As we turn Somerset into a sea of housing, where will we grow our food?
Operating in silos, government has inflicted a series of unintended consequences on the Somerset landscape, increasing our reliance on imported food and not even providing decent housing.
Somerset Confidential® special SC 31
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As we turn Somerset into a sea of housing, where will we grow our food?
We have a housing crisis.
That much is not in dispute. What might surprise you is that this is a crisis with direct consequences for food security and the cost of living crisis.
At the heart of things is a government obsession with the idea that we need to build 300,000 new houses every year. We would dispute the need to do this, indeed we have done in the past but for now that is a separate issue.
Of course plenty of new houses are being built each year. You’d expect that. Metropolitan boroughs, cities, they all need more housing and have the infrastructure to take it. And we expect brownfield sites to be developed and these tend to be in town and city centres.
All that said then, it may come as a surprise to learn that this is not what has been happening over the past decade.
In fact quite the opposite. The largest concentration of new house building has been across rural England.
The largest concentration of new house building has been across rural England
A report published by Searchland based on House of Commons Library figures (which we have validated) shows that over the last decade the local authority areas where there were the largest number of house completions were:
Wiltshire 22,100
North Yorkshire 21,300
Somerset 20,540
These are three of the richest areas of farmland in the country. So why are houses being built here? And why in even these rural counties, are houses being built on greenfield sites, on farmland, rather than on brownfield sites in market towns?
Just look at the way Ilminster, Crewkerne, Somerton and Wincanton Bridgwater and even our county town of Taunton have been expanded over the last decade.
Predominantly by building on farmland. Even in the small town of Langport, fields that used to belong to Old Kelways have been bulldozed for housing and more nearby are currently the subject of a planning application on behalf of Land Value Alliances.
On the edge of Frome there is a 1,700 house commuter village proposed on 161 hectares of prime farmland known as the Selwood Garden Community.