Are France and Germany really all that good a comparison though? France has roughly the same population, a million or so more people, yet has about two and a quarter times more territory. Germany is a bit closer with about a third more people yet still has one and a half times the territory the UK has.
Personally I think the UK would of been better off embracing the idea of and building good quality apartments like in Paris, but that's another topic.
I'd say their a decent comparison - the key isn't population per se but desire for population in certain locations. Most of Scotland, lots of Wales, the South West, East Anglia, the North West, the North East - even much of Yorkshire - is not that densely populated. The entire point of the Green Belt was to restrict population in certain areas of the UK and to try to force it into other areas. Not to have a restriction on the total population of the UK.
Those other countries are similar in development level and economy level (and economy per capita) to the UK.
The good quality apartments in the City - would have been a useful idea, yes.
The thing is, everything is a trade-off and we can argue over what is on the plus and minus side of the ledger, but too often people can tend to highlight the plus side and gloss over the minus side - I'm as guilty of that as anyone. However, my genuine view is:
- The fact that more houses could be built where people wanted them is pretty much incontestable (?). This means that with a greater supply to meet the demand, house prices in the insanely-high-house-price-part of the country would be far less insane. So would other property in London, so the costs associated would be lower (lower ground rents for shops, etc). As any inhabitant of London knows,
everything is more expensive there, and that's often a major contributing factor (although by no means not the only one). The same in the Home Counties - the entire commuter Belt suffers similarly. Housing is a large chunk (and growing) of most households' expenses; lower costs here would really help many families. Lower shopping costs would be great as well.
- The red side of the ledger is the downside of more building in that area - but I would argue that it would automatically be concrete sprawl, as we don't see that in the areas around Paris and Berlin, do we? Intelligent and sensible development (villages spattered around where we'd forbit them on scrubland in the Green Belt; Garden Suburbs; requisite areas of parkland and forestry in areas to be built on, etc) would work at least as well as the inflexible Green Belt fiat - in my opinion.