PLANS to build thousands of homes on Windsor and Maidenhead's green belt will do nothing to help ease the affordable housing crisis, campaigners have warned.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) says the public are being "sold a lie" by developers keen to "gobble up" protected green belt land to build homes that will be unaffordable to those most in need of them.

The group has reviewed local plans from across England for its annual 'State of the Green Belt' report.

According to this study, local authorities are planning to allow almost 460,000 homes to be built on the country's green belt to help meet their housing targets.

In Windsor and Maidenhead, the CPRE has identified plans to build 5,685 homes on green belt land.

This land is part of the wider Metropolitan Green Belt, across which 156,030 homes are expected to be built.

However, the CPRE says that there is enough brownfield sites - land which has been built on before - in Windsor and Maidenhead to build a minimum of 1,808 homes, which they argue should be prioritised over green belt developments..

Tom Fyans, director of campaigns and policy at CPRE, says green belt land is being "eroded at an alarming rate" across the country.

Far from providing the solution to the affordable housing crisis, he continued, building on green belt land is serving only to further "entrench the issue".

If local affordable housing targets are applied to green belt developments in Windsor and Maidenhead, only 30 per cent would meet the Government's definition of affordable.

However, the CPRE's analysis shows that there is often a gap between planning targets and what is actually approved by local authorities.

The average target across local authorities in England is for 31 per cent of new homes to be affordable.

According to the CPRE though, only 22 per cent of housing units that currently have planning permission meet the definition of affordable.