to unstick housebuilding with a new designation of ‘grey belt’, or low-quality areas on green belt where homes could be built. Ellie Brown visits a site #UKhousingAbout 25 hectares of soil and grass are being warmed by the midday sun on a quiet lane in Hertfordshire. Standing next to this slice of countryside, I can see the rooftops of Harpenden faintly in the distance.
I’ve come to see this ordinary farmer’s field because one day, probably within the next few years, it will be transformed. Financial services company Legal & General (L&G) is aiming to build 550 homes here, and local councillors approved the plans in February.
There will be allotments, sports pitches, parking spaces and paths leading through the site to the bus stop on the route into town.
It will include up to 210 affordable homes, of which 15% will be social housing, 39% affordable rented and 46% affordable homeownership units.
Hertfordshire is in the green belt around London, an area intentionally quite difficult to build on, as it is meant to control urban development.
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The new homes have been made possible by changes in planning rules that now designate sites like this one as ‘grey belt’, one of the earliest interventions by the Labour government as it tries to remove obstacles to housebuilding.
From green to grey
Labour’s plans to allow more development on the green belt were previewed in late 2023, with a general election looming. As Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer set out the party’s plan to build 1.5 million new homes across Britain, he signalled that some of those homes would go on low-quality parts of the green belt – or, as he put it at the time: “Disused car parks, dreary wasteland. Not a green belt, a grey belt.”
After pledging to build a generation of new towns, he told his party conference that Labour would not be “tearing up” the green belt, but where there were “clearly ridiculous uses of it”, this “cannot be justified as a reason to hold our future back”.
By the end of July 2024, weeks after its election victory, the new Labour government was consulting on the details of the proposal and by December it was written into the revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which guides planning in England.
The change means that any site deemed to be grey belt could be viewed as ‘appropriate’ development of green belt as long as it is in a sustainable location, there is a clear need for the type of development and the scheme meets a set of ‘golden rules’ (see box below).
What makes land grey belt is not as clear cut as Sir Keir’s speech made it seem. Technically, any land that does not “strongly contribute” to any of three out of the five purposes of the green belt can be designated as grey belt. Those purposes are: to check the unrestricted sprawl of built-up areas, to stop next-door towns from merging, and to preserve the setting of historic towns.
The policy also has a provision to protect areas from being designated as grey belt if they are deemed important for culture, nature or are at risk of flooding or coastal change.
Since grey belt was brought in, some have suggested that it may not provide the hoped-for boost to housebuilding. In February, a House of Lords committee, while supportive of the original policy, concluded that it would only have a marginal impact, at best. But others who have seen it play out in practice say it is transformative.
According to Zack Simons KC, a planning barrister at Landmark Chambers in London, the new grey belt rules are proving “literally determinative” for some projects.
He says that, before the change, developers could have tried and failed to get planning permission for a green belt site for a quarter of a century. But after the introduction of the grey belt, schemes are gaining planning permission within weeks.
“It’s been seismic, and it’s been wide-reaching in terms of what the implications are going to be, particularly [for] these very large and strategically important areas of green belt in the South East, and the North West as well,” he says. For him, the key change is the introduction of a new category of exception to the idea that building on green belt is inappropriate.
Green belt development rules are restrictive. The policy started in London in the 1930s and was rolled out in other areas of the UK in the next couple of decades.
By 2024, 12.5% of the land in England was classified as green belt, while just 11% was classed as ‘built up’. Combined with other policies, this means more than a third of the country is protected from development, according to official government statistics.
The ‘golden rules’ allowing development on the green belt
Paragraph 156 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which guides planning in England, states that any major development involving housing on green belt land, whether through applications or local plan review, must make three contributions:
- Affordable housing, reflecting policies in accordance with the NPPF or, if these are not in place, 15% above the policy that would apply, but no greater than 50%
- Necessary improvements to local or national infrastructure
- New or improved green spaces accessible to the public. New residents should be able to access good-quality green spaces within a short walk of their home, whether through on-site provision or through access to offsite spaces
If a development is seen as harmful to the green belt, it is deemed inappropriate and only allowed in very special circumstances – a high bar, Mr Simons says.
He explains that, under grey belt policy, certain sites can avoid having to meet this requirement. It means these cases go from a strong policy presumption against planning permission to one strongly in favour, he says.
However, not everyone is in favour of the change. While the policy was being drafted, it received significant push-back from some consultation respondents fearing its impact on the countryside, including the countryside charity CPRE.
The CPRE’s Hertfordshire’s branch is calling for a new definition of grey belt that would include its contribution to the other two purposes of the green belt: safeguarding the countryside from encroachment and assisting in urban regeneration. It claims that since grey belt was written into the NPPF, every major green belt planning application in the county has cited the policy as a reason to grant permission.
“It’s sort of development at any cost at the moment, and it’s the cost to the countryside which is the thing that worries us so much,” Chris Berry, planning manager at CPRE Hertfordshire, tells Inside Housing.
Mr Simons admits there has been “mega pushback” on individual applications, with people not realising grey belt is more than the petrol stations and car parks originally described, although he also points out that residential schemes often face objections.
“Most of the sites I’m working on that are grey belt are farm fields, they’re agricultural fields,” he says.
“I think that, for local people, there’s been a surprise as to how the policy’s operating, because it’s much broader than some ministers were advertising.”
Harpenden is a small and affluent town of 30,000 people half an hour from the capital. Two years ago, it topped a list by property firm Savills of the best towns and small cities to live in the UK. House prices here have averaged more than £900,000 over the past year.
Strolling through the town centre on a sunny Friday afternoon, it is not hard to see why: wide open fields lead into a high street strewn with gardens and benches, parades of shops and historic pubs.
Planning battles
The St Albans district (which Harpenden is part of) is set to fall far short of meeting its housing need, which was set at 1,660 homes per year in 2024.
Like many other places in the UK, the local authority has a shortage of social housing. As of April, there were 635 households on the waiting list, including 256 needing at least a three-bedroom home. Just 300 social housing properties are let in St Albans each year and most are flats.
According to an affordable housing statement accompanying L&G’s plans, just 28 affordable homes were built in Harpenden between 2008 and 2022-23.
Against this backdrop, one of the first planning battles involving grey belt land took place: about a field 10 minutes by bus from the edge of Harpenden.
Walking around, this patch of farmland initially seems rural, but at the bottom of the gently sloping hill is the A-road to Luton, with its steady flow of traffic and people, and on the field’s eastern stretch, a row of large houses.
On its other sides are narrower lanes shaded by trees, lacking a pavement and deserted at times. There is a school here and a hospital beyond a private woodland.
In February, St Albans district councillors voted by five to four for the development – more than eight years in the making, as an agent for the house builders told the meeting. Committee members approved the 550 homes despite locals filing more than a thousand objections over the course of three different consultations.
Jeff Phillips, chair of the Harpenden Society local campaign group, which opposed the scheme, says its main concern is a lack of statutory authority to make sure that promised services for new residents are built.
“You can put this into any grey belt argument or any green belt argument. If you’re plonking this number of houses on a community that’s got constraints on infrastructure, it’s going to be hit,” he says.
Planning officers had recommended the scheme be approved, as it met the new grey belt designation.
It came a month after a report by consultants Lichfields assessing the scheme against the new grey belt rules was sent to the council. The report claimed the site did not contribute to any of the three green belt purposes cited in the policy and noted the two other green belt purposes were not relevant.
It concluded: “Because the site is grey belt and the development meets the ‘golden rules’, the site is considered ‘appropriate’ in green belt terms and there is no requirement to demonstrate very special circumstances.”
But Lichfields added that even if the council did not consider the site to be grey belt, there would be a “strong case” for demonstrating very special circumstances, which had already been set out in the application. Planning officials also concluded that even if the development was considered inappropriate, these circumstances exist to justify granting permission.
In the two-hour planning meeting, some councillors disagreed that the site could be seen as grey belt and claimed the scheme did not contribute enough to local services. However, others highlighted the area’s lack of a local plan, the need for development and the national planning policy changes that would make it difficult for the council to object.
L&G did not put someone forward for interview for this story, but a spokesperson said: “The UK faces an acute housing crisis marked by undersupply and affordability challenges. Grey belt sites like the one at north-west Harpenden represent a critical part of the solution.”
It may only be six months, but the grey belt is already reshaping the UK’s planning landscape – just as one of its first new developments will alter this corner of Hertfordshire.
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