'Woods and homes' green belt call
Posted: 18 Apr 2006, 10:35
An interesting idea, to reforest green belt land and use a small part of the land for housing, too.
If the homes were built with wood stoves as their main source of heating, this might make sense! It will probably just serve to make their selling price unaffordable for most, though!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4915022.stm
If the homes were built with wood stoves as their main source of heating, this might make sense! It will probably just serve to make their selling price unaffordable for most, though!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4915022.stm
Mr Balen called for a change in policy where some farms and green belt would be turned into housing and woodlands.
He said: "If some of these were converted to sympathetic development consisting of 90% woodland, including small lakes and rivers, and 5% each for housing and supporting infrastructure, each farm whose use was changed in this way would yield almost 200,000 square metres (2.15 million sq ft) of new woodland, together with 140 average-sized new homes."
Mr Balen proposed that 3% of all farmland be converted using this system, which would create 950,000 new houses and 130,000 hectares of woodland, which equated to about an 11% increase in the woodland cover of England and Wales.
