There’s something curious happening in the villages surrounding Peterborough. Places like Castor, Ailsworth and Thorney—green, picturesque, and comfortably middle class—are becoming battlegrounds. Not because they’re under siege from climate catastrophe or economic collapse (though they are). But because a few thousand new houses might be built nearby.
Local residents have mobilised. Protests. Petitions. Parish council rows. Banners nailed to garden fences. The usual vocabulary of NIMBYism is all there: “loss of character”, “strain on schools”, “traffic chaos”. But there’s a new twist this time—Reform UK has discovered the environment.
The party that wants to rip up net zero, expand fossil fuels, and deregulate the planning system now says we must stop rural development to protect “precious farmland”. This is the same Reform UK that treats climate policy as a leftist plot and has never met a carbon emitter it didn’t like. Now they’re draping themselves in green to block housing. It’s laughable. And dangerous.
Because what’s at stake here is more than a few fields or historic sightlines. It’s a vision of who gets to live where—and who doesn’t.
Bad Faith Greens
Reform UK’s opposition to rural housing is not about ecology. It’s about exclusion. The villages in question are dominated by detached houses, converted barns, and listed cottages. Property prices are high. Social housing is scarce. Young families can’t afford to live near the schools they grew up in. And renters are pushed into overpriced, undersupplied markets in the urban sprawl of Peterborough proper.
What Reform UK are really doing is weaponising environmental language to uphold a deeply unequal status quo. They’re happy to bulldoze regulations when it suits landlords or oil executives. But when it comes to building homes for people who might vote differently, live differently, or simply not already own property, they raise the drawbridge.
We Need Development. But the Right Kind
Local development plans should absolutely consider schools, GPs, roads, public transport, biodiversity. In many areas, they don’t. Years of austerity have hollowed out local government. Infrastructure isn’t keeping pace with demand. But the answer isn’t to block new homes. It’s to build properly, publicly, and with planning powers returned to communities, not developers.
Brownfield sites across Peterborough offer part of the solution. The council’s own land register shows viable plots—especially around the Station Quarter, North Westgate and Boongate—that could take thousands of homes. But developers prefer greenfield. It’s easier. Cheaper. More profitable.
It’s true that several major brownfield sites in Peterborough—most notably the Station Quarter is now green lit for regeneration, and in theory, offers a sustainable route to easing the city’s housing pressure. But the reality is more sluggish. While the Station Quarter has secured Levelling Up funding and some work is set to begin, its focus remains heavily on transport infrastructure, with housing a vague promise on the horizon. North Westgate has been the subject of masterplans and glossy visuals for nearly a decade, but progress has been stymied by land acquisition disputes and developer hesitancy. Boongate, meanwhile, remains designated as suitable for development but shows little sign of movement on the ground. These brownfield sites remain entangled in a planning and investment limbo—too expensive to develop quickly, too complex for profit-led builders to prioritise, and too often tied up in bureaucratic processes. As a result, the easy target becomes the greenfield edge of the city, where planning is easier, land is cheaper, and resistance comes from villagers rather than conservationists. This is the quiet scandal of the British planning system: it talks sustainability while delivering sprawl.
This is the structural contradiction at the heart of British planning: we rely on private capital to fix a housing crisis caused by private capital. The market won’t build what it can’t monetise.
Labour says it wants to “Get Britain Building Again,” promising 1.5 million new homes and reforms to unblock the planning system. Angela Rayner talks tough on developers who land-bank and delay, and there’s noise about reviving infrastructure, training workers, and forcing councils to meet housing targets. But is it enough? Because the real roadblock isn’t just the system. It’s the politics. Labour may talk about ambition, but they still flinch at the first whiff of a headline in the Telegraph or a revolt in the shires. Can they face down the NIMBYs? Can they take on Reform UK’s fake green outrage and call it what it is—class protectionism dressed up as countryside conservation? Or will this end like so many Labour schemes before: a decent slogan buried beneath capitulation and compromise?
So the left has a choice. We can either let Reform UK define the terms of debate—“no building here, no foreigners there, no green targets anywhere”—or we can demand a socialist programme of public housing, environmental repair, and rural reinvigoration.
Build Socialism, Not Just Houses
Villages are dying because they’re being preserved in aspic. Young people are forced out. Local services wither. Bus routes are slashed, if they exist at all. Pubs and shops close. And still the property-owning class protests that “enough is enough”.
But housing is not a threat. It is life. When done right, it means new families, new energy, schools staying open, new communities being born.
So let Reform UK wave their green flags of bad faith. We see them. The real environmental threat isn’t a few bricks on a field. It’s the party of oil barons pretending to be conservationists. And the longer we let them set the agenda, the more hollow our countryside becomes.
[Addendum] Delays Disguised as Principles
And then there’s the Homes for Everyone report, which claims to offer a people-centred, environmentally sustainable path out of the housing crisis. It talks sense on some points: prioritise brownfield, renovate the neglected, fill the empty, repurpose the redundant. But peel back the layers and you’ll find the familiar impulse to delay, defer, and ultimately deny. The report advocates a “sequential approach” that reads more like a bureaucratic chokehold than a housing strategy. It says all the right things about environment and community—while quietly implying that building homes where people actually need to live should be the last resort. What it never quite reckons with is scale. Or urgency. Or class. Because the housing crisis doesn’t wait politely in line behind ideal conditions. We need to build—properly, publicly, and at pace. Not just retrofit what remains of yesterday’s housing stock. Good intentions, but too often the logic becomes: anywhere but here, anytime but now.
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