Housing matters: CPRE Essex chairman in the media spotlight

It isn’t always easy to attract the attention of our written media – indeed sometimes you’re grateful just for a response to a press releases or suggested story – so we’re delighted to report that David Knight, CPRE Essex chairman, has been quoted at length in a national newspaper.
David was talking to the Express about what was described as a “tsunami” of housing development on Maldon’s Dengie peninsula, while Tom Fyans, CPRE’s national chief executive, was quoted in a pull-out comment piece.
You can read the impressively substantial article here, but just to highlight David’s golden prose here it is:
“It is disheartening in the extreme to see so much greenfield development when 1.2 million homes could be built on brownfield sites across the United Kingdom.
“The destruction of agricultural farmland cannot be reversed and it is a precious resource too often regarded as the easy option for developers.
“This is because greenfield land is much cheaper to build on than brownfield, but that is a problem the developers must be made to deal with, in our view.
“The other issue is that any ‘call for sites’ issued by a council will open the floodgates in terms of developers reapplying for permissions for schemes that have often been refused planning in the past.
“This can result in schemes that should never really have been given planning permission end up getting built.”
And who among us would argue with that?