Countryside, development, housing and biodiversity
By Rosamund McDougall
Co-chair of the Optimum Population Trust 2002-2005 and joint Policy Director 2006-2009.
This paper was written to show the pressure that population growth places on housing demand and its consequent impact on the countryside, natural
resources and biodiversity. It was originally written in 2004, with various items updated until 2007. More recent census and ONS projections point to even
greater UK population growth than expected. In In 2011 the Optimum Population Trust changed its campaigning name to Population Matters.
Key points
*Continuous urbanisation of the planet,
fuelled by expected population growth of 2.5
billion by 2050, will be ecologically
unsustainable.
*UK population grew at an average annual
rate of 0.5% in the six years from 2000 to
2006. If this growth rate is allowed to
continue, 12.7 million more people will be
living in England alone by 2050 - needing an
extra 8.25 million homes.
*This growth would mean building a
megacity more than one and a half times the
size of London, covering more than a quarter
of a million hectares - an area more than
two-thirds the size of Hampshire, without
allowing for external infrastructure needs.
*Urbanisation on this scale could mean, at
London's 2000 consumption levels: the use of
an extra 260,948 GigaWatt hours of energy a
year in 2050, the production of 70 million
more tonnes of carbon dioxide, and the
consumption of an extra 1,464 billion litres of
water.
*Official projections of March 2006 show the
number of UK households rising to 36 million
by 2050 - which translates into 11 million
more homes needed for the UK as a whole.
*Policies to stabilise and decrease UK
population by 0.25% a year, as recommended
by OPT, would have eliminated almost all the
need for additional homes by 2050 if they
had been implemented in 2005.
ENVIRONMENTALLY UNSUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT: EARTH
1. WORLDWIDE URBANISATION
World population grew rapidly in the twentieth century as cheap
energy made industrialisation possible, and as it did so people
moved from rural land into cities, bringing rapid urbanisation and
depleting the Earth's natural resources. According to the United
Nations World Urbanization Prospects: the 2005 Revision (UN,
2006), there were just two cities with 10 million inhabitants or more
in 1950 - New York and Tokyo, but by 2005 there were 20 of these
mega-cities, ranging from Tokyo, with its conurbation of 35 million
people, to Manila and Moscow with 11 million. Half the world's
population will be urban dwellers by 2008, and by 2030, with world
population at 8.2 billion, they may account for nearly two-thirds.
This process has disconnected human populations from their natural
habitat and led to destructive development on an unprecedented
scale. And with climate change beginning to bite, population growth
and movement from rural to urban settlements is likely to increase
poverty as many millions of ecologically dispossessed citizens join
the flow.
Ten years have been wasted since the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change was first adopted by the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1997. Greenhouse gas
emissions have since risen at increasing speed, and the human
species has grown almost unfettered - by nearly a billion - during
that period. While governments are beginning to act to curb climate
change, there has been no international effort to introduce
environmentally sustainable population policies. More and more
humans are living off shrinking ecological capital- less and less land
to provide renewable resource and absorb their wastes.
While humans are dangerously damaging the ecosystem, the other
species they share it with - and depend on for survival - are being
lost at an unprecedented rate. The Living Planet Report 2006 report
revealed that populations of terrestrial species had declined by
about a third since 1970, and according to the World Conservation
Union of 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries, animal
and plant species are being lost at an unprecedented rate.
Biodiversity loss is also being exacerbated by melting icecaps and
desertification - the effects of global warming.
-2ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The concept of 'sustainable development' has moved far away from its original meaning, which implied long-term ecological
sustainability. The term has been widely abused - for example to describe building development which does not in any sense meet
the fundamental requirements of ecological sustainability. These are that such development does not (by increasing total
urbanised land) contribute to destabilising climate change; that it can be supported in a post-fossil fuel energy age; that it does
not continue the destruction of biodiversity and reduce Earth's capacity to produce renewable biological resources; and in the
case of the UK, that it does not also continue to destroy our natural landscape and countryside.
The need for healthy biodiversity underpins people's additional need for the unmeasurable benefits that landscape and
countryside give them - beauty, space, silence and peace - as well as the complex natural life-support system necessary for
long-term survival. There are also measurable benefits: the greater security of food and water supply from domestic land
use and environmental benefits that would result from sustainable population policies as well as conservation and
reforestation policies. Had governments enabled all their citizens to use birth control and reduce family size when modern
contraception became available in the 1970s, there might have been 500 million fewer humans by 2010.
ENVIRONMENTALLY UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: EUROPE
2. EUROPE'S THREATENED LAND
If climate modellers prove correct, desertification will spread further north from Africa through southern Europe, where
regular droughts have already damaged ecosystems in southern Spain and Italy. As temperatures rise, rainfall becomes more
unpredictable and storms increase, agricultural and other biologically productive land will become unfit for use. With highlypopulated coastal regions and cities such as London under threat by 2100, many of the EU 27's citizens may be driven
northwards. Europe's agricultural land is already under threat - in 2000 the European Environment Agency concluded that EU
soil resources were already being irreversibly lost and degraded at an unprecedented rate.
Europe is better placed than other continents to deal with these population movements. By 2025, the population of the EU
is expected to have peaked, and then to decrease to below 475 million by 2050 - at least 20 million fewer people than
today. With its high carbon and ecological footprints, Europe as a whole will be able to use population decrease to offset its
impact on the rest of the world as well as its own territories - but several EU countries are offering financial incentives to
increase their birth rates. Overpopulated EU member states such as the UK are likely to face serious environmental problems
if they allow population growth to continue.
ENVIRONMENTALLY UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: UK
3. THE CONCRETING OF OUR COUNTRYSIDE AND GARDENS
The population of the UK grew nearly a fifth (10 million) between 1950 and 2000 - within the lifetime of many people living
today. From mid-2000 to mid-2006, it has been allowed to grow by an estimated 1.5 million more, and population density
has increased in most areas of England and Wales, with severe pressure in the south-east of England. At current rates of
population growth, the UK will soon become the most densely populated country in Europe.
The results of long-term population growth, combined with consumption growth, can be seen all around us as our landscapes
are lost to large-scale housing expansion with all its supporting infrastructure needs. Some 160,000 homes are being built in
the UK every year - with infrastructure the equivalent of half a capital city the size of Cardiff. But as fast as developers
develop and builders build, population growth moves the goalposts.
-3Household projections published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on 16 March 2007
showed the annual rate of household growth in England from 2004 to 2026 rising yet again - to 223,000 a year compared with
the 209,000 projected one year earlier. A third of this household growth - one million extra households in England every four
years - was recognised as directly due to net inward migration into England, with the rest due to reducing average household
size as growing numbers of separated couples, more unmarried people, and more older people live alone (including previous
generations of migrants).
Yet successive governments and developers continue to call for more and more housing supply - to satisfy unlimited demand,
instead of recommending limits to population growth as part of the solution: the additional housing 'need' might not have
occurred if population stabilisation and reduction policies had been put in place in 1990. From 1990 to 1998, according to
DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, some 8,000 hectares of undeveloped land in England were
urbanised every year, and with population growth running at more than 320,000 a year since 2004, the rate is likely to
increase. Housing is only half of the story: urbanised areas are continuously expanding to meet the need for the roads,
airports, shops, offices, factories, hospitals, leisure facilities, power stations and wind farms, prisons and waste dumps that
go with rising population and rising consumption.
With older people living longer and younger people marrying later or living in one-parent households, average household size
fell from 2.9 people in 1971 to 2.4 in 2004, according to the Barker Review of Land Use Planning , commissioned by the
Treasury and published in December 2006. Average household size is projected to fall from 2.3 in 2006 to 2.1 in 2021,
fuelling the demand for housing caused by underlying population growth - of which more than 80% will arise from net inward
migration, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
In 2005, UK population was officially projected to reach 70.7 million in 2074, an increase of 10.2 million from the estimated
mid-2006 level of 60.5 million. But if growth continues at the actual 2000-06 average rate of 0.5%, it will reach 73.5 million
in 2050. With projected average household size down from 2.3 in 2006 to 2.1 people in 2021, more than eight million extra
homes would be needed to house this increase in England alone (see Graph 5.3 below).
3.1 POPULATION GROWTH AND HOUSING CONSTRUCTION
London and the South-East have become a single megalopolis of gridlocked urban sprawl, and the scale of further
environmental destruction proposed can be seen in the Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future plans from the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now DCLG), some of which were already under way when the 2007-8 recession
dampened housing construction. Plans included an "ambition" to build 200,000 extra new homes a year in England alone from
2006-2016. Successive governments' predict-and-provide approach to population and housing has been reinforced by
recommendations in the Barker Review of Land Use Planning of December 2006. Among its many recommendations to speed
up the planning process and allow homes to be built for households forming at the rate of 209,000 people a year is just one
environmentally sustainable recommendation - that policies should focus, "wherever possible, on desired outcomes... for
example in terms of climate change, the outcome should be to reduce the carbon footprint with the best means being
flexible." The ecological impact of building up to eight million extra homes by 2050 is demonstrated in Section 5 and Section
6 below. And with new official projections indicating even higher population growth, eight million homes has become an
underestimate.
Greenfield sites, Green Belt and green space in cities (private gardens are classified as 'brownfield sites') are all being
sacrificed to urbanisation. Massive development plans include new towns in central England and a megalopolis band of
development for 15 million people across the North of England. Urban sprawl is taking place even in National Parks nowhere is safe from environmental destruction.
-4WEAPONS OF MASS DEVELOPMENT: RECENT EVENTS
Barker Review of Land Use Planning, while appearing to support environmental considerations and
acknowledging that England "is a small and relatively densely-populated country", recommended a series of policies that would let
development rip further into the UK's shrinking green land. These included "a policy framework which encourages...a more
positive attitude to development" and "setting out the case for local planning authorities to have better financial incentives and
flexibility to promote economic development more effectively."
-East England Regional Assembly, an unelected body of local authority and other representatives
of the South-East region, revealed plans to build 640,000 new homes in the area - up to 32,000 a year - by 2026. (The South-East
Region includes Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Sussex but not London.) It was estimated that
taxpayers would have to meet £30 billion of infrastructure costs. Eight million residents of the South-East were to be asked to
choose one of three options for the Plan - to allow the building of 25,500, 28,000 or 32,000 homes a year. However, residents
were not to be allowed the option of voting for population and planning policies which would make all three of these building
targets unnecessary.
edfordshire, Cambridgeshire,
Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk) by 2021, approved by an unelected Regional Assembly in October, was announced. This
brought the total new homes planned for Central, East and South-East England to at least 1.2 million homes.
-density, high rise housing, but prefer
space and natural surroundings. Of people asked what type of property they saw as their dream home only 6% cited a 'trendy
penthouse flat', compared with 14% citing a family cottage in the countryside, 12% a seafront property, 9% a farmhouse, and 6% 'a
huge mansion in the country'.
g units a year, for rent, by 2008, and
this decision was broadly welcomed. He also confirmed plans to build 200,000 new homes in South-East and Central England by
2016, in the areas of Milton Keynes, Thames Gateway, Ashford in Kent, and the M11 Stansted-Cambridge corridor, bringing total
building plans to more than a million homes and supporting transport infrastructure by 2016.
ed
that government-backed plans to build hundreds of thousands of new homes will damage the environment and endanger Britain's
efforts to curb global warming. The statement was hailed as "very important" by the chairman of the House of Commons
Environmental Audit committee.
- including OPT - DEFRA commissioned an assessment
from independent consultants, which confirmed that government plans to build 1.4 million extra new homes in England would
have a devastating impact on the country and the wider environment if they were to be carried out. The plans would lead to huge
increases in domestic waste disposal, carbon dioxide emissions, loss of countryside and amenity land, water demand and materials
quarrying for construction. The plans conflict directly with Kyoto emissions targets and are environmentally unsustainable. [Study
into the Environmental Impacts of Increasing the Supply of Housing in the UK, DEFRA, April 2004.]
Review of Housing Supply written by economist Kate
Barker, was published, stating that 1.4 million homes needed to be built in England in the next 10 years (140,000 a year) in
addition to the 93,000-146,000 a year already planned or under construction - a total of up to two million homes by 2016. The
conclusions of this report were immediately and almost wholly approved by Chancellor Gordon Brown.
-building plans in
the south-east alone could cost £20 billion without yielding any benefit, taking into account the infrastructure of hospitals, schools
and transport that would have to be built to support 200,000 homes. At £20 billion for 200,000 homes, the infrastructure costs for
6.5 million homes would be insupportable.
-5It is not only the UK's human population that is suffering the consequences, but other species: fragmentation of wildlife
habitats and the progressive destruction or 'simplification' of ecosystems have been caused by human activities. Survey
analyses of plant, bird and butterfly species over a 40-year period, show an accelerating rate of decline and extinction in
the UK. Ideas such as leaving borders in fields or gardens untouched to allow small ecosystems to flourish have helped to
alleviate biodiversity losses. But to pretend that such small-scale ecological benefits will offset the development demanded
by and expected 16 million more people by 2050 is, OPT maintains, a grotesque deception.
Predict-and-provide development plans have set in train a gravy train of property speculation as population growth feeds
into rising house prices - housebuilding and construction companies love population growth, because it means more business.
The plans also contradict the government's own reported plans to restrain transport growth because of its impact on
congestion, pollution and climate change. They are also unnecessary - a moderate population stabilisation and reduction
policy provides one essential long-term contributing solution, alongside others such as the maintenance of planning controls
and laws, with the building of limited amounts of affordable housing in rural areas.
The Countryside Agency (now Natural England) has admitted that between 1990 and 1998 only 40% of English landscapes
remained unaltered by development. (Some of this development was due to change of agricultural use, and some to
urbanisation.) But as with information from many other agencies charged with protecting countryside and landscape in the
UK, the true extent of development is hidden. For example, as rural areas become reclassified as urban ones once their
population reaches 10,000, the annual percentage of rural land loss appears less significant than it has been over the long
term. Population growth is acknowledged as a cause of rapid urbanisation, but stabilising and reducing UK population never
mentioned as part of a solution.
In its State of the Countryside 2006 report, the Commission for Rural Communities recognised the continuing trend of urban
to rural migration, with a net total of over 105,000 people moving into the most rural areas in 2003/4: "A continuation of
this pattern would see the total population of the most rural districts/authorities increase by just under 20% in the next 20
years or so." This is already having ecological impacts: "there are warning signs in the worsening of some measures of
biodiversity in the southern regions of England. "Only the northern Pennines, the Lakes, the North York Moors and parts of
Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Herefordshire, Devon, Cornwall and a small part of Suffolk, Kent and Dorset are still classified as
"sparse". That population growth leads to environmentally unsustainable development can no longer be in doubt.
3.2 MORE HOMES MEAN MORE INFRASTRUCTURE
Government policy, suggesting that more than 40% of new building might take place on greenfield sites and 60% of new
homes on brownfield sites, does not take full account of infrastructure needs: in July 2004 a London Schools of Economics
report estimated the infrastructure cost for new housing estates at £40,000 per house, which would have to be subsidised by
taxpayers. Strong opposition to development projects is evidence of the strength of public feeling against further
development on this scale, but power has been removed from the public by a series of planning 'reforms'.
Housing is not the only source of continued land loss spurred on by population growth: among the infrastructure items
needed to support more homes for more people, for example, are railways, nuclear power stations and prisons. Commuter
railways are full to bursting in the overcrowded south-east where land for new lines is most expensive. An average nuclear
power station requires 40 hectares and, if gas cooled, will not be dismantled until 85 years after shutdown. And the prison
population of England and Wales hit a bursting-point high of more than 80,000 in February 2007 - when the government
announced plans to build new prisons with 8,000 extra places over five years: the causes of this rise include many nondemographic factors, but to build prison capacity for an increase of five million in the total UK population would, at an
incarceration rate of 141 prisoners per 100,000 people, require prisons to be built for another 7,050 inmates - 20 more
prisons the size of HMP Aylesbury or nearly five the size of HMP Wandsworth.
-63.3 THE EROSION OF RIGHTS TO PROTECT THE COUNTRYSIDE
Population growth curbs freedom. To make it easier to carry out large infrastructure projects, the Planning and Compulsory
Purchase Act of 2004 removed yet more citizens' rights to control their own environment - to accommodate or provide for
population growth (whether by natural increase or net inward migration) that could easily have been prevented had
governments acted on the recommendations of a government-appointed Population Panel in 1973, which said that "Britain
must face the fact that its population cannot go on increasing indefinitely", and called on the government of the day to
"define its attitude to questions concerning the level and rate of increase of population". Powers to delay development have
been replaced by powers to speed it up - using a concept of 'planning gain' which assumes that most development can yield a
'gain' to the local population. A range of planning guidance measures has been introduced, designed to help developers to
get planning applications accepted more quickly, and to reduce the time and money available for the public to resist them.
Yet more rights to protect the countryside may be eroded by measures that allow developers to pay 'fees' to local councils to
award quicker planning permission for development. The erosion of these rights is a direct result of growing population
pressure on a finite supply of land. The Act will affect not only the countryside but also the suburbs, by designating private
gardens as 'brownfield' (already developed) land available for high-density development. Rights have also been eroded by
the creation of Regional (political and planning) Assemblies which have power over local authorities.
3.4 SHORT-TERM FIXES
3.4.1 BUILDING ECO-FRIENDLY HOUSING
The concept of sustainable development has been misunderstood. Building new eco-friendly housing is no answer to the UK's
environmental problems on its own. If this concept is used simply to build more homes to accommodate a perpetually
growing population, with the extra infrastructure needed to go with the extra people, "sustainable development" can only
result in lower quality of life for all its inhabitants.
3.4.2 FILLING EMPTY HOMES
Other proposed solutions can only slow the process of urbanisation. For example, empty homes can be used to house the
homeless, and legislation has been introduced to allow councils to force owners of vacant properties to offer them to
homeless people on council waiting lists. In 2005-6, according to the Empty Homes Agency, there were about 290,000 'longterm' empty homes in England alone, of which some 10-20,000 a year were successfully used to provide extra housing. While
there is potential to increase this number, 20,000 homes would be filled up in a few weeks by a UK population rising by more
than 320,000 a year.
3.4.3 HIGHER DENSITY HOUSING
Housing people at higher densities brings some environmental benefits: for example, it can reduce transport impacts by
enabling people to walk to school or work. And if more people share a home, they will reduce demand for household energy.
Nationwide application of this principle without stabilising overall population numbers, however, is based on lack of
understanding of the overall resource demands and impacts on their surrounding environment of increasing numbers of
individual human beings in a finite space (the UK) over the long term. A 10% improvement in environmental impacts
achieved by housing 500 people living at higher density, would be wiped out by the addition of another 50 people to overall
numbers. More than that, the additional 50 people would create demand for additional infrastructure, and therefore further
loss of land to development.
All this means that by 2050 there will be few non-urbanised landscapes left in England, and the pressures on National Parks
and still unspoilt rural areas of Scotland and Wales would become severe. A population stabilisation and gradual reduction
policy, alongside strict planning controls and the provision of affordable housing, is, OPT maintains, sensible and necessary
to avoid this outcome.
-74. POPULATION GROWTH, INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENTS, FOOD PRODUCTION AND WASTE
4.1 ENVIRONMENTAL FALLACIES ABOUT LAND USE
Successive governments and developers have countered public disquiet about overpopulation by pointing out that less than
15% of the UK's land area of 24 million hectares is urbanised, suggesting that continuous population growth can easily be
accommodated. This is based on a concept of biologically productive land as inert space, not as a natural resource needed
to provide healthy supporting ecosystems for food, water supply and renewable energy. It assumes that a citizen's
environmental impact occurs only inside the home. It also fails to take into account the land, sea and atmosphere needed to
absorb the impacts of a population's wastes, including greenhouse gas emissions. Ecological footprinting demonstrates that
the UK is living far beyond its environmentally sustainable limits. The effects of 60.5 million people with 21st century
lifestyles on their own habitat are already clear to all - rising housing and land prices, congestion, road pricing, water
shortages, insufficient land for renewable energy production, rising carbon emissions, and many more.
TABLE 4.1: LAND USE IN THE UK (of total 24 million hectares)
Year
Crops &
bare fallow
Grassland
Rough
grazing
Other
agricultural
Forest &
woodland
Set aside
Urban &
other
Percentage
urbanised
2005
4,583,000
6,904,000
5,590,000
289,000
2,825,000
559,000
3,501,000
14.6%
Source: Land by agricultural and other uses: 1998 and 2005, Land and Land Use, e-Digest Statistics, DEFRA 3 October 2006.
4.2 DIMINISHING RETURNS: FOOD, WATER, WOODLAND AND WASTES
4.2.1 FOOD
The UK does not need to be wholly self-sufficient in food, but with population continuing to grow, urbanisation eating up
farmland, and more of our remaining agricultural land likely to be needed for energy crops, food production will be further
squeezed. This process is taking place as many countries providing imported food are also suffering environmental
degradation and agricultural land loss, and in the knowledge that unnecessarily imported food contributes to greenhouse gas
emissions by increasing transport aviation. According to the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs, UK selfsufficiency in food fell from 71.1% to 60% (of all food) between 1988 and 2005, and from 82.6% to 73.3% (of 'indigenous type
food') during the same period. Europe's agricultural land is also under threat - in 2000 the European Environment Agency
concluded that Europe's soil resources were being irreversibly lost and degraded at an unprecedented rate.
4.2.2 WATER
The effects of extra demand on static or diminishing supplies of water are plain for all to see: more frequent drought,
pressure to build more reservoirs, and the introduction of water metering, particularly in the south-east of England.
4.2.3 FORESTS AND WOODLAND
Some 5,000 years ago, forest and woodland covered most of the UK. As humans began to settle and farm the land in greater
numbers from the Middle Ages onward, they cleared the land of trees to create pasture. By the end of the 20th century,
after rapid industrialisation and population growth, trees grew on less than 10% of our land - an amount that has risen
slightly in recent years to reach nearly 12% in 2005 (see Table 4.1 above). From the environmental point of view, a better
use of 'surplus' agricultural land than built development would be planting of more forest and woodland, which would help to
absorb carbon dioxide emissions and produce bio-energy crops such as coppiced willow.
-84.2.4 WASTES
Waste disposal and treatment for growing populations mean more waste production, more infrastructure to deal with
disposal and treatment, and more greenhouse gas emissions. Total waste produced in the UK from agriculture, minerals
mining and quarrying, sewage sludge, dredged material, municipal waste (mostly household waste), commercial, industrial
and demolition and construction waste reached 335 million tonnes in 2002 (about 5.6 tonnes a year for each person in the
UK). Household waste reached 31 million tonnes in 2003 - nearly half a tonne per person. "The longer term trend is still for
waste growth with total municipal waste increasing by 0.5% per annum on average over the last five years," according to
DEFRA. Changing consumption patterns reflecting higher material living standards are causes which can be mitigated by
changing habits and better recycling, but the 2000-06 rate of increase in municipal waste exactly matches that of population
growth. As each individual recycles more of his or her own waste, success is undermined by the constantly increasing
numbers of people who create waste.
5. THE DIFFERENCE A POPULATION POLICY MAKES
Calculations such as the ones above do not appear to enter government policy-making since no government minister,
department or agency is yet responsible for population policy in relation to the environment. Policy making by the Treasury
has worked usually on the assumption that increasing numbers of people lead to an increase in tax receipts which can be
used, for example, for spending on extra landfill sites and waste processing systems. However, this approach does not take
into account the growing pressure on the UK's finite amount of land, with consequent cost inflation which rises as the
amount of available land decreases - a case of diminishing returns.
TABLE 5.1: OFFICIAL UK POPULATION PROJECTIONS (MILLIONS)
2004-BASED PRINCIPAL PROJECTION, GAD, OCTOBER 2005
Mid-2005
Mid-2006
Mid-2010
Mid-2020
Mid-2031
Mid-2041
Mid-2051
Mid-2061
Mid-2071
Mid-2074
60.218
60.533
61.619
64.449
67.013
68.353
69.252
69.858
70.481
70.691
TABLE 5.2: OFFICIAL POPULATION PROJECTIONS FOR ENGLAND ONLY (MILLIONS)
2004-BASED PRINCIPAL PROJECTION, GAD, OCTOBER 2005
Mid-2005
Mid-2006
Mid-2010
Mid-2020
Mid-2031
Mid-2041
Mid-2051
Mid-2061
Mid-2071
Mid-2074
50.434
50.714
51.715
54.344
56.832
58.299
59.411
60.275
61.142
61.420
Source: Population Projections by the Government Actuary, 2004-based Principal projection published October 2005. No 2005-based interim projections were
published, but the 2006-based projections were due to be published in 2007.
Population growth is not the sole cause of the UK's environmental problems - many other environmental solutions are
needed. But pent-up and future population growth will be the main cause of future housing need, made worse by the
splitting up of households into smaller units. Take as an example the 2004-based official (GAD) projected population
increase of 8.9 million in England only - from 50.4 million (mid-2005) to 59.3 million in 2050. This is based, as previous
projections have been, on underestimates of both life expectancy (which means fewer deaths each year and therefore
greater natural increase), and of net inward migration.
In Graph 5.3 below, population is projected to grow by 0.5% a year - the real average growth rate in the UK in the six years
from 2000-2006. Household size is projected to decline from a level of 2.3 people per household in 2006 to 2.13 people per
household in 2021 (as forecast by the DCLG), and remain stable at 2.1 from 2026 to 2050. The additional 8.25 million homes
needed for the resulting population increase in England alone by 2050 is partly due to growing population and partly due to
the reducing household size of the base population, which itself has been swollen by past population growth.
-9-
The consequences of such growth would be devastating. Population growth at its current rate of 0.5% a year would expand
England's people by 12.7 million - 69% more than the 7.5 million people who inhabited Greater London in 2005. If the 8.25
million extra homes were built at a density of 35 per hectare, nearly a quarter of a million hectares of land would be
covered - more than the area of Greater London - by the homes alone. That would be without any internal infrastructure an extra megacity of 12.7 million people would occupy 266,851 hectares, without taking account of its ecological footprint
on the rest of the UK and the rest of the world. With the external infrastructure needed to support a city larger than
London, the land take would be higher still.
5.3 ENGLAND: 0.5% POPULATION GROWTH EFFECT ON HOUSING NEED TO 2050
Graph OPT/RM/HT. Sources: Historic population figures from Housing Statistics Table 421, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now DCLG). Population growth of 0.5%
was the real average growth rate in 2000-2006, using births, deaths and migration figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Household size from Table 401,
Housing Statistics, ODPM (DCLG).
Graph 5.4 below is a simple demonstration of the effect of population stabilisation and gradual reduction on the need for
extra homes. All other things being equal, if the population of England were allowed to decline by just 0.25% a year, as
recommended by OPT, the net increase in the number of homes needed by 2050 would be just a few thousand. The
population reduction shown is a simple annual rate of 0.25%, for illustration only - the endpoint in 2050 would be achieved,
but the rate of decline would begin after an initial upward start and subsequent flattening out as numbers stabilised and
began to fall. No age, gender or other demographic changes have been taken into account: the household size projections
are the same as for Graph 5.3.
-10With a slightly faster reduction in population, developers and the housebuilding industry could make profits from replacing
bad housing with better homes for the existing population, without resort to development on greenfield and low-density
surburban land. In 2001 there were 7 million homes in England which "failed to meet the decent home standard" [Social
Trends 34, ONS January 2004, as reported in The Guardian, 30 Jan 2004]. Construction jobs could also be replaced by new
work created by the renewable energy industry - under the assumption that it makes more sense to provide the existing
population with secure low-carbon energy supply than to provide homes that would create yet more unsustainable energy
demand. Renewable energy could support up to 35,000 jobs by 2020, according to a report from the Department of Trade
and Industry [DTI 16 January 2004, as reported in the Financial Times, 17 Jan 04].
5.4 GRADUAL (-0.25%) POPULATION REDUCTION EFFECT ON HOUSING NEED TO 2050
Sources: Historic population figures from Housing Statistics Table 421, ODPM (now DCLG). Household size from Table 401, Housing Statistics, ODPM (now DCLG).
6. GOVERNMENT POLICY IS STILL EXPANSIONIST
Recent and future population growth will be the main cause of pressure to concrete over the countryside. England is rapidly
catching up with the Netherlands as the most densely populated country in Europe. Scotland is more densely populated than
the USA, and the UK is already more densely populated than China, with 60.5 million people sharing a land area of 24 million
hectares in mid-2006 - an area which is already shrinking as a result of rising sea levels, coastal erosion and other effects
associated with climate change.
-11

Extra housing requires extra roads, other transport infrastructure, energy supplies, waste disposal facilities and other infrastructure.
Extra housing on green fields means losing landscape and countryside, of which large quantities have already been spoiled by development: urbanised land
has doubled in less than 50 years.

Extra housing on green fields means less effective drainage and increased risk of flooding. 'Future Flooding', a report published by the Office of Science and
Technology (DTI), drew four possible scenarios of the flooding and coastal erosion risk that could result from climate change. The four scenarios range from
(1) World markets - business as usual to 2080, high growth and CO2 emissions; to (4) Global sustainability - careful resource use at international, national
and local levels. Under the worst-case scenario (1) up to 4 million homes in the UK would face regular flood risks by 2050-2080, with the cost of damage
rising from today's £1bn a year to £20bn a year. Because emissions build up and stay in the atmosphere for long periods, a significant degree of projected
climate change is already inevitable. In view of these findings, policies that favour continuing population growth (because of the growth in housebuilding
and infrastructure development needed to accommodate it) do not appear sensible. Covering open land with concrete or asphalt reduces natural drainage
and increases the volumes of run-off water that exacerbate floods. Other long-term flood risks, such as the possibility of low-lying parts of London and East
Anglia being submerged by rising sea levels, make continuous development even more unwise. See DTI Foresight Programme Future Flooding report, DTI
Foresight 22 April 2004.)

Extra housing in the countryside can contribute to deforestation and clearing of vegetation and therefore global warming: "Every year 20 times more carbon
is exchanged between the atmosphere and the Earth's vegetation and soils than is released from fossil fuels. About a fifth of the build-up in greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere is derived from land-clearing and other land management practices." [World Bank Biocarbon Fund Launch, Tokyo, 5 November
2002]

Extra housing on green fields may require building on flood plains, for which flood insurance might not be available. This also applies to some brownfield
developments, such as the Thames Gateway plan.

Extra housing may become increasingly difficult to sustain if global temperatures rise: the High Emissions Scenario of the UK Climate Impacts Programme
suggests a possible temperature rise of 6.8 degrees Celsius in south-east England by the end of this century, which would have severe effects on
agriculture, water supplies and land subsidence.

Extra housing and related building development would not now be necessary if successive governments had taken notice of the 1973 report of the
Population Panel appointed by the Lord President of the Council in 1971, which found no evidence that further population growth would benefit the UK.
Without a policy to gradually stablise and reduce population there can be no long-term solution to the UK housing problem.
The only alternatives are to pack people more densely into smaller spaces (which few people want), to build over yet more
open country and to build more densely in suburbs (which few people want - the evidence is widespread opposition to
development schemes), or to refuse access to the countryside (which few people want). What most Britons do want is to
curb population growth, particularly the mass inward migration which is its main cause. Population has to stabilise
sometime, and the best time to start, in OPT's view, would have been at least two decades ago.
7. HOUSE PRICES AND INTER-GENERATIONAL SUPPORT
Many young Britons have been priced out of the housing market. House prices in the UK rose for more than a decade to 2006
(and continued to rise by 10% in 2006). This phenomenon is attributed to: low interest rates, growing property speculation
(particularly in the buy-to-let market); lack of trust in equity investment; easy borrowing at high multiples of income; and
strict planning controls over land supply for building.
While all these factors are real, the effects of continued population growth have only recently been publicly admitted. Mass
inward migration, the main driver of UK population growth, brought more than a million net new buyers and renters into the
UK in the decade to 2006. Extra demand comes from the super-rich with unlimited money to spend on a London home as
well as for poorly-paid migrant workers prepared to put up with crowded housing offered by the buy-to-let market.
Research by the Halifax Bank [Population growing fastest in London and South East, 24 December 2004] on population
growth and house prices concluded that "population growth is a key driver of the housing market. House prices have
increased, on average, by 238% in the last 10 years in the ten local authorities with the fastest growing population". The
report found that 313 local authorities in Britain had seen population increases from 1993 to 2003, while 93 had recorded a
decline. (Because the percentage increases were higher in areas with already high population numbers, and the decreases in
regions with lower numbers, there has been significant overall growth.
Yet the Treasury commissioned its first major study into housing supply [The Barker Review of Housing Supply, 2003]
without commissioning any demand management study allowing incorporation of a population stabilisation policy or any
other environmentally sustainable solutions. OPT recommends that a population stabilisation and gradual reduction policies
are urgently incorporated into solutions.
-12LONDON’S ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT
In 2000 the GLA (Greater London Authority) co-funded a new ecological footprint study of London called City Limits. The final
report, by consultants Best Foot Forward, was launched in September 2002. Key findings from the study showed that in the year
2000 Londoners:
*"Consumed 49 million tonnes of materials (or 6.1 tonnes each).
*Consumed 154,407 GigaWatt hours of energy, and produced 41 million tonnes of CO2. Less than one per cent of London's energy
came from renewable sources.
*Consumed 6.9 million tonnes of food, of which 81 per cent came from outside the UK
*Consumed 866 billion litres of water of which 28 per cent was leakage.
*Travelled 64 billion passenger kilometres of which 69 per cent were by car.
*Produced over 26 million tonnes of waste of which 71 per cent was landfilled and only 9 per cent recycled."
*"Produced about 42 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, including the transport, domestic, commercial and industrial sectors*."
This translates into an ecological footprint for London of 49 million global hectares (gha) - which is 42 times its biocapacity and
293 times its geographical area - that is, an area roughly twice the size of the UK.
Source: Sustainable Development: London's Ecological Footprint, GLA, 2002. *C02 figures from London Carbon Scenarios to
2026, GLA, November 2006.
As well as overall population growth, the effects of an ageing population, smaller family size and wealth distribution have to
be taken into account. For example, parents who have chosen to have small families may have saved more to support
themselves in their old age than parents who have had large families. Home-owning over-55s with small families and enough
savings to support themselves are therefore better placed to accommodate their children beyond the age of 20 or give them
financial support to buy their own homes. Older generations support the young (for roughly 20 years), and the young later
help to support the old (for roughly 20 years), as they begin to earn and pay taxes. According to a MORI poll for the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation [16 June 2004], parents expected to give their children an average £17,000 of financial support to buy
their first home. The situation is difficult, however, for parents who are not home-owners or have modest homes but large
families. Here the older generation can do little to help the young, and financial support has to come from the taxpayer.
8. POPULATION POLICY SOLUTIONS
Opinion polls show that seven out of ten people say Britain is already overcrowded [overpopulated]. Yet successive
governments' pro-population growth and anti-planning constraint policies will pack ever more people into ever denser
spaces, increasing taxes and reducing quality of life. These policies are turning the UK into the overpopulated, concreted,
congested, stressed-out backyard of Europe.
A genuinely sustainable population policy can do much to help. Young and low-paid people are among those affected by a
lack of affordable housing. Gradually falling real house prices brought about by a gradual reduction in population (freeing up
existing housing stock), coupled with limited development on brownfield sites (excluding gardens) and improvement and/or
conversion of existing homes into affordable units, would benefit all except those who have recently bought homes at
inflated prices. Cutting life-expectancy is clearly no population policy solution, and the splitting up of households into
smaller units will not reverse unless trends in family breakdown which create lone-parent households can also be reversed.
Mass inward migration can be stopped, however, given the political will, teenage pregnancies can be reduced, and parents
in the UK can voluntarily limit family size to a replenishment level of two children. If urgent action is taken, the 'need' to
build a city the size of Cardiff every year that population grows by more than 300,000 can be averted, and the UK could
move towards genuinely environmental sustainability as it allows population to decrease gradually by five million by 2050.
-13THE CARBON FOOTPRINT MULTIPLIER: HAVING MORE THAN TWO CHILDREN
If one couple (the Greens) have two children who in turn have two children each, they will produce two, then four, new
consumers/polluters in two generations. Another couple (the Un-Greens) have four children who in turn have four children each,
and produce four, then 16, new consumers/polluters in two generations. To reduce their total environmental impact to that of the
4 youngest Greens, the 16 youngest Un-Greens would have to cut their per capita consumption and pollution to a quarter of that
of the Greens, throughout their whole lifetimes. (This simple calculation does not take account of the husbands and wives
'absorbed' by each generation from outside their families.)
UK population has grown sixfold in just two centuries and 60% since 1900. It reached an estimated 60.5 million in mid-2006,
is rising by more than 320,000 a year and is officially projected to reach 70 million by 2066 - nearly another 10 million
people in six decades. Seven out of ten people agree that Britain is already overcrowded [overpopulated]. Support us in our
campaign for a sustainable population policy for the UK - along with other necessary environment policies - and help to save
our natural environment for our children and grandchildren. OPT recommends a policy that allows UK population to stabilise
and reduce gradually by 5 million by 2050 - by improving family planning services, by encouraging parents voluntarily to
"stop at two" children, and by numerically balanced (net zero) migration.
Copyright Rosamund McDougall 2007