Letter: Guildford Labour Is Out of Touch on the ‘Grey Belt’ Issue

Published on: 16 Aug, 2025
Updated on: 16 Aug, 2025

Green belt land in Normandy now subject to a new housing development proposal.

From David Roberts

In response to: CPRE Calls for Government Re-think on ‘Grey Belt’ Definition

Guildford Labour hopelessly out of touch as usual. Nothing in the planning rules requires Green Belt land to be “beautiful”. That’s not one of the stated purposes of the green belt.

So any argument to downgrade it on aesthetic grounds is a red herring. And no-one, including the Guildford Greenbelt Group (GGG) argues with building on previously developed brownfield sites in the green belt. This has always been permitted and doesn’t need the creation of a new category of “grey belt”.

Labour have set a national target of 1.5 million new homes over five years. What difference would this make to house prices in a country of 30 million homes? None.

In any case, the target is not being met and is unachievable. For logistical and labour reasons it is pure fantasy. Blame Brexit.

Meanwhile, Labour are failing to address the real cause of the housing crisis: the deep dysfunction of the housing market. Surrey house prices are not set by some simple GCSE-economics rule of supply-and-demand, but by complex factors including the overhang of the London market, overseas investment, student numbers.

In addition, there is supply rationing and land-banking by a handful of big housebuilders, the country’s million unused planning permissions and 600,000 empty homes, misguided government incentives that stimulate demand and a long-term over-concentration of prosperity in the South-East.

Worse still, this government is displaying a crass insensitivity to protecting the countryside. Guildford’s green belt is not just empty building land. It has an intrinsic value going way beyond pure aesthetics, including benefits to air quality, greenhouse-gas absorption, water catchment, flood control, recreational space, biodiversity, physical and mental health, food security and other amenities and economic uses such as tourism.

Developing “grey belt” land has quantifiable opportunity costs, which fail to figure in Labour’s planning policy.

At the same time, allowing greenfield development directly discourages developers from reviving our town centres, where building costs are higher but where there is existing infrastructure and where most people want to live, especially young, working people.

You would think that, of all governments, a left-wing one would understand all this. What are Labour doing siding with the haves against the have-nots by widening the North/South divide and supporting growth-at-any-cost and the big housebuilding lobby?

Responses to Letter: Guildford Labour Is Out of Touch on the ‘Grey Belt’ Issue

Nick Norton Reply

August 17, 2025 at 5:48 pm

The version of the Labour Party Mr Roberts refers to is often referred to as “Blue Labour” by its traditional supporters. A neo-liberal construct of the prime minister’s principal political advisor Morgan McSweeney and the shadowy Labour strategist Maurice Glasman.

Dominated by neo-classical economic thinking and the Thatcherite “tax and spend” dogma, which the progressive Modern Monetary Theory school of economic thinking shows to be a complete sham in a country whose government issues its own currency every time it delivers a spending policy and borrows nothing, the prime minister and his chancellor have nothing more to offer than ‘business as usual’.

Just be thankful Surrey is yet to be conned into accepting to be part of a corporately owned Special Economic Zone or so-called Freeport, emanations of the charter city concept, signed up to with Rishi Sunak by the current Labour leaders while in opposition.

They have little or no idea what “social housing” means and are in thrall to many corporate donors, including major housebuilders.

Nick Norton is a former Guildford Greenbelt Group candidate
Nigel Keane Reply

August 21, 2025 at 1:27 am

With respect to David Robert’s comment, the lack of building is nothing to do with Brexit.

It is the failed policy of all major parties to ignore the real working class so that important skills are not started at school.
The push for everyone to go to university and get a degree (even useless ones) by the public school and university educated, barrister and former Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Blair has damaged this country.

Nurses used to qualify for being either a State Enrolled Nurse or State Registered Nurse. The course was as long as many university courses but for all that training they were not given a degree. Now they have to endure student loan debt to pass. Why?

Why would you need a degree to be a police officer, all you need is common-sense and be big enough to overpower a felon (as envisaged when the minimum height of Constables was set in 1829 at 5’7″ by the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Rowan and Mayne and adopted across the country.

In Germany workers are respected plumbers, car mechanics, builders etc. attend technical schools and actually get given degrees in their specialities I know of a doctor of Engineering who actually a plumber.

Why in the UK are technical qualifications such has BTEC looked down upon as being of no real importance opposed to say a BA in Philosophy (I once asked a student what he would do with his degree and he told me he would teach Philosophy).

There is no reason why we should not increase the number of vocational schools to help more young people into real work. The King has achieved this on on his Dumfries training school enabling more to find skills that they obviously take pride in and, what is more, employment.

Incidentally, I left school in 1964 and got a job paying £4 per week. I eventually ended up in a career which I enjoyed for 40 years I did not even have a single GCE to my name.

In 1936 My mother got a scholarship to Barret Street Trade School (now called the London College of Fashion). There she was taught to use a sewing machine for embroidery becoming very skilled, she later worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Machine Co as a home advisor showing new customers how to use their new purchase.