Rishi Sunak’s turn on wind farms reflects Tory failure to protect rural England | Simon Jenkins

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The English countryside is sick. It can feel as if a day never goes by without its green and pleasant land falling victim to the threat of wind farms, coal mines, solar arrays and apartment buildings. Boris Johnson seemed to want a turbine in every field. Liz Truss wanted “investment areas” even in protected areas. Rishi Sunak has called for 300,000 new homes to be built a year – until he doesn’t.

This week, the new Environment Secretary, Therese Coffey, could not enlighten a House of Commons committee on her farm policy, given the chaos created by Brexit. Meanwhile, the environment secretary, Michael Gove, found himself resigned to onshore wind farms one minute and a coalmine at Whitehaven the next. As for Labour’s Keir Starmer, he attacked Sunak for leaving out residential targets the same week he said he would stop telling local councils what to do.

The basic problem is that the English countryside is not a renewable resource. Until the end of the last century, there was a general assumption that “country” was only for agriculture, recreation, and natural beauty. The creation of town and country planning was a much-vaunted response to the war.

Until recently, these recognized “Natural Beauty” areas were relatively safe. Not anymore. According to their champion, CPRE, each year since 2017-2018 England has seen an average of 1,670 housing units approved in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) – representing an annual loss of 119 hectares of supposedly protected landscape. Development in the Cotswolds AONB, mostly ‘executive homes’, has tripled in the last five years.

The vernacular growth of existing settlements which might be encouraged in France and Germany becomes in England an unparalleled sprinkling of estates of model books lying in the fields under the dictation of the Whitehall inspectors. One result is that the Natural History Museum has declared Britain “one of the most natural-depleted nations in Europe,” with 40 million birds apparently disappearing from its skies since 1970.

As a result, a recent Ipsos poll showed that 57% of people felt that giving “the views of local people or protecting the countryside” should take priority over achieving housing targets, with only a quarter believing housing numbers to be the only priority. But public policy works in the opposite direction. There is no minister for the countryside only for the activities that destroy it. Developers are leading the lobbying for new homes, with builders among the Tories’ most generous donors. They long for the open fields. All the stories about the “housing crisis” were illustrated by the new buildings. This is despite the fact that in 2020 new builds accounted for just 7% of housing transactions in England.

Britain is among the most profligate users of residential land in Europe. London has only a quarter of the population density of Paris, which is why it is constantly expanding outward. Reasonable housing policy will focus on correcting low densities and inefficient occupation, not least the thousands of empty properties. Meanwhile, pressure from developers has kept new buildings VAT-free, while it is charged entirely on conversions or retrofits. This discourages housing economics and sustainability. Likewise, stamp duty is a disincentive to the more urgent need of downsizing for the elderly. British housing policy is distorted and corrupt, it builds homes for the rich and ignores the poor.

The result is the constant pressure to invade a now virtually defenseless countryside. In his earlier incarnation in agriculture, the current Planning Minister, Michael Gove, has proposed a thoughtful alternative to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The Environmental Land Management Scheme (Elms) has shifted the focus of support away from food production towards “public goods,” encouraging farmers to protect landscapes and nature, grow hedges and forests, promote wildlife and develop public awareness. A year of chaos in Downing Street has blown that good feeling out of the water. Covey hinted this week that things may stay the same under CAP’s “oversight” subsidies. Another recipe for chaos.

There are now marches on the horizon, the Community Planning Coalition, with 500 local groups across the UK. It is part of a fierce reaction to local councils’ Whitehall housing targets. Enough was enough, Conservative MPs said, and Sunak was afraid to give up: the targets were now merely “advisory”. Ironically, at the same time Sunak was subject to an opposition lobby, that of other MPs who wanted more wind turbines to deface the countryside, albeit “where the locals agree”.

What is clear is that Britain has no means of defining and defining which parts of the countryside should qualify for permanent protection and which could be open to varying degrees of development. In towns and cities, listed buildings and protected areas are protected. Heritage has value. Historic Britain built may be safe forever.

The same is not true of “historical” landscapes. At least outside of the National Parks, nothing is “included”. AONBs, nature reserves, green belts, river valleys, and stretches of fields and trees are more vulnerable to speculative developers. They buy land and bet on a sensitive local council or a change in government policy. Just as lawns were once sacrificed to gas stations and out-of-town supermarkets – half of which are now obsolete – so they are now subject to the latest fleeting but irreversible intrusion.

The only solution is zoning, to declare tracts of countryside as inviolable, the other safe from any use but the most important. A lot of land will be left for development, both “green” and “brown”. For the most part, housing construction must be confined to towns and cities, be sustainable, “intense” existing sites and utilize existing infrastructure. The British countryside will be charged with a proper assessment of what remains of its natural appearance, a legacy to posterity.

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