One hundred thousand homeless families in England

@BritishFailedAesthetic In my village, the parish council objected to sixty six social houses being built.

At the other end of the village, the same council runs a food bank in the church!

@BritishFailedAesthetic There's no need to build on the green belt when there are so many derelict brown-field sites in cities all over the UK. There should be more regeneration of the inner towns and underused industrial sites. Never happens of course because speculative builders find it cheaper to persuade the government to release farmland rather than to renovate or rebuild inner city areas. In the town where I was born there are unused commercial building that occupy sites that could be used to provide housing for thousands of people. Many of these properties have been empty and unused for decades.

@ninalanyonI agree on the matter of brownfield sites, but one problem created over the last several decades was by snobbery on the part of commercial-site developers, who would unashamedly advertise some new industrial estate as being on "a greenfield site".

Recent examples in SW England, all just off the M5, include that waste-to-electricity plant near Gloucester, now attracting more development next to it; a supermarket's massive warehouse near Bridgewater; and Bristol University's huge "Gravity" speculation right by the Mendip Hills AONB.

The housing speculators are at least as bad, but to be honest many former urban industrial sites probably looked too grim to attract house builders and buyers. The exception being former dock-side warehouses converted to flats affordable to... solicitors and insurance-company managers? Even if they give the estates childishly bucolic names - to remind us what they destroy? (A housing-estate planned for Vearse Farm, near Bridport, is called "Foundry Lea"; while that pretentious "Poundbury" sprawl outside Dorchester is nowhere near the real Poundbury!)

For agricultural land though, compulsory purchase apart, it's not the government but the landowners - the farmers - who would release the land to the speculators (who are always the real NIMBYs), for building, subject to planning-permission.

Who could blame them though, when they could then retire on the proceeds, freed from the ignorant attacks British farmers and farming now face from all sides.

@ArishMell But in the green belt planning permission is either impossible or very difficult to obtain at the moment. It would take government action to release that land in practice even if a farmer did sell it to a developer.

@ninalanyon It's still not state-owned land as phrases like "government release" imply, but yes, allowing building on protected land would still be at governmental agency (not government) level.

The Government of the day can change the overall policy but not decide individual cases.

A landowner would know if it can be built on or not, and usually land is sold with outline planning-permission already obtained by the seller. Otherwise it would have to be sold as continuing agricultural land.

That's for houses. I don't know the situation regarding the worryingly large areas of good, productive land being taken up by sprawling solar-array installations. They might come under different planning rules, but I gather that a farmer who sells or lets land for that risks huge tax burdens for himself or his benefactors, for while they might receive an income they will have turned the land from agricultural to industrial use.