Chris Hinchliff

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and my employment by CPRE before my election to Parliament. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing this important debate. There are fair questions to answer about the effectiveness of planning policies that are supposed to protect our best farmland. They are currently failing far too often, but this is not a new problem, and the Tory record of preserving agricultural land for our food security is, I am afraid, rather shaky. In the 12 years from 2010, we lost more than 14,000 hectares of prime agricultural land to development. Having listened to Conservative Members speak on this issue many times, I suspect that the debate today is really something of a proxy war. They use the issue of food security as a smokescreen for the fact that they oppose the aesthetic impacts of turning large swathes of our countryside into industrialised landscapes under steel and glass, surrounded by wire fencing and surveillance cameras. I would encourage them to be brave and defend beauty on its own terms.