Housing estates are killing our countryside

The government says that 240,000 new homes a year are needed in England, but it’s a lie, says Alexander Waugh, evidenced by every estate agent’s window in the country. This policy means that government and developers win, while communities and the country lose

How do you describe your sexual orientation? Please tick: Bisexual, Gay, Heterosexual, Lesbian? Do you identify yourself as transgender? Yes? No? If yes, are you a male-to-female tranny, or a female-to-male one?

Why, I wonder, was Roger Mitchinson, a planning officer from the Taunton Deane Borough Council, last week seeking answers to these impudent questions from the inhabitants of Milverton, when his stated aim in coming to their beautiful Somerset village, was to ‘consult’ them on a scheme to erect a vast Toyland housing estate on a field of Grade 1 agricultural land overlooking the main street? Does a planning consultation need to incorporate this sort of filth? The official answer to that question is this: ‘Taunton Deane Borough Council has a policy to monitor attendance at events to ensure we reach the diverse communities that we aim to serve.’

I don’t know where the officers of Taunton Deane Planning Department picked up their definition of the verb ‘to serve’, but never, as far as I am aware, in the long and varied history of the master-servant relationship, has it been the expected or desired function of servants to seek written declarations of their masters’ sexual enthusiasms. The truth, of course, is that planning officers do not see themselves as ‘serving’ the community at all. Indoctrinated by central government rhetoric in the facile belief that anything ‘modern’ or ‘21st-century’ is necessarily best, they have no understanding of the subtleties of organic growth, the economics of supply and demand, the civilised history of urban development, or the aesthetic necessity for open space.