Matt Browne is Communications Officer at Bright Blue

At the start of this month, the Prime Minister announced a new Conservative commitment to provide younger people with new homes; 200,000 new starter homes to be offered to first time buyers under the age of 40 at a 20% discount. In doing so he assumed a time honoured Tory mantle, well worn by Margaret Thatcher and Harold MacMillan, of the provider of bricks and mortar for those working to build a home for their family.

For some, however, this pledge to ‘get Britain building again’ saw Cameron mount an assault on an equally entrenched Conservative tradition; the protection of Britain’s countryside. Build significant numbers of new homes, so this argument goes, and you fatally mar England’s green and pleasant land. Every field lost to housing is lost forever; lost to the dog walker, to the child picking blackberries, to the homeowner enjoying the view they worked for.

The wish to protect these bucolic pleasures is a fundamentally Conservative instinct. Far from being a ‘not in my back yard’ mentality of jealously guarded individual possession, this desire to preserve our countryside is often characterised by a determination to ensure that the quieter, greener acres of England can be safely left in perpetuity for communal enjoyment.

Is this a case of irresistible force meeting immovable object within the Conservative tradition? Is the familial desire to make hearths and homes at odds with its Tory twin, the need to conserve our woods and meadows for our children?  Not really.

Both aspirations need to be realised, but the timeframes are different – one need is generational, the other millennial.

Housing is a generational issue. Two thirds of 25 to 34 years olds don’t own their own homes, 25% of under 34 year olds live with their parents. With increased longevity and increased numbers of divorced couples requiring separate accommodation, existing housing stock is becoming more and more tied up. We need to build 2 million new homes over the next decade to clear this logjam and meet our housing need. Cameron’s starter homes, targeted at first time buyers, marks a start.

2 million new homes is a large number, but one dwarfed by England’s rolling acres. Currently only 9% of England is classed as built up land, a figure that includes gardens. Building the extra homes needed would increase this figure to 12%. A 3% reduction in undeveloped land, yes. Merry England drowned under concrete, no.

Arguments against new homes often suggest that development, once started, simply won’t stop. Floodgates open, a remorseless tide, slopes sliding; house building becomes a force of nature, biblical in scope and impact. The drama of the metaphors used belies the reality. Whilst we need new homes by 2025, our longer term housing need is yet to be established. It is inaccurate to suggest that high housing need will be used to justify high rates of development throughout the 21st century as our longer term housing needs simply haven’t been determined. Indeed the factors that will shape housing need after 2025 are only now becoming apparent.

We have the opportunity to head off long term housing pressures as they develop, if we have the right conditions in place.  This includes a strong and innovative economy, and a society where the younger generation have a bricks and mortar stake to work to defend, not a teenage bedroom to hide in.

Individuals with a direct stake in our countryside, with a view from their own living room window, a favourite field to blackberry-pick and walk the dog in, are individuals inspired to preserve rural England, to protect the green amenities they have worked hard to share in.

We need homes in the short term, new homes that will bolster us in our efforts to tackle the long term threats to our countryside.

The extent to which having a home to enjoy can deepen the human relationship with nature is a recurrent theme in the poetry of that most conservative of poets, John Betjeman. In his ‘Baker Street Station Buffet’ he wrote of a London commuter, dreaming from the platform of the smell of dinner awaiting in his newly built suburban villa, a longing thought inextricably linked with the green fields and misty sky of the autumn scented countryside outside his newly painted front door. It was, Betjeman wrote, a vision that kept the tired commuter warm inside.

As the train of our twenty first century pulls out of the station, it’s a twofold dream that Conservatives can help deliver in turn, a home to own and a land to cherish.