Where does Labour's enthusiasm for destroying the greenbelt come from?

Did you know with a Digital subscription to Yorkshire Post, you can get access to all of our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Converting green fields into suburbia might enable targets for house building to be reached but it is most unlikely to result in the construction of sufficient housing that is genuinely affordable and meets real needs. Developers tend to want to build four and five bedroom executive homes for people that can afford the prices and that often means those moving out of London. The need is for starter homes for the young and specialist homes for those who might otherwise have to go into a care facility. Those houses are rarely at the centre of developer ambitions. The government has just altered planning guidance to put immense pressure on local council planners to approve any development within walking distance of a train station. Yet the existing rules about what can be built are there for good reasons. Developing housing that doesn't meet local needs simply gobbles up land without helping to house first time buyers. Many of our country's green belt policies have been in place for close to 100 years through endless changes of government because they made a lot of sense. Now these protection zones are at real risk of being ruined in a misguided dash for the wrong kind of growth in the wrong places. There is a lot more to be said for renovating existing buildings in the inner city or knocking them down and creating something better than there is for using up even more of our beautiful countryside or productive agricultural land simply because it is cheap and easy to build on. It isn't hard to identify parts of our Yorkshire towns and cities that need a co-ordinated drive to improve housing, health care and education. There are entire communities where little or no genuine improvement has happened for decades. The neglect has been unforgivable. Placing the focus of policy on expanding small villages into commuter towns risks leaving developers with precious little incentive to do the harder work of improving existing urban areas. Angela Rayner's policy of insisting that any village that has a railway station must automatically be the right place to build new houses in large quantities will fail both the residents of those villages and the people who desperately want and need to see improvements to their existing urban environment. Where is the incentive to do the expensive work of redevelopment if there are cheap green fields available to build on out in the suburbs? She is removing much of the ability of locally elected planning committees to make independent decisions about what should be built in their locality. Local councillors' ability to make an accountable decision in front of the local public will be replaced by decisions made by faceless bureaucrats. That is a very strange way of proceeding for a government that professes to believe in devolution. On one of the most important issues for local people they will be left with no say. However large or inappropriate the development is it will have to be approved or else unelected officials from many miles away will override the planning committee's decision and impose costs that have to be paid by local council tax payers. Most members of the public still believe that the local councillors they elect can make free and fair decisions in a planning meeting about what gets built in their locality. That has become increasingly untrue as more and more powers have been taken away from elected decision makers and given to unelected officials. It is easy to speed up the planning process by letting developers do whatever they want. That might result in available land being used up on inappropriate schemes that provide little or no genuinely affordable housing, pay no respect for the style that is typical in that location, and focus on the housing needs of those who already have equity and can afford large homes. It is also easy for a political party to accept donations from developers in advance of their election and then proceed to implement policies that put more money in the pockets of those developers. The donations to Labour prior to the last election included significant sums from building developers after discussions between leading members of the party and representatives from the industry. Lobbying is a profitable business because it changes policy. Political donations need careful scrutiny. Labour has rightly been asking tough questions of Nigel Farage about why he became so keen on crypto shortly after accepting large sums for his party from crypto profiteers. Villagers across Yorkshire who end up with massive new housing estates that pay little respect to local needs or styles might like to ask equally hard questions about how many political donations have flowed from building developers to the Labour party in the years prior to their enthusiasm for destroying the green belt. Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.