Combined authorities to oversee Labour green belt release, says Nandy

The Labour Party will look to use development corporations overseen by combined authorities to release “poor quality” greenbelt land for housing, the shadow housing secretary has said.

In an interview published over the weekend, Lisa Nandy said that if elected, Labour would “take on the taboo around the green belt and declassify the poor-quality parts which currently aren’t very lucrative for developers but provide good sites for new housing”.

She told the Sunday Telegraph that Labour would empower combined authorities such as Greater Manchester or South and West Yorkshire to identify areas of green belt land to declassify, with Development Corporations then given the role to build out homes.

Nandy’s comments come a month after Labour leader Keir Starmer first re-opened the possibility of using green belt land for new homes in a speech in which he promised that Labour would back the “builders not the blockers”.

However, Nandy said Labour would not compromise the principles of the green belt by allowing the destruction of green open spaces or by allowing communities to be “sucked into the urban sprawl”.

She said combined authorities “tend to know already” the possible green belt sites that might be usable. “A lot of them are brownfield sites that need some investment in order to decontaminate them and bring them back into use,” adding that homes could be built alongside new railways.

However, it was not clear from the piece whether local authorities not in combined authority groups would also be able to take advantage of similar green belt freedoms.

The prime minister has accused Labour of breaking a promise to grant more power to local communities. Rishi Sunak said last month that Keir Starmer “wants to impose top-down housing targets, concrete over the green belt and ride roughshod over local communities,” accusing Starmer of.”

In recent years a number of right-leaning think tanks have advocated building around transport nodes on the green belt as a way to tackle the housing crisis, with Liz Truss in 2019 advocating building one million homes on green belt land, but anti-development backbenchers have now forced ministers to instead double down on green belt protections.

The recent proposals to reform national planning policy included a rule change making clear that councils cannot be expected to review their green belt boundaries for reasons of meeting local housing need.

The Labour Party has been contacted for comment.