The Government’s new housebuilding targets, published in December last year, seek to undo decades of under-delivery of new homes.

The targets are ambitious and challenging, but in my view, they are totally necessary if we want to uphold the ‘unwritten promise’ that each generation is better off than the one before. At the moment we are failing as a society to give the same opportunities to young adults who have to commit such a high percentage of their earnings just to simply get their own home.

There is no doubt, we are in the midst of a housing crisis and we desperately need more homes in the Central South and we need them quickly. So where shall we put them?

If truth be told, if you live next door to a field, you probably won’t want to see houses built on it. Similarly, if you live in a small village, you’re highly unlikely to want to see it expanded. The status quo is a much more comfortable scenario for many, but town planning is an agent of change; and a big change is needed.

We must remind ourselves that building new homes does not automatically lead to an increase in the use of roads or infrastructure. There are thousands of young adults who are already working, driving, shopping and yes, visiting doctors, dentists and hospitals. They are already contributing to society, but they often live with family members, what they lack is independence, they lack a place to call home.

I’m old enough to remember the ‘Hampshire County Structure Plan’ in the late 90s and early 00s. Structure Plans were designed to look 10 to 15 years ahead to provide a strategic context for Local Plan making. The Structure Plan applied a ‘top down’ target for local Councils to adhere to, all based on a spatial strategy that allocated broad areas for new development and sought to control development in certain locations, particularly in areas between settlements.

We hear the term ‘Green Belt’ a lot, but with only a small amount of Green Belt in Hampshire, the County Structure Plan instead identified ‘Countryside Gaps’ as a way of preventing existing settlements from growing towards one another.

The legacy impacts of these ‘gaps’ is still felt today, largely because the concept of gaps is still a much-heralded approach to planning policy making. It is also engrained in the minds of many residents too and it is a familiar and popular concept.

Gaps are also cited by a lot of NIMBYs trying to prevent development being built near them.

I live in West End, Southampton which has physically merged with the City of Southampton, and yet, in my view it has retained its own identity, its own sense of place and retains a real sense of community. So does it matter whether or not there is a physical gap of green fields between individual settlements? Well, in my opinion, no, gaps are not always helpful and they can be harmful.

I believe that if we are going to encourage people out of their cars, and create better habits of walking, cycling and the use of public transport; then some settlements need to be enlarged, and they need more homes to reach a sufficient quantum of residents to ensure the viability of new regular bus services, and retain the shops and services that are starting to fail.

If we keep leaving gaps between settlements, then we will simply have to roll out new development further and further away from our urban areas and deeper into the countryside; just compounding the lack of sustainability.

There are many examples where new development on the edge of an existing settlement, and in some cases between settlements would increase the overall sustainability of the area, leading to better outcomes for residents and the planet.

We can no longer afford to simply mind the gaps.

n Daniel Wiseman is a chartered town planner with twenty-five years’ experience in town planning in Central South in both the public and private sectors. Daniel is a Senior Director at Gillings Planning and joined the team in January 2018. He started his career in local government at Portsmouth and then Southampton City Councils before moving into planning consultancy.