The green belt has had its day, argues York businessman Geoff Beacon. It's time to find an environmentally-friendly alternative that doesn't hit the young and poor by artificially inflating house prices.

There has recently been much comment on the vast profits made from development land. In a recent letter to the Independent newspaper, Coun Andrew Duffield of Alnwick District Council argued for a national land value tax and described the unearned windfalls of land speculators as a cash cow that the Government could perpetually milk.

But York can milk this "cow" now. The city council owns a 13-hectare site worth about £70,000 as agricultural land but with planning permission for housing it would be worth about £70 million pounds.

This is the London Bridge site just inside the ring road next to York Colleges.

This site has been in and out of the green belt through various revisions of the local plan. But, given the desperate need for housing, the objections I have seen to development on the site do not amount to a hill of beans. And City of York Council could use the receipts fruitfully.

Nationally, the rise in the value of property has equalled 40 per cent of gross domestic product in some recent years.

Changes in tax and benefits since 1997 may have made the poorest families better off by more than £30 a week but, during the same period, the affluent have seen their houses increase in value by hundreds of pounds a week.

Wealth distribution has been from the poor to the rich and from the young to the old. Increases in property values have for many years been driven by a shortage of development land.

But, for most of the country, it is not land that is in short supply but the right to use land for building.

We have a shortage not of land but of planning permission.

It is not an increase in the value of the bricks and mortar that has made property more valuable it is the increase in the value of the rights which planning permission grants to allow property to occupy land.

Planning permission often increases the value of land a thousand-fold.

For example, a hectare of agricultural land near York is worth about £5,000. With planning permission for residential development this can rise to more than £5 million. Planning permission increases the value of a plot for a single house from £100 to £100,000.

Planning authorities dispense huge amounts of wealth. The immediate windfalls go to the landowners, which in the case of the London Bridge site is City of York Council.

But we should remember that these planning processes control the housing market, which is the cause of the enormous increases in the value of our house.

In the long run rises in house prices get spent whether it be by equity withdrawal, inheritance or downsizing. This is an enormous tax-free bonanza - to the lucky.

Traditionally, green belts were to stop urban sprawl and were billed as the "green lungs" of the city.

Now the policy is seen as the major instrument for protecting the environment against environmental damage because of overdevelopment. They are believed to "protect the countryside".

But we might remember here that only about ten per cent of England and Wales is urbanised. Around York we have thousands of hectares of land in the green belt. Little of this is seen, except as a view from our cars.

The shortage of planning permission caused by green belt policy also redistributes wealth from young to old as well as from poor to rich: older people eventually sell their houses to younger people.

Higher housing costs are a burden on the young as well as the poor.

Young people who have been brought up in York are being forced out by housing costs.

Another problem related to the green belt is that the policy encourages building replacement rather than new build. Replacing existing buildings with denser development is seen as an environmental benefit because higher density is thought to mean shorter travelling distances thus saving the environmental impact of car travel.

But what is rarely calculated is the global environmental impact of new building - building a new house generates about 70 tonnes of CO2. Demolishing ten dwellings to build twenty creates 700 unnecessary tonnes of CO2.

Green belts are often "green deserts" because modern agriculture is high in chemical and other inputs.

Dr Keith Porter of English Nature said last year that low-density developments with gardens and public open spaces would provide more favourable habitats for species than the giant pesticide-treated cereal fields that dominate much of the countryside now.

"By placing housing in these areas with innovative designs you can build in the corridors and the linkage the wildlife needs to come back in," he said. "You would be certain to increase biodiversity." Indeed, a square kilometre of land in the center of York has significantly more bird species than a square kilometre of farmed land in the green belt. And, of course, many brownfield sites can be turned into parks and wild life reserves, such as St Nicholas Fields. Green sites within the urban fabric have the advantage of actually being accessible to the public.

There are social objectives that are delivered by the planning system. For example, planning permission may come with a requirement to provide social housing or a university may be given planning permission with the implicit recognition that it is performing a wider public service.

My proposal is to scrap the green belt as a policy and replace it with one that concentrates on the environmental and social aspects of any development.

This policy would give favourable consideration to social housing and forms of settlement with reduced environmental impact.

We must remember that the green belt gives more wealth to the affluent property owning classes and these have the biggest impact on the environment because they have larger cars and bigger electricity bills.

It is not hard to see that increased house prices lead to increased consumption and less sustainability.

So why doesn't the council do a deal on the London Bridge site; plug the gap in its finances and get itself off the current parking charges hook?

This suggestion comes from someone who has argued for drastic traffic reduction in York since the 1973 Inner Ring Road Inquiry. But even I know the council is stuck a bridge too far.

Geoff Beacon is a director of York-based Beacon Dodsworth Ltd, who specialise in geographical information systems and geodemographics. He has also been commissioned by the European Union to report on the effects of labour subsidies on employment

Updated: 09:19 Thursday, August 19, 2004