THOSE worthy and doubtless well-housed people celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Green Belt are quite right.

It was an appropriate thing to do in 1955, given that millions of new homes were needed in Britain after the squalor of the 1930s and the Second World War.

But just because it was the right thing to do then doesn’t mean it is now.

Indeed, I would argue that the Green Belt as constituted 60 years ago is an anachronism which, far from encouraging easy access to land outside cities, simply forces up land values in urban areas.

Nobody could have foreseen in 1955 that one in two marriages would end in divorce or that the average lifespan would increase so rapidly. Perhaps more importantly, the idea that the midland and northern industrial powerhouses of Britain would be denuded of industry, forcing large numbers of UK migrants into the south-east corner of our country, was unimaginable.

Yet these three factors mean that the Green Belt has to be reviewed and completely changed.

In so doing, it doesn’t mean we would build everywhere.

One of the unintended consequences of the Green Belt crushing Oxford is that tiny homes with minute rooms and gardens, which are totally inappropriate for even two-child families, are squeezed into brownfield sites around the city.

Far from creating a green and pleasant land, the Green Belt has led to urban intensity and a sort of new, affluent type of squalor, with estates dominated by parked cars rather than trees and lawns.

Why do the Green Belt fanatics ignore the obvious solution propounded by experts, namely to change the corset which paralyses effective development into a series of housing wedges, in which residents really do have immediate access to green land.

Linked to a proper regional development strategy, which strongly encourages industry and commerce to move out of the south-east, this will both allow the millions of new homes we need to be built in pleasant surroundings and, at the same time, protect and enhance the existing Green Belt.

Of course, the other effect of this will hopefully be to release pressure on land values in places such as Oxford and thereby reduce the cost of housing.

I am prepared to see the value of my house reduced in order to better house the population; are those people who are celebrating the Green Belt’s 60th birthday prepared to do the same?

STUART SKYTE
Plater Drive, Oxford