Former chairman of the National Trust Simon Jenkins writes in Country Life that the Trust is failing in its conservation obligation to the countryside

He argues that the new white paper on the future of British planning from the Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick MP (Con) is concerned ‘solely’ with new building, with no reference to ‘rural guardianship’.

He argues that the Trust has always had a central role as a campaigner and landlord in engaging with debates about ‘what should stay emphatically rural’, and that it needs to act now to increase planning control to protect coastal and rural England from excessive developments that do not adequately serve the rural communities they are built on.

Full article:

Country Life - Simon Jenkins: Britain’s historic houses are, for the most part, safe — that is not true of the countryside