Waving spades at Nimbys won't get new houses built

WERE I starting out in the world of work today, I don't know how I would afford to buy my home at least not while I was 26, the age at which I managed to clamber on to the housing ladder.

- Ross Clark

Decades of house price inflation have squashed the home-owning dreams of millions of people.

Unaffordable house prices are the biggest block on aspiration in Britain today. And sometimes, as Sir Keir Starmer suggested yesterday, homes for people have to take priority over preserving habitats for animals not that the two have to be in conflict.

But government ministers, and Angela Rayner in particular, are being too gung-ho in their self-declared war on Nimbys (Not in My Back Yard), deriving just a little too much pleasure from the prospect of plastering Conservative constituencies in the green belt with new developments.

Nimbys do exist. I have lived in the English countryside long enough to know that there is virtually no project you could propose which would not stimulate a noisy campaign trying to block it. Never mind new homes, roads or pylons around where I live, we have had people protesting against the creation of a nature reserve.

BUT I am also well aware of how seldom such protests succeed and in blocking development.

Somehow, planners developers between them tend to get what they want.