<p>Labour is busily forcing us to build communities that disrupt the patterns of English settlement.</p>
<p>Planning guidelines require us to build to a much higher density than has been traditional outside the main city centres. They force us to build more housing for rent than people would like. They limit the number of parking and garage spaces that can be provided.</p>
<p>All this does not succeed in changing the way people live. The government thinks if you skimp the parking and garages, people will go by bus. Instead, we see housing estate after housing estate with cars parked on the roads and straddling the verges. We find families having to play musical cars on short narrow drives as they juggle two or three cars in front of a garage for one.</p>
<p>Limiting affordable housing for sale does not put peopple off buying their own home - it just means they have to bid the prices of the existing stock up to ever higher levels, forcing partition of houses into ever smaller flats.</p>
<p>Higher densities increases tensions in communities, bringing the noisy neighbour closer and the anti social youth in quick contact with more homes.</p>
<p>We need to tackle the demand for housing by having a sensible migration policy, and the supply of housing by having a more sensitive planning policy. There are places which will welcome new development, and would welcome development to a decent standard. Current national norms put people off, because the new settlements are out of character with most English villages and market towns.
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