'NIMBYs are heroes of our time': Simon Jenkins launches devastating attack on the state of housing in Britain
The Cotswolds are being ruined, house building targets are only helping the 'middling rich', and why NIMBYs should be celebrated, not vilified: Simon Jenkins lit up the Future Countryside conference with a scathing speech about house building and planning policy. Julie Harding was there to witness the fireworks.
Parts of Britain are being covered in ‘identikit identical houses’ that appear to have been ‘ordered by an algorithm’ and enabled by an increasingly centralised planning system and the growing influence of a construction industry that wields extraordinary power, according to Simon Jenkins.
The broadcaster, author and erstwhile Country Life staffer told the audience in his keynote address to the Future Countryside conference at Raby Castle, Co Durham, last week that the build obsession in Britain for ‘houses, houses, houses’ had nothing to do with homelessness, but everything to do with the arbitrary statistic of 1.5 million homes — ‘which we’re not going to reach anyway’ — and a building industry intent on making money.
Local authorities have become ‘mere agencies of central government direction’, targets can be imposed on local villages and towns with impunity and ‘that imposition is, to me, the biggest single threat we face at the moment’.
'These are not houses for the poor. They are houses built by the private sector for the middling rich'
He cited the example of Moreton-in-Marsh, a once lovely Cotswold town that ‘is now an absolute disgrace’, having been ‘destroyed by a surrounding siege mob of Persimmon and Barratt homes.
‘You drive across the Somerset Levels, you drive across Essex, Kent… the south Midlands, parts of the Welsh borders and there are ugly housing estates,' he added. 'These are not houses for the poor. They are houses built by the private sector for the middling rich.’
The millennium was a watershed, when polls showed the British people loved only the Royal Family and the NHS more than the countryside. As long ago as the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, people felt rural areas should be protected and this had continued through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. ‘There was a general agreement that the countryside was something worth protecting… There was no great battle running then, except a battle to move slowly forward every year, [but] something... dissolved at the turn of the century.’
'NIMBYs are heroes of our age... At least somebody is trying to defend the countryside'
This consensus began to unravel during the Blair years as the construction lobby grew in influence and ‘wanted the Government to do what they wanted, and they were very, very effective. Most of the money going to the Conservative party [then] was coming from the construction industry, and the result [was that]… by the time of the Cameron government, you had a real sense that the game was up’.
The former chair of the National Trust added that he regards NIMBYs (an acronym for ‘Not in my back yard’, people who oppose developments) as ‘heroes of our age... At least somebody is trying to defend the countryside’.
To reverse the trend, he argued that although there will always be competing demands, the countryside has ‘to work for our advantage, but that working has got to be the result of a conversation in which the quality of the countryside must be dominant’.
This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
