Housing sprawl

An unused car park with the potential for development

The scandal of wasted urban land
A vast amount of land within towns and cities crying out for development is going to waste, according to CPRE's latest research. Many councils are failing to identify opportunities for development on brownfield land. Our study, Untapped Potential, found widespread neglect of sites such as empty or underused car parks, former industrial and derelict land. CPRE commissioned leading planning consultants, Llewlyn Davies Yeang to research current practice among local councils in getting new development, including homes, on underused and neglected land.

Is your council wasting the countryside?
England needs hundreds of thousands of new homes in the coming decade, to cope with a still rising population and falling household sizes. Yet these new homes consume more countryside than any other kind of development as they sprawl out into the countryside – bringing new roads and extra traffic with them. At the same, there are huge areas of derelict land and buildings within our existing towns and cities, blighting neighbourhoods.

Find out how your local council is doing
Your local council gives planning permission for new housing developments. CPRE wants it to put pressure on housebuilders to make maximum use of brownfield land, and to refuse permission for new housing developments at wastefully low densities. You can download a PDF of the statistics from the Communities and Local Government website.
> Communities and Local Government website: Land Use Change Statistics (England) 2008 – provisional estimate