Andrew Carr’s letter last week was, like the curate’s proverbial egg, good in parts. It stated the reasons for resisting the proposals for several large housing estates around the periphery of our town, but concluded that we would have to accept them because the Government has seen house building as a way to help the national recovery.

Nationally there is a shortage of houses, and that a major programme of house construction would assist the economy, but these are not sufficient reasons to abandon all common sense arguments about the effect of these schemes.

This government talks localism but practices centralism. It says that local peoples’ opinions count in the planning process and then makes the process, e.g. of formulating neighbourhood plans, so onerous on unpaid, unresourced local councillors that it can come down with a heavy hand and impose its, i.e. the developer’s, will when unrealistic time frames are not met.

The developers are there to generate the windfall profits of converting farmland into land with outline planning permission at an uplift of 100 times its original value.

This is one of the reasons they are reluctant to develop brown field sites, where planning permission exists. Our local councils have identified plenty of these for the relatively few new houses that Devizes may need in the next few years.

So, contrary to Mr Carr’s conclusion, we need to keep fighting for sensible planning. If we don’t win, the local and national politicians know they will suffer at the ballot box.

Jerry Pilgrim, Kingsmanor Wharf, Devizes.