Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 07:39:50 on Fri, 31
Aug 2012, Martin Edwards remarked:
One of the reasons that developers do not like to have to use brownfield sites is the cost of decontaminating land that
has been used for industry.

Also setting up electricity and water supply and sewers.

You have to do that on greenfield sites too.


It's a lot easier to build on a green field site and usually
considerably cheaper. Add the lower construction costs to the much
lower cost of buying agricultural land on the outskirts of towns and
cities compared with land values in and near town centres and there is
a clear incentive to develop green field sites which the housebuilders
already own compared with brown field sites which they don't.

Experience shows that by far the best way to facilitate development of
brown field sites is for the public sector to pay for site clearance
and remediation which, by definition, contains many unknowns and
risks, then sell the site at cost to developers. This has worked
spectacularly well in such places London, Liverpool and Glasgow
docklands, the former Royal Dockyard at Chatham and the area around
the Black Country Spine Road in the West Midlands.