People who have opted to live in a rural village - and thus forgo the amenities that living in a larger settlement would entail - should have the right to stay in the environment of their choice and not have a larger settlement foisted on them insidiously. I appreciate this will be met with cries that this is selfish because we have a housing crisis, but when there are nearly a million empty houses in this country, when there are hundreds of thousands of flats above shops that could be renovated ( which would breath new life into dying town/city centres) when there are approximately eight million households of single occupancy available which could be given incentives to rent out rooms, when people are allowed to buy second homes without being penalised, when local authorities encourage foreign investors to buy property/land as investments and these investments are left empty then I don't believe there is a crisis. Building on rural sites is being done because of greed - not need.

I would also like to point out that on September 8th 2016 www.planningportal.co.uk ( The national home of planning and building regulations information and the national planning application service ) published a report that said '' Councils have granted enough planning consents to meet the government's ambition of one million new homes by 2020 but developers are failing to build them..'' The research was carried out by the independent think tank Civitas. Obviously the local plan looks beyond 2020 but as Britain leaves the EU then the demand on housing may lessen and rather than causing irreversible damage to a green field area then perhaps this should be halted until a clearer picture emerges.

.Many small sites on the edge of rural villages are rich in wildlife, and building on them will -bit by bit - deplete the available habitat .On the 14th of September 2016 a partnership of 53 organisations published The State of Nature report 2016. The report shows that a new measure that assesses how intact a country's biodiversity is, puts the UK among the most nature depleted countries in the world, it is ranked 189 out of 218 countries.