This Government really does have it in for the countryside - Andrew Vine
It won’t be that way for much longer, thanks to an anti-democratic housebuilding policy that could potentially concrete over an area of greenbelt equivalent to the size of Surrey.
Taken together, these two awful policies amount to a sustained attack on the countryside and the people who live and work there.
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Hide AdNo good for the nation, or its finances, will come from either of them. They will seriously damage British agriculture and disfigure the countryside with sprawling estates of houses that are unaffordable for the young people who really need them.


And the attitude of the government towards communities which raise legitimate concerns about whether houses are being built in the right place is one of jeering insolence.
They are routinely insulted as nimbys or blockers and bureaucrats, sneeringly pejorative terms which the Prime Minister has thrown at them more than once.
It is difficult to fathom quite why Labour is being so aggressive towards the countryside, especially when its unassailable Commons majority includes many new MPs for constituencies that encompass rural communities.
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Hide AdMaybe it’s an institutional lack of understanding within a party that has traditionally drawn the bulk of its support from urban areas.
Or maybe it’s just plain old-fashioned class warfare based on a cliched caricature of people who live in the countryside as affluent Tories who’ve had it their own way for too long.
Either way, it displays an unmistakable antipathy towards the countryside and its communities that was carefully kept quiet during the election campaign, with no indication that farmers would be ruined by taxation or rural areas face having massive new housing estates dumped on them.
Voters would have rejected both notions. The nearest indication that Sir Keir Starmer gave of a housebuilding blitz was to suggest that some sites were being wasted by going undeveloped, citing a derelict petrol forecourt in his north London constituency.
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Hide AdIt’s a very long stretch from building on an empty urban site to a policy of gobbling up the greenbelt as part of a drive to build 1.5m new homes, which was announced by Sir Keir’s deputy, Angela Rayner, last week.
Nor would voters have countenanced the undemocratic nature of how these homes are to be forced on communities whose objections will be loftily swept aside, and their elected local representatives on councils bypassed.
Councillors who know their communities, their strengths and weaknesses, and their capacity to accommodate substantial numbers of new residents, will be stripped of the power to decide where development can take place.
Local knowledge, one of the most valuable components of effective local government, is officially being derided by this policy. Who else but conscientious councillors and the officers who advise them must Sir Keir have in mind when he is so dismissive of “blockers and bureaucrats”?
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Hide AdThis policy makes a mockery of the government’s much-vaunted claim to be a champion of regional devolution and local decision-making. It amounts to a power grab that decrees central government knows best, and communities will just have to suck up whatever is inflicted on them.
It is also a blueprint for flawed decision-making and haphazard development. We can expect a blizzard of speculative applications to build in the most attractive locations by companies emboldened by a policy that presumes in their favour.
It won’t be affordable homes for the young trying to get on the property ladder being proposed, but executive houses on which there is a much bigger profit to be made plonked down on the greenbelt and marketed as enjoying splendid country views.
Bad policy-making is becoming a speciality of this government. That’s evident from its clobbering of pensioners and businesses and now it’s the countryside getting a kicking.
Labour has needlessly made enemies of rural communities and will live to regret its hostility towards them.
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