Professor Dieter Helm, chair of the Natural Capital Committee, has said that the green belt should be preserved and treated as natural capital. Speaking in a personal capacity at the "Green Belt of the Future" seminar, Professor Helm talked about observing "decades of an almost entirely fruitless debate between people who think that the economy is on one side of the debate and the environment on the other."
He explained that natural capital encompasses the idea that the environment "is a set of assets in overlapping ecosystems that are just as important as any other assets in the economy."
Professor Helm's seminar comes a few weeks after the Government released its housing white paper, "Fixing our broken housing market" which, amongst other things, aims to address the housing shortage in the UK; something which some fear may see increased building on the green belt despite the fact that the paper aims to "maintain existing strong protections for the Green Belt".
At the same event, Janet Askew, director of academic engagement and enhancement at the University of West England, said that London shows how successful a compact city can be, and therefore "The green belt is a sustainable policy and it works."
However, both the white paper and advice from the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) suggests that in extreme cases, green belt boundaries may have to be changed, but, as the RTPI says, "only through careful reviews over wider areas than single local authorities, and where safeguards are put in place to ensure that development is sustainable, affordable and deliverable in a timely manner, and without prejudice to the renewal of brownfield land".
