Rural Housing

Listening to housing experts on Radio 5, I despair.

We need more housing and we do have the land on which to build enough houses.

Take Suffolk, which is an area of about 1,500 square miles, all of which is land on which you could build houses if you wanted. But of course you don’t.

And take my stud farm, which is about a hundred hectares. At present there is one large house, one modern house at the stud, one bijou cottage and a pair of brick semis, best described as crap, 1940s council house.

I also have a lot of dilapidated buildings including a medieval Suffolk barn, that could easily be converted or replaced with say four modern, reasonably large houses. On the other hand, the two semis could be demolished and replaced with say four or possibly six affordable houses.

All of this would mean that in two-thirds of a square mile, we’d replace a load of rubbish with at least six new houses. I doubt it would be allowed as the nimbys in the planning department wouldn’t let it fit in with their plans, which mean we don’t want to many more houses, as that would reduce the value of their own.

But repeat this type of development across Suffolk and we’d create about 10,000 houses, without anyone noticing.