The constant erosion of Yorkshire's green belt land has to be stopped - David Behrens

Fifty years ago, when I first came to work in the West Riding, people complained that if they carried on building houses at the rate they were going, the whole area would merge into a single, soulless settlement. There was even a name for it: Cleckuddersthorpe.

The green belt that separates one town from another was supposed to stop that, but it's an ideal today's green lobby does not seem interested in perpetuating. You'd have thought it would be their first priority, wouldn’t you? More fool you.

That part of the countryside is where green politics and class warfare clash head-on. All that fresh air and biodiversity sits uncomfortably with eco-warriors who think it’s too middle-class by half.

It explains why, for all the rhetoric about environmental sustainability and ecological preservation, there’s very little commitment from the new government to prevent large swathes of it from being tarmacked.

First things first: the new strategies from Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner to build more houses and breathe new life into hollowed-out high streets are full of good intent. But what Labour has so far failed to identify is that the two ambitions complement each other. If properly implemented, one solves the problem of the other. What an opportunity, if only they knew it.

Here’s why: the PM says he wants to rid town centres of dodgy-looking vape shops and betting dens which operate on the fringes of the law, encouraging antisocial behaviour and generally lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, and good luck to him.

But what then happens to those newly vacated shops and all the others left behind in our rush to buy everything online? Surely this is exactly where new homes should be.

Town centres come with infrastructure already laid on: schools, roads, train stations and retailers gagging for the custom that new residents will bring. And they are increasingly full of redundant buildings ripe for conversion or redevelopment.

Yet housebuilding that brings new life to existing urban centres is still not being prioritised. Instead, councils are falling back on the old recourse of nibbling away at the green belt, and now they are emboldened by the contradictory requirements of disconnected policies no-one has bothered to join up.

In Sheffield, where only a few years ago the council was trying to cut down trees just because they were in the way of roadworks, 14 green belt sites are now to be sacrificed to 3,500 homes as part of a 15-year plan for new builds.

“They’re really nice green spaces,” said the council’s Labour leader when protesters led her on a tour of the threatened areas last week, as if this were a revelation to her. She then added: “Seeing it for yourself obviously builds your empathy with the campaigners.” She should get out more, then.

Sheffield is doing this by design but in Bradford, where due to administrative paralysis they don’t even have a housing plan, they’re even further down the road to Cleckuddersthorpe. This month alone developers have strong-armed councillors into surrendering two pieces of green belt 10 miles apart by arguing that they’re not green enough.

The builders did this by exploiting a set of so-called ‘golden rules’ used by planners to mark out untouchable green land and reclassify the rest as grey belt – in other words low quality scrub – that can be freed up for housing.

Hacking away at the green belt acre by acre, as Bradford is now doing, is the most insidious form of urban creep. With no blueprint to keep developers at bay, they could turn up almost anywhere. Maybe at the end of your cul-de-sac.

As it is, the greenery around Wilsden and Menston will be paved over to accommodate 165 new homes, in spite of many hundreds of letters objecting and only a handful in support. Meanwhile, nearby towns that could do with the gentrification new houses might bring will be left to their decline.

That is what happens when the tail is allowed to wag the dog; when builders and not planners dictate the housing supply. Developers will always seek the most profitable plots into which they can squash build-’em-quick semis that all look the same, and those on bits of green belt next to prosperous suburbs are top of their list. Creating a showpiece estate on land reclaimed from vape shops and boarded-up bookies takes more imagination – and imagination costs money.

But that’s a model Burnham and Rayner are going to have to demolish if they are to seize the initiative and rescue areas that need improving – while leaving alone those that are already assets.