Press release 28 January 2003

Note 4 February 2003: Plans for 200,000 new homes were announced, adding to 900,000 already being planned by local authorities.

The Communities Plan for England, due to be published by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in early February, is expected to spur house-building on a massive scale.

Pent-up population growth is the main cause of plans by local authorities to build on greenfield sites on an unprecedented scale. This has been made worse by the splitting of households into smaller units. The failure of government to act to curb a projected further increase in UK population of 4.4 million by 2026 (7 per cent) will have shocking consequences for the environment. If government house-building targets are to be met, problems of land loss, congestion and energy use will simply spread from the South-East across other areas of England. Without a population policy there can be no long-term solution to the UK housing problem.

Nearly 90 per cent of Britain's population now lives in urban areas, and those areas are continuously expanding to meet the need for ever more houses, roads, airports, shops, offices, factories, hospitals, leisure facilities, power stations, prisons and waste dumps.

According to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, proposals to cover more than 166 square miles of countryside are already contained in local authority plans, and government plans are to build three million * new homes in England by 2020 - one million of them in London and the South-East. Both greenfield sites and Green Belt are already being sacrificed to urbanisation. Every additional home also creates additional demand on resources such as energy and transport, and therefore increases carbon dioxide emissions. The current Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill also threatens to remove yet more rights from people to control their own environment in order to carry out large infrastructure projects - to accommodate population growth (whether by natural increase or net inward migration) that could easily have been prevented.  [ * One of various estimates]

Successive governments, by failing to tackle population growth, are turning Britain into a human battery farm. UK population has grown nearly 20 per cent since 1950. Now 58.8 million, it is projected to reach 63.2 million by 2026 - another 7 per cent. [See UK population growth figures for 1950-2001 on OPT website.]

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