news Rishi Sunak’s U-turn on windfarms reflects the Tories’ failure to protect rural England | Simon Jenkins

The English countryside is sick. It can feel as though a day never passes without its green and pleasant land falling victim to the threat of windfarms, coalmines, solar arrays and

housing estates. Boris Johnson seemed to want a turbine in every field. Liz Truss wanted “investment zones” even in protected areas. Rishi Sunak called for 300,000 new houses a

year – until he didn't.This week the new environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, could not enlighten a Commons committee on her policy for farms, given the shambles of Brexit.

Meanwhile, the environment secretary, Michael Gove, found himself capitulating to onshore windfarms one minute and a coalmine in Whitehaven the next. As for Labour's Keir Starmer,

he savaged Sunak for abandoning housing targets the same week as he said he would stop telling local councils what to do.The root trouble is that the English countryside is not a

renewable resource. Until the end of the last century there was a general presumption that “the country” was exclusively for farming, leisure and natural beauty. The creation

of town and country planning was a much-vaunted reaction to inter-war sprawl. Until recently, areas of acknowledged “natural beauty” were relatively safe. Not any more.

According to their champion, the CPRE, every year since 2017-18 England has seen an average of 1,670 housing units approved in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) –

representing an annual loss of 119 hectares of supposedly protected landscape. Development in the Cotswolds AONB, mostly of “executive homes”, has tripled in the past five

years.The vernacular growth of existing settlements that might be encouraged in France and Germany becomes in England a characterless splatter of pattern-book estates dumped in

fields under the diktat of Whitehall inspectors. One consequence is the Natural History Museum declaring Britain “one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe”, with 40m

birds apparently vanishing from its skies since 1970.As a result, a recent Ipsos poll showed 57% of people felt giving priority to “the views of local residents or protecting the

countryside” should take precedence over meeting housing targets, with only a quarter believing housing numbers were the only priority. Yet public policy works in the opposite

direction. There is no minister for the countryside, only for activities that wreck it. Lobbying for new houses is developer-led, with builders among the Tory party's most generous

donors. They crave open fields. All stories about a “housing crisis” are illustrated by new buildings. This is despite the fact that in 2020, new builds comprised a mere 7% of