Streaming wars: Labour's green belt policy faces its first test
Making sense of the latest trends in property and economics from around the globe
4 minutes to read
What do James Bond, Indiana Jones and the Little Mermaid have in common? Answer: the latest iterations of their films were made at the UK's Pinewood Studios.
Pinewood does a lot of the heavy lifting for the nation's film and TV industry, which has expanded rapidly amid competition from the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney. It's a big studio, spanning roughly 200 acres, but it's not big enough. We'll need another 2.6 million square feet of studio space by 2028 to meet Knight Frank's mid-range growth scenario for the industry, up from the 6.9 million square feet we already have.
That will mean more studios, usually within an easy commute of major employment hubs. In London, that means navigating planning in the Green Belt. In May, Buckinghamshire Council threw out an application by Marlow Film Studios for a £750 million development comprising almost 2 million square feet of soundstages, production offices and new workshops. Eight of the twelve councillors voted to reject that application, primarily due to the impact on the Green Belt and the implications for traffic.
The green belt
This was before the election. The new government has pledged to release lower-quality "grey belt" land within the green belt for development. Think disused car parks, quarries or little-used plots of waste land. Local planning authorities will be instructed to review their green belt to identify potential grey belt areas.
Would this policy have resulted in a different result for Marlow Film Studios? The company seems to think so. Backers of the studio announced yesterday that it would appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. Once the appeal has been lodged, the government could decide to call the scheme in.
The decision will be important for the future of the UK's film and TV industry, and residential developers will be watching closely, too. The site is a former quarry and landfill adjacent to the A404. Opponents of the project say the site is "a valuable wildlife-rich habitat, supporting multiple protected and endangered species." The developers describe it as a "despoiled former landfill site," currently "unusable for domestic buildings or agriculture".
Decarbonizing homes
Meeting the UK's 2050 net zero target will require massive progress in decarbonising the stock of existing homes, which account for 15% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions.
It's going to be expensive: the UK's climate watchdog, the Climate Change Committee, reckons the cost will come to about £250 billion, so about £9 billion a year from the late 2020s. So far, homeowners have been offered little in the way of financial incentives to upgrade their homes. Green mortgages offer tiny discounts. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is inadequate, to say the least. The CCC estimates that decarbonising the housing stock is "feasible" if homeowners install 20 million heat pumps. There were less than 40,000 installations last year.
Substantial house price premiums for energy efficient properties would incentivise homeowners to do the upgrades, but we've seen little evidence they exist. As the government ratchets up the legislative requirements on homeowners, premiums will grow, but that strategy won't be popular.
Price premiums
Nationwide has new research out this morning suggesting that properties with Energy Performance Certificates of A or B attract a house price premium of 2.8% compared to properties rated D (the most common rating). There is little difference for properties rated C. Properties rated F or G do see discounts of 4.2% relative to a D-rated property.
This isn't going to move the needle when other upgrades can add significantly more to the value of your home. Separate research from Nationwide, for example, suggests a loft conversion can add more than a fifth to the value of a property.
Anyway, the release linked above also included Nationwide's House Price Index for August, which showed values dipped 0.2% month-on-month. Still, the annual growth rate ticked up to 2.4%, the fastest since December 2022. A reminder that you can read our latest house price forecasts here.
In other news...
Workers to gain right to a four-day week (Telegraph), Mortgage holders and renters hit hardest by inflation (FT), Chinese offices emptier than during Covid pandemic (FT), fears of rise in UK capital gains tax trigger selling ‘frenzy’ (FT), business confidence holds steady at eight-year high (Times), US economy grew faster than expected in second quarter (Times), and finally, China considers allowing refinancing on $5.4 trillion in mortgages (Bloomberg).