RECENT reports on the news have informed us that between 2006 and 2012, 54,000 acres of green space in the UK was converted to “artificial surfaces” – mostly housing.

This is an area twice the size of Liverpool which has been lost to urbanisation in six years. Mostly this affects the south east but spread is relentless. In 2011 the EU asked its members to reduce “land take” (ie building on green land) to zero by 2050. It is unclear how, with this present rate of development, this will happen in the UK.

More development applications are apparently being granted nationally than in the past, and this may be due to the financial incentives for councils. So what can we do as a society to prevent this? National Planning Policy (NPPF) is clear that local authorities should have regard to the character and beauty of the countryside, and extra protection is in place for areas of outstanding natural beauty and national parks but by using the “sustainable development” clause in the NPPF, many developers seem to be trying to justify their development of green land by nebulous green credentials, which it’s hard for local authorities to argue against. There needs to be better legislation to support our communities against this type of development. The CPRE released a report entitled Getting Houses Built in June 2015, which discusses how best to build the required housing without compromising our green spaces. Many of their suggestions would be easy to achieve with some change of national policy.

We’ve been 'lucky' here in Stroud so far – Rodborough Fields, Baxter’s Fields and Wades Farm stay green at present but with the recent application for development on Grange Fields, we are again under siege from developers who are seeking to maximise their profitability for their shareholders.

No sooner does one application get rejected, than another rears its head. It’s not just here in Stroud, or even Gloucestershire, but across the whole country. The media is awash with campaigners trying to save their green environment.

No one argues that we don’t need more housing in this country – clearly we do, but appropriate areas like brownfield sites should be built on first before ransacking our land and ruining our green spaces for future generations.

If we lose too much agricultural land where will animals be grazed and our crops grown? If it’s forests or wetlands, the damage to our wildlife and our “green lungs” is perhaps even more harshly felt.

Persimmon Homes (figures from the 2014 annual report) hold over 87,000 plots with planning permission in their “land bank”, enough to house more than a third of a million people. What is going on? Why aren’t they actually building these houses, and what are they waiting for? Why are they targeting areas like Grange Fields when they already have all these assets? Is it really all down to greed and money? Wouldn’t it be lovely if some of these huge profit-making organisations agreed to not build on green land in the future? Maybe then, all our lives, and the future of our children and grandchildren would be a little more pleasant.

Teresa Vance

Uplands