Countryside under Threat

The first moves to destroy vast area's of countryside moved another step closer yesterday with the Government plans to underwrite mortgages in order to get the housing market going. Soon we will see building work start on increasing the population of the market town of Oakham by some forty percent in the coming years and vast area of green being turned into the slums of the future.

The Government say that the plan will kick start the private sector building market and an industry that has great political lobbying power in the form of the Home Builders Federation. It is there report that states we need all these new houses, but they are hardly independent, in that they represent house builders. The four hundred million pounds the Government is putting into the scheme, when we told times are so hard, is designed to produce six thousand new homes. However, reports in the press, suggest that only twenty percent of the houses built will be affordable homes making nonsense of the governments line on the reasons behind the scheme.

For years it has been Conservative Party doctrine that we should be a nation of home owners and that we all dream of owning our own home. It is the Conservative party that sold all the council houses that means that there is a shortage of rented accommodation and rented market where landlords can set unrealistic rents. The Government see this scheme as a way of getting first time buyers into the market and for all the talk from the Home Builders Federation of helping "hard pressed first time buyers" they are just interested in a "huge boost to house building". They don't care what houses they build, where they build them as long as they can sell them and make a big profit on everyone and it is clear you make more profit bigger houses than affordable ones. 

The Government has little regard for where these houses will be built. The have changed planning guidelines to open up vast area's of green belt land for development and although they claim that local people will be allowed to have a say in planning, the truth is the only opinions that will be taken into account are those that agree to the building of new homes. You can see this working in practice in Oakham, where there is a lot more opposition to the Hawksmead development of a thousand homes than there is support which is over played by local Government and the developers. According to the developers less than fifty people turning up out of a town with a population of ten thousand to see their plans at a recent exhibition was a positive response, I'd like to see a more negative one when a lot of those would have been people some kind of interest in the building of the homes, like the councilors. 

The fact is plans for the first phase, which has recently been approved, contains only nine affordable homes from the one hundred and  forty three being built. That represents just over six percent of the homes being built, suggesting that the critics of the Governments plans are being over optimistic about the number of affordable homes the that will be built as a result of this policy. Also these houses appear to be being built on what looks like wasteland. The fact is this land wasn't wasteland until it was brought by Hawksmead, the developers, and left to become wasteland. It was in fact once land that was once used for agricultural use. It is, in fact, green belt land that hasn't been developed on before. The developers are pulling the wool over our eyes.

What Rutland County Council and the developers are doing is disgraceful and shouldn't be allowed. It fair enough to develop former brown field sites but this is wrong.  We need green belt land to grow and farm on, to feed the population of the country now and into the future. Once built on this land is lost forever for our children and their children children. What we are doing is short sighted and not even for a good reason. Companies like Hawksmead are doing for money and profit and not as some kind of public service we should be grateful for.