EVERY time there is a planning application of substance in rural areas there are bound to be complaints.

The county needs to build more houses and most people recognise this. They just believe their corner of the countryside and community will be ruined by the impact that hundreds or thousands of homes inevitably bring.

Today we report on the anger in Hailey over plans to build 1,000 homes north of Witney. The fear, understandably, is this will lead to Hailey going from a village and an identity in its own right to being swallowed up as an outer suburb of the town. And, of course, there have long been concerns that eventually Abingdon will be subsumed into Oxford by development ‘creep’.

The houses have to go somewhere – but that does not mean the people of Hailey are wrong.

These conflicts are growing because there is a lack of clear policy on how we address our growing housing pressure as a country.

Homes (and their attached infrastructure) will be built.

There is some merit to the argument for spreading the home acrosss all our communities. The reverse argument is that every village and town is then negatively affected, so why not take the option of meeting the majority of demand with one big new ‘garden city’?

Where is the leadership on this? Why can’t we be clearer, rather than having this vacuum that sees each of our communities having to fight an individual battle.