Neil Wilby Media

Green Belt campaign groups

The Green Belt campaign began in earnest in October 2016, when the first draft of the GMSF landed. The GMSF included all ten Local Authorities in Greater Manchester, and this earlier draft proposed to build 60,000 homes in the Green Belt; this is more than double the number in the approved plan (27,000), so we have had some success in getting the land grab downscaled, even if we ultimately lost the war. The big three Green Belt campaign groups in Oldham (Save Royton’s Greenbelt, Save Shaw’s Greenbelt and Save Chadderton’s Greenbelt) were founded around this time. These three groups are located in the north of the borough where the allocations in the Green Belt were predominantly located. Many other groups with similar objectives were created across Greater Manchester. Save Greater Manchester Green Belt, the umbrella campaign group, was created by Zoe Sherlock shortly thereafter to co-ordinate activism by the 40 or so groups that existed at that time.

This public backlash coincided with the 2017 mayoral election, and Andy Burnham (then a mayoral candidate) promised to withdraw the plan and re-think it. GMSF 2.0 arrived at the start of 2019, and in this version the number of homes in the Green Belt had been reduced to 30,000.

The different groups approached the campaign in different ways. The three Oldham groups along with the “Save our Slattocks” group (which hails from the Rochdale side of the Oldham-Rochdale border) staged a protest at Tandle Hill Country Park that was attended by 3,000 people, and featured on regional news (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB-nv6_6Cbo). Royton and Shaw focused on engagement with the consultation process, whilst the Chadderton group opted for a more politicised campaign. Their leader, Tracy Woodward, stood for election twice in Chadderton North in 2019 and 2021, garnering almost a thousand votes on each occasion and coming second. Royton and Shaw had some success in getting allocations deleted from the plan, including the two sites in north Royton.

Having been approved as sound by the Planning Inspectorate, it is expected the plan will be formally adopted by the nine Local Authorities. If this occurs, that will leave legal action as the only recourse, estimated at £100,000.

The housing crisis

To understand the delusion driving Places for Everyone, it is important to recognise the myth that is shaping our understanding of the housing crisis, and therefore hampering our ability to tackle it. The housing crisis is essentially two-fold: home-ownership is becoming an increasingly distant dream for many, and then there is the chronic shortage of social housing. It will be simpler to take these in turn.

Supply and demand

House prices have outstripped earnings at record rates: in the late 1990s, house prices were on average 3.6 times the average salary; in just 20 years that has doubled to 8 times, and in London it is even higher. The orthodox view is that we are simply not building enough houses, so demand is outstripping supply and driving up prices. It makes sense, and everyone is familiar with the economics of supply and demand, so most people don’t really stop and question it.

It is on this basis that Greater Manchester (minus Stockport) has a housing target of 175,000 homes over a 17-year period, despite the fact that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) projected household growth of only 105,000 over the same period (and the 2021 census suggests that the ONS has been over-estimating the level of household growth). The Government housing target is reverse engineered from its totemic 300,000 new homes per year national target. The thinking goes like this: if you over-supply the market the prices will come down.

Whilst “supply and demand” is widely understood and accepted, economists have started arriving at the conclusion that fluctuations in the supply and demand of credit has had a greater impact on house prices than housing stock. Professor David Miles of Imperial College, London, showed that the increase in British house prices between 1985 and 2018 was explained by the fall in real interest rates and the increase in real incomes. A shortage of houses did not enter the picture. These conclusions are supported by the Bank of England, no less (https://positivemoney.org/2019/09/bank-of-england-confirms-positive-money-analysis-of-house- prices/), which found that the price of a house is not determined so much by simple textbook supply and demand as with typical consumer goods, but by the role of finance. The counter- assumption, that prices are being driven upwards by a shortage of housing stock is easily disprovable: PositiveMoney found that, prior to the pandemic, the increase in housing stock levels have outstripped population growth. So in theory this should have precipitated a drop in real prices, but it did not.

Greater Manchester is an interesting case in point: between 2011 and 2021 the rise in house prices mirrored the national trend exactly. However, during this period, Greater Manchester (including Stockport) delivered 79,000 new homes, compared to household growth of 50,000. Over-supplying the market by 60% during this period does not appear to have arrested house price rises. It makes plenty of sense when you think about it. People don’t go out and buy a house in the same way they buy a pair of socks. A person’s ability to purchase a house is determined byhow much a person can afford to pay as part of a monthly mortgage. This being the case, if interest rates drop, then people can afford to buy a more expensive house for the exact same monthly cost, and this is what has driven prices up.

The Green Belt groups are not saying there isn’t a housing shortage (of a particular type) or an affordability problem, we simply disagree that the over-provision of market housing is the solution. In plain numerical terms Greater Manchester has a documented land supply that the councils themselves have assessed as capable of delivering 179,000 homes over the plan period, far exceeding the ONS projected need of 105,000.

Affordable housing

Despite the numerical over-provision in Greater Manchester between 2011 and 2021, the affordability crisis has become increasingly acute, as demonstrated by the growing social housing waiting list (79,000 at Greater Manchester level including Stockport). Whilst the mayor’s “bed for a night” scheme has applied a somewhat cosmetic solution to the homelessness crisis engulfing Greater Manchester, the official stats tell the real story. The cost-of-living crisis has seen a bump in homelessness up and down the country, but the long-term trend makes for troubling reading: between 2011 and 2021 nationally, there had been a reduction in “priority need” homelessness cases, even in London. Greater Manchester has bucked the trend, however. Compared to a 20% drop nationally, Greater Manchester saw the number of cases increase by over 60% (ironically, an almost identical percentage increase to the housing surplus over the same period).

So the over-supply of housing over the same period did not see house prices in Greater Manchester break with the national trend, they have not prevented social housing waiting lists from increasing, and they have not seemingly made any impact on homelessness either.

Another part of the jigsaw came in 2015, when the City of Manchester took the decision to limit affordable and social new builds and focus on market rate homes. In 2022, the Manchester Evening News published an article (Jennifer Williams,“Has Manchester rebuilt London’s housing crisis?”, Manchester Evening News) and talked with people who were part of that decision:

“The theory was ‘we just need more homes around the city’,” says one figure familiar with the conversations at the time, “and it would ease the pressure.” “But it didn’t work, because the numbers were going the wrong way; deprivation was going the wrong way; the market was going the wrong way.” Another former senior official familiar with that period agrees.

Relying on market housing to solve the affordability crisis was a disaster for Manchester, and one that should have been painfully obvious in hindsight. People end up in social housing—or on the streets—because the housing market does not work for them. In other words, the “supply and demand” solution for people who cannot afford a home is not to make housing cheaper for them, but to make them homeless.

“Marj, what do you say to all of those people who say ‘we just need those houses’?”

This was the question put to Marj Powner, Vice Chair of Save Greater Manchester Greenbelt during a radio interview in autumn 2023. There seemed to be recognition by the political class of Greater Manchester that they had got it disastrously wrong on housing, and Places for Everyone committed to building 50,000 affordable homes (including 30,000 for social housing). The distinction is important, because a home only needs to offer a 20% discount to be classed as “affordable”; in that case, a house carrying a headline price of £400,000, is still pretty much unaffordable to people in need of affordable housing even with a 20% discount.

However, the pledge of 50,000 affordable homes amounted to around 30% of the total housing target over the plan period, and the numbers in the evidence base just did not add up. Each Green Belt allocation was accompanied by a viability assessment, which showed that of the 27,000 homes to be built in the Green belt around 5,500 would be “affordable” —a little over 20%. For social rent, this figure dropped to 1,300 (around 5%, as opposed to 17% as pledged by the plan). In Oldham, none of the Green Belt allocations will provide any social housing. The reality caught up with the plan at the examination and the 50,000 affordable homes pledge was dropped. What we ended up with was not a plan that had learned from the mistakes of the city, but one that was hell bent on perpetuating them across the whole of conurbation for a generation.

Conjuring up a land “shortage”

So you have your housing target, and even though it has been artificially inflated through a perversion of economic witlessness, you still don’t actually have a land shortage. So what do you do if your goal is to build a ton of market housing and get those Band E council tax receipts flowing in?

The councils of Greater Manchester performed a sleight of hand and the Planning Inspectors conveniently gave them cover for it. The inspectors noted that compared to the housing target of 175,000 homes, the land supply stands at 179,000 homes, representing just 2% flexibility in the land supply. Therefore they considered Green Belt release a necessity. On the face of it, this seems a reasonable position to adopt: if a couple of large sites fell through or logistical issues were encountered hampering the delivery of several smaller sites then meeting the target could be compromised. The Green belt release would increase flexibility to 14%, and therefore underwrite the housing supply. The logic appears sound on the surface, but it is important to look at exactly what the inspectors are justifying.

This is a 17-year plan, and councils’ land assessments only have a 15-year life cycle. If you compare the target for the first 15 years of the plan to the land assessment, then you actually have 12% surplus, which is not far off the 14% advocated by the planning inspectors. And that is without any Green Belt release whatsoever. So the lack of flexibility primarily results from the final two years of the plan i.e. not a “shortfall” at all, but rather an unassessed period of the plan. Why does this matter? Because Government policy only requires land for the first 10 years of the plan upfront, and the first 15 years “if possible”. It does not require all the land upfront for a plan of arbitrary length.

But even if you only supply the first 15 years upfront, you still have to find the land for the remainder of the plan period eventually, right? True. But that’s where it becomes interesting. The land supplies are not finite; they are a perpetually renewable source, as land comes in and out of use. It’s like a till at Asda: maybe there are no more than a dozen people in the queue at any given time, but perhaps 150 customers pass through that till in a day. The size of the queue is not indicative of the total number of sales. To provide an example, in 2015 the prospective land supply for the plan area stood at 163,000 units; by 2022, it had increased to 168,000 units, despite 67,000 homes being built in the plan area in that time. In other words, land has been becoming available at roughly the same rate it is being built on.

The Mayor, the GMCA, and the councils are playing a numbers game, and the planning inspectors are complicit. By mismatching the term of the plan to the lifecycle of the land assessment you end up with a prescriptive formula for annexing land from the Green Belt. To illustrate the concept, let’s hypothesize we are in 2015 and we want to build 60,000 homes in the Green Belt. What I need to do is first add the 60,000 on to the 163,000 I have in the 2015 land assessment to give me a ball park figure of 223,000. I then subtract my 14% margin which takes me down to 196,000. With an annual target of 10,305, I therefore need to set the length of the plan to 19 years (196,000 divided by 10,305) to create enough of a shortfall to justify building 60,000 homes in the Green Belt. Incidentally, the version of the GMSF proposed back in 2016 did precisely this: it was a 20- year plan that proposed building 60,000 homes in the Green Belt. We have the benefit of hindsight now: since then we have built 67,000 homes (approximately 9,600 per annum) and the land supply has increased from 163,000 to 168,000. History has proven there wasn’t a land shortfall in 2015, and there isn’t one now. It’s just a smoke and mirrors trick, and not even a sophisticated one.

Oldham Council and “ecocide”

So once a land shortage is established, and the sites selected, there is just one more hurdle to overcome: the current inhabitants. National policy requires plans to allocate land with the least environmental and amenity value. To assist in this process, the allocations were accompanied by a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal (PEA). In some instances (such as the New Carrington allocation in Trafford) no ecological evidence at all was provided, and this is an ongoing concern. In many cases, however, the PEAs were carried out by the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit (GMEU). This was indeed the case for the Oldham sites.

The PEA guidelines issued by the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) stipulate that the PEA should include a desktop survey and a site visit, followed up by a report that assesses the likely presence of protected and priority species that are present and maps out their habitats. The PEAs for the Oldham sites included desktop surveys and nothing else. They left the impression that there was nothing of ecological value present at any of the sites. This was curious to say the least, given that there was a designated Site of Biological Importance (SBI) at the Beal Valley/Broadbent Moss allocation in the north of Oldham.

Gillian Holden, a resident of Oldham and founder of Save Derker’s Greenbelt, attended the examination hearing for this allocation in January 2023. Despite no formal education or background in ecology, she had been surveying the site since August 2020 and had recorded numerous protected and priority species. The difference between her records and the paucity of the PEA was so stark, that I assisted with a Freedom of the Information request to the GMEU for data in the Greater Manchester Local Record pertaining to this site. The data we received back was illuminating: maps revealed a mosaic of habitats. Despite Gillian’s lack of formal training, her records were remarkably consistent with that of the Local Record: in total, there are 36 protected or priority species logged in the Local Record, and Gillian recorded a further six. In addition, Gillian also recorded numerous Red and Amber listed bird species.

The Local Record also recorded the presence of water vole on the east side of the site. The water vole is the UK’s most endangered mammal, having lost 94% of its habitat since the 1970s, and it is illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to harm the creature. It is also illegal to destroy its habitat, which is in the vicinity of a proposed access road. Even more concerning is that Oldham Council commissioned an ecological constraints assessment of the proposed spine road connecting Beal Valley and Broadbent Moss, in 2021. The assessment revealed the presence of the water vole and included much of the ecological information that should have been included in the ecological appraisals for the allocation. All of this information was withheld from the PfE examination, despite the fact it was material to the soundness of the allocation.

In September 2023, concerns about the PEAs not following the CIEEM guidelines and the resulting shortcomings were put to Oldham Council by Royton North Cllrs. Arnott and Quigg. Via email, the Leader of Oldham Council, Cllr. Shah, responded “Whilst PfE does allocate some land with environmental value, the evidence has enabled this to be kept to a minimum and ensured that the most important ecological assets have been identified for inclusion in allocation policies. It has also enabled recommendations for likely mitigation and enhancement to be included within policies, where appropriate.” We do not believe it is possible for Cllr. Shah to make that determination, given the lack of conformity between the PEAs and the CIEEM guidelines. It is very difficult to assume good faith when there was obviously a conscious decision at some point to not disclose the constraints report and the presence of an endangered species to the examination process.

Levelling down

To some extent the Green Belt has become a lightning rod, and this singular issue has diverted attention away from other aspects that warrant greater scrutiny. PfE’s core aim is to restructure the economy of Greater Manchester. Fundamentally, PfE is a Cheshire/South Manchester plan that aimed to capitalise on the opportunities that HS2 would have brought to the region. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but the role of the north—particularly that of Oldham, Rochdale and Bury—will be to provide logistical services to the south, namely warehousing. Around 1.5 million sqm of industrial floor space will be provided along the North-East/M62 Corridor.

The policies for the two strategic allocations (Stakehill on the Oldham-Rochdale border, and Pilsworth on the Rochdale-Bury border) promise to make the area a “nationally significant area of economic activity” through the provision of over 1 million sqm of industrial and warehousing floor space. However, the viability assessments show that warehousing will account for around 95% of the floor space at Pilsworth, and about 80% at Stakehill. This is not surprising given that the GMCA’s own data shows that general industry has a shrinking land footprint in Greater Manchester. The upshot is that the economic area will be dominated by fulfilment and warehousing services, and it is difficult to see how this will honour the stated ambition of being “nationally significant”. Besides the fact that warehousing jobs on average pay only slightly above minimum wage, there are two other more fundamental problems that Oldham, Rochdale and Bury need to grapple with:

 – Warehousing is low density employment. According to the GMCA’s own data, employment density in warehousing is roughly 77 sqm per job, whilst it is 40 sqm per job for general industry. Other forms of employment generally have even better employment densities. Saturation-level warehousing is an extremely sub-optimal use of an area’s employment space. Between jobs that pay the same, the earnings yield per sqm for warehousing would be approximately half what it is for general industry. The earning yield per sqm would be even higher for sectors such as retail and those that utilise offices. And given that warehousing is extremely susceptible to automation those densities will only get worse.

 – The other issue is that the GMCA’s data shows that warehousing has much lower GVA growth than the GM economy as a whole. GVA—Gross Value Added—is a measure of how much a sector or geographic area is valued at. The one GVA measure most people will have heard of is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is the value of a country’s economy. In Greater Manchester, the GVA growth of the overall economy is roughly three times that of warehousing. Rather than levelling up the region, we will see a widening of the wealth gap, if the economy in other parts of Greater Manchester is growing at a faster rate than in those areas dominated by warehousing. This is just a mathematical truism.

 – The provision of storage facilities is of course a logistical necessity for industry, but its purpose is predominantly to support other industry, manufacturing and services. If the goal is to use it to drive employment then it is an extremely sub-optimal solution due to low employment densities. If the goal is to use it to close the wealth gap then it is doomed to fail due to the low GVA growth.

 – It is perplexing to understand why Oldham Council would sign the borough up for something that so obviously prioritises the interests of other areas over our own. But this is most likely explained by the fact that the executive management team at Oldham, predominantly lives outside of Oldham. i.e. they have no personal investment in the borough’s success. If the borough thrives, the upsurge in business rates will drive up the council’s revenue streams. If the borough remains impoverished then the council’s income can be supplemented through various grants. Either way, the council’s top executives are shielded from the town’s poverty (as evidenced by that the fact that Oldham has more executives earning a six-figure sum than more affluent areas such as Stockport and Trafford). Ultimately, the primary goal of Places for Everyone is to drive the economy in South Manchester, and the likes of Oldham and Rochdale are just an afterthought. There is no coherent industrial strategy for the north.

It is a levelling down agenda for Oldham.