How to kill nightingales and not build houses: insist on building on Brownfields

Posted by Paul Cheshire, SERC and LSE The planning system is supposed to safeguard amenity, our wild places and the environment. I have already exposed how it signally failed to protect the shifting sands of Menie from the Trump golf development. I also argued here that refusing to allow any development on Greenbelt land inevitably led to ever higher house prices, a more volatile housing market and to the loss of environmentally valuable or amenity-rich places such as ex-MoD land, grounds of former hospitals or recreation grounds (owned by government or the planning authorities themselves, who in cash-strapped times face a a grave temptation to develop).