This week marked the publication of the Greater Manchester Spatial Plan. We examine what this could mean for housing supply in the city region and for the future of the greenbelt.
We’re not even halfway through January and we’ve already seen one of the biggest urban stories of the year – the release of Greater Manchester’s new spatial plan for the city-region. The Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) sets an ambitious target to build more than 200,000 homes over the next 18 years.
Despite previous statements indicating greenbelt development was off the table, the plan allows for some moderate easing of greenbelt, combined with denser city centre development. This is sensible, pragmatic and to be welcomed but a question remains: will it be enough to keep Manchester affordable over the long-term?
First, some history on Manchester’s housing strategy: This is not the first iteration of the controversial GMSF. The first draft was released by Greater Manchester’s council leaders back in October 2016 (before Andy Burnham was in post), and aimed to build 227,000 houses by 2037. Originally, it proposed releasing 8.2% of the green belt to provide land for housing. Many campaigners opposed this, and the newly elected Mayor, Andy Burnham, sent the plan back to the drawing board in 2017.
The latest draft published this week contains two important changes. First, it releases slightly less greenbelt land than the original plan, 4.1% of the total, but more than Andy Burnham previously indicated he would. Second, while the latest document is still ambitious, it plans for 26,000 fewer homes over the same period than the original.
In many cities, the housing supply challenge is often painted as a battle-ground between building high-density homes in the city centre or encroaching on the green belt. Greater Manchester is fortunate in that it lacks the density of cities such as London – suggesting less of a confrontation between people who what to build up and people who want to build out.
Prioritising building on Greater Manchester’s plentiful high-density city centre brownfield land first is right and will further incentivise investment in public transport to reduce the dependence of the city on cars. It makes the goal in the Mayor’s new transport plan of 50% of all journeys in Greater Manchester be made on foot, bikes or public transport by 2040 easier to realise.
However, unlike Greater London’s greenbelt which surrounds the city-region, Greater Manchester’s green belt extends deep into the city-region making development on large amounts of land between already urbanised parts of the city-region more difficult. This limits the options to build more housing in parts of Greater Manchester close to the city centre and transport nodes. The worry is that without medium-term reform to the shape of Manchester’s green belt, it may tighten housing supply in Manchester even more than the green belt already does in places such as London and York. In the future, when looking to undertake moderate development on greenbelt land, the Mayor should look to develop in these areas of ‘interior greenbelt’ first.
Greater Manchester’s Green Belt and Local Authority Boundaries, 2019
Despite the scale of its ambition, the GMSF cannot avoid the sheer size of the green belt forever (47% of the total metropolitan area). In all likelihood, plans to reduce the size of the green belt by 2% will need to be looked at again once the existing supply of brownfield land runs low – particularly if housing demand over the next 18 years is higher than the GMSF expects which should be the case if the city region’s economy continues to grow.
The GMSF was a politically pragmatic compromise achieved through the cooperation of the metropolitan councils and the mayoral authority to boost the supply of homes. It happened because Greater Manchester’s Mayor has an elected mandate to implement and integrate the GMSF and the new transport plan. Other cities and the Government should learn from this. The other metro mayors currently lacking spatial planning powers, in Tees Valley and the West Midlands, should be gifted Greater Manchester-style planning powers by the Government so they too can plan and deliver the housing and transport their city-regions need.
Long-term housing strategies that are both sustainable and achievable need to build both up and out. In the short-term Greater Manchester has achieved this, but in the future, if its economic success is maintained, it will need to be bolder on the green belt than the proposals in the current plan. By 2037 Manchester will not face a trade-off between high-density flats in the city centre or green belt reform – it will need to do both. If the city region is to avoid the housing problems that bedevil London and other successful cities, policy makers need to be ready for this.
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John Ventner
The previous draft GMSF had a timeframe up to 2035, not 2037 as per the new draft. This in itself has impacted the numbers due to relatively high (but not high enough) delivery in the intervening years between the 2 drafts.
Alan Wenban-Smith
1. It is impossible to be against ensuring that there are enough decent and affordable homes for all. However, laying on more greenfield land (including Green Belt) – the conventional wisdom that informs current policy (and underlies this blog) – is mistaken.
2. 90% of newly-forming households over the next 20 years are currently under 25. The real crisis of housing need is not the rate of new home building but the widening gap between young workers’ incomes and the general level of house prices. This means that younger households face longer or even indefinite delays in finding a home.
3. An increase in construction of new housing will meet only a very small proportion of these needs directly (even with Help to Buy and Planning Obligations for affordable homes). And if more new building really did reduce the general level of prices (eg through ’trickle down’), new building would stop.
4. The turnover of existing homes delivers 10 times more housing choices than new build. For young, newly-forming households (in particular) the price and quality of the cheapest existing stock is what really matters.
5. The GMSF proposals would greatly increase the amount of housing land, but the additional housing would be unlikely to be viable if required to make provision for non-market housing, as well as necessary services and infrastructure.
6. The diversion of limited public funds to service new housing areas would be particularly damaging to the quality of life in precisely those areas most likely to be affordable to new households.
7. The housing that does get built in such circumstances is that least likely to meet needs of new households, while being most likely to undermine their prospects in the second hand market, and most likely to destroy any prospect of ‘sustainable development’.
8. During the currency of the ‘Brownfield first’ policy at national level (1997-2007), the proportion rose from 54% to 72%, and at the same time the forward supply of further brownfield housing sites rose from 28,000 to 31,000 ha.
9. Brownfield land is not a finite stock, a stop-gap which will therefore be exhausted, as stated by this blog. It is a flow which can be exploited and increased by relevant policies – particularly urban regeneration (including brownfield use).