I wonder, from the tone of the debate, how many people would guess that the green belt actually got bigger in 2021-22?
It means the green belt is less than one per cent smaller than it was in 1997.
The population of England has risen from 48.7m to 56.7m over roughly the same period. So there's that.
Every year, at Reach, we'd alert newsrooms across the country to the fact this dataset was coming out, while gently pointing out that there was highly unlikely to be any real change & we'd probably not write about it.
With news that the average house price rose 15.5% year-to-year in July (albeit largely because prices fell last July because of Stamp Duty changes), here's a list of the council wards with the biggest average (median) property prices in 2021-22.
Chorlton and Didsbury still top among Manchester wards, with city centre wards rising rapidly (despite almost all the stock there being flats, not detached/semi/terraced houses).
Here's what happens if you plot terraced house prices in Chorlton ward (for non-Mancs: "desirable" suburb) v flat prices in Deansgate ward. Property price inflation in somewhere like Manchester isn't just about an over-heated, unaffordable city centre.