Reference Martin Hesp's on the almost unnoticed demise of the Commission on Rural Communities (CRC) and its absorption into Defra.
Speaking as the chairman of The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) here in Devon, we have found ourselves filling the gap between numerous single-issue interest groups: the National Trust for heritage, the RSPB for birds, RSPCA for animals and others, by looking across the whole of life in the countryside and speaking up for the rural community, its way of life and the economy that underpins it.
Our number one campaign has long been for Rural Affordable Housing, disgracefully neglected by all governments for years. Governments and others often make fatuous statements about big issues like this suggestion that each community should have 12 houses bolted on to it.
The real difficulty is to see rural policy in the round and how each new Government initiative interacts with another. Here we are in deep trouble.
The Localism Act was warmly welcomed by most of us since the Government promised "to put unprecedented power in the hands of communities to shape the places where they live". No sooner had this policy become law than the Government passed the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and the Growth and Infrastructure Bill with its demands for a presumption of approval for sustainable development. It also demanded that local authorities must demonstrate a five-year land supply of deliverable housing. We see urban sprawl rather than urban regeneration as the likely outcome.
This matters when the countryside is viewed, not through the narrow prism of one interest group or another, but as a dynamic whole. A glance at our website www.cpredevon.org.uk demonstrates all too clearly that the spread of wind turbines and increasingly large solar farms, built not in pursuit of a coherent energy policy but as a means of farming Government subsidies, is slowly changing the countryside in ways that will affect more and more of those who live there.
The sheer scale of proposals coming forward for housing across the county, many may well be refused by the local authorities and then overturned at appeal. In short, the Government is clawing back their commendable Localism policies by setting up planning by appeal, where the Planning Inspectorate will decide our future.
Seeing the likely effects on the countryside and its way of life requires all of us to step back from any narrow view we might hold and to bring pressure to bear on the Government at every level to treat rural Devon, not as something to be plundered for profit, but as a dynamic and beautiful part of England with a robust economy that needs support to improve its infrastructure.