All sides of the political divide agree there is a housing crisis in the UK, but also seem frustratingly short on answers. Campaigners from the Russell Brand-backed New Era Estate to free-market think-tanks assert the need for more housing, but house-building in the UK has slumped to the lowest levels since the early 1920s. Moreover, the Conservative manifesto pledge to sell off 1.3 million housing association properties under ‘right to buy’ – nominally using the cash to fund more homes – is expected to exacerbate the problem in the short term. Some call for rent controls in London to both curb the private rental sector and encourage house-building, but there is also a bigger question of where those homes should go.

Some suggest we need a radical loosening up Britain’s notoriously restrictive Town and Country Planning Act 1947, most notably in the Green Belt surrounding London: the National Housing Federation argues that freeing up one per cent of such land could provide space for 300,000 new homes. Objections to this come both from influential voices who call for the development of brownfield sites rather than paving over the countryside and from those who question whether the market can be relied upon to provide sufficient accommodation. There are concerns that without an accompanying large-scale development of transport infrastructure, loosening Green Belt restrictions would only lead to the creation of unloved suburban banlieues at the expense of precious green space outside the cities.

Is opposition to building on the Green Belt really just Nimbyism, or are there valid concerns that the policy is an ineffective quick fix to a bigger problem of demand? Do even moderate attempts to relax planning restrictions on new developments on both brownfield and Green Belt land alike threaten to cause chaos for humans and disaster for natural habitats? Are property developers and home-builders simply distracting themselves from more innovative solutions to the housing crisis, or a change in our attitudes to home ownership? Why has suburbanisation and city expansion, once heralded as the triumph of a modern city development, now become viewed with so much suspicion? Should the focus remain on providing the right kind of housing, or is the only solution to the current impasse to ‘build, build, build’?