Who we are

Stop Urban Sprawl is a campaign to raise awareness of the government's housing targets for the East of England region.

The government's formula sets a starting point of 45,596 new homes a year across this region — around 1,367,880 over thirty years, spread across 1,280 towns and villages. An increase in population of 48%.

The infrastructure is already struggling. We are under a hosepipe ban as we write this. Rivers are at exceptionally low levels, sewage is overflowing, surgeries have closed to new patients and schools are full.

The flaw is structural, not accidental

The government scatters growth across hundreds of villages, a hundred and fifty houses at a time. Planning obligations must be directly related to the development that pays them — so a small site can be asked for a footpath, and can never be asked for a reservoir, a substation, a surgery or a station.

Every village extension consumes capacity. None of them creates any. Do it four hundred times and you have the demand of a city with the infrastructure of a parish.

This was not the plan

In 1946 Parliament passed the New Towns Act, which built Stevenage and eventually Milton Keynes through development corporations. In 1947 it passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which set out to stop towns spreading indefinitely into the countryside. Green belts followed by circular in 1955.

The two halves were designed together: contain the old places, build new ones. Britain kept the containment and quietly abandoned the new towns. What has replaced them is not a plan at all — it is the same sprawl, redistributed onto villages.

What we think should happen

If the country genuinely intends to build millions of homes, then build the infrastructure first, build at density, put it where it disturbs fewest people, and leave the rest of the countryside rural.

Our own answer is a single infrastructure-first settlement large enough to absorb the thirty-year housing requirement for Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and North Essex — leaving the rest of the East of England alone. You can read the proposal at ForestCity.uk.

You do not have to agree with it. Plenty of people signing this campaign never will, and that's fine. The argument about scattering stands whether or not our answer is the right one — we'd rather have it in public than not have it.

What we do with your details

If you sign the petition, we'll email you about development in your area, about the campaign's work, and about the alternatives we think would take the pressure off. Unsubscribe from any email. We don't sell or share the list. We publish your name on the petition page once twenty people have signed, unless you untick "Show my name" — never your email or postcode.

Corrections

We publish government figures and our own research. If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it and say what changed. corrections@stopurbansprawl.uk