SIR: Is our MP a supporter of the project for the demolition of all that is left of our planning regulations and environmental and heritage protection?

Hidden behind the pandemic we are beginning to glimpse what Cummings’ Brexit was all about. Remember Michael Gove beginning the Brexit campaign by deploring the fact that European wildlife protection got in the way of development? That legislation is demolished, replaced by the Orwellian Environment Bill, promising all sorts of benefits but making certain that there will be no accountable body to ensure they come about.

Now the Housing Minister, Robert Jenrick’s annihilation of the planning system. We know what this is for – the Jenrick-Desmond scandal revealed developers expect favours in return for political donations. As with the Environment Bill, we are promised respect for some lingering areas of environmental and heritage protection (never mind that this is a government with road and rail plans that destroy or irreparably damage nearly 1,000 protected sites) in return for a free-for-all carpet-bagging developers’ binge.

Jenrick takes to heart the supposed Goebbels dictum “if you tell a lie, tell a big one”. Apparently the planning system routinely prevents houses and hospitals being built. He offers no evidence for such an obviously false statement – the principal effect of all the government’s buccaneering has not been to build houses (and certainly not the social housing that is needed) but to allow developer friends to accumulate wealth by hoarding vast banks of land with planning permission.

Jenrick has the nerve to claim that removal of any constraints on developers’ money-making will result in new Baths or Belgravias. He quotes John Ruskin as saying ‘we must build forever’, by which Ruskin surely meant building things that future generations will regard with pride and affection. Better citations from Ruskin would be:

'There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.'

Or 'The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.'

Chris Gillham,

Upper High Street,

Winchester