Building on green belt is key to solving the housing crisis, says Lisa Nandy – London Wallet

Building on green belt land is the key to solving the country’s housing crisis, according to Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy.

She told GB News: “Rachel Reeves [Shadow Chancellor] and I are meeting mortgage lenders later today, and we’ll be talking about the short-term measures that we need to put in place to make sure people are protected now but there’s no substitute for getting Britain building again.

“Housebuilding is forecast to fall to its lowest level since the Second World War and if we’re going to find a way out of this housing crisis and this economic crisis, we’ve got to get Britain building again, one of the ways that we’ve proposed doing that is ending the taboo in the debate around the green belt.”

In a discussion with Eamonn Holmes and Lisa Nandy, she continued: “At the moment, we’ve got an absurd situation where the government is passing a piece of legislation in the House of Lords which will make it harder through planning reforms to get homes built.

“We think that instead of declassifying the genuinely green bits of the green belt, we ought to be identifying sites like the disused petrol station in Tottenham that is classified as greenbelt and was recently turned down for an affordable housing development and get Britain building the right homes in the right places.

“And we need to put ourselves firmly on the side of the builders, not the blockers. We’ve been on the wrong side of that now for far too long.”

She added: “Large parts of the green belt aren’t green. They don’t protect the character of communities, which is what the green belt is supposed to do.”