WHILE YOU WERE sleeping . . . or holidaying, or walking, perhaps in the countryside of southern England, the Government was pulling the grass from under your feet. A document produced a couple of weeks ago by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) proposes a fundamental shift in Britain’s planning system, one that threatens to tear decision- making out of local hands.

OK, there’s a housing problem. There are not enough homes to meet demand, particularly in southeast England. Agreed. First-time buyers and key public-sector workers are being priced out of the market. Agreed. But what do you think should happen next? This conundrum, at the heart of what ought to be a steamy public debate, is being decided under cover of a spurious “public consultation” taking place over the dog days of August.

The impressively dull-sounding Planning for Housing Provision, published by John Prescott’s department just before Parliament went into recess for the summer, but really produced under the auspices of the Treasury, proposes a fundamental change in the country’s planning system. In future, local and regional planners will have to “take into account house prices and other market information when deciding what level of house building is necessary”. They will need to have a rolling supply of available land whose release would be triggered when local house prices hit a certain level, that level to be determined by the Government in a way that is not yet clear.

Essentially what this means is that councils would be forced to release more land for housing in popular areas when house prices are rising, regardless of the environmental impact or any other considerations of sustainability — local schools, hospitals, roads, water provision etc. It removes all control from the hands of local and regional authorities, all power from local people, and stuffs it back into Whitehall’s pocket. This is pure Gordon Brown. The Chancellor wrested control of Britain’s planning system two years ago when he commissioned the economist Kate Barker to review the housing supply. Ms Barker’s final report, published in March last year, ignored environmental considerations and said we needed lots more houses to satisfy demand and tame price rises.

Trouble was, the concerns of local planners were not so easily ignored, and the Government has become irritated by how slowly new houses are being built. Hence the proposal to override local concerns by imposing a purely market-driven obligation on planners.

And the consultation period on the new proposal is less than eight weeks, despite the Government’s own guidelines which state that 12 weeks should be the minimum. Eight weeks during which much of Britain — and all of Whitehall — is on holiday or half asleep. The ODPM was at pains to emphasise yesterday that the announcement hadn’t been “slipped out” during the parliamentary recess. Well, no, it was published three days before the Commons rose for the summer, always a frantically busy time at Westminster. There is no better period in which to hold a non-consultative consultation.

A report into unaffordable housing, published at the end of June by the economists Alan W. Evans and Oliver Marc Hartwich at the moderately right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, derides opponents of uncontrolled development in the countryside as “owner-occupiers, conservationists and Nimbys”. But the insistence among economists, and some on the Right, on treating the property market as you would any other market has to be challenged hard, for the simple reason that land is a finite resource. England is rather beautiful and it seems a shame to destroy its countryside forever to meet demands that could be met in other ways. Does that make me, owner of a small flat in a large block in London, a Nimby conservationist?

This issue has produced some strange bedfellows: Left and Right, Shelter and the CBI, John Prescott and Oliver Marc Hartwich. And it’s all couched in such nicey-nicey terms about extending opportunities for people to meet their aspirations and have a decent home at a price they can afford. But how affordable do these planners think new homes in the South East are going to be for a freshly qualified nurse? We could seek other answers, beyond Nimbyism and the free market. The key thing, it seems to me, is to tackle the property market at the top end, not the bottom. The purchase of a second and any subsequent home should attract a swingeing extra tax, to be paid to the local community. Some 815,000 households in England own a second home, and 60 per cent of new-build housing in Central London last year was bought by investors, rather than by people who intended to live in it. What a waste.

Proponents of a land-value tax, under which any property owner would pay a tax proportionate to the value of his or her land, would like to see it replace income tax in order to see the country’s real wealth spread more widely. I can see why politicians would never dare to do it, but I’d like to hear them debate it all the same.

Some more suggestions? How about forcing property developers, for a start, to develop all plots of land for which they have already received planning permission, instead of sitting on them until their value rises further? The top 12 property developers alone have at least 70,000 of these — an amount that grows year by year. Then the 690,000 properties in Britain that have stood empty for six months or more could be compulsorily purchased and developed. Affordable housing for public sector staff? A local tax, or perhaps a land-value tax, might be used to boost salaries to cover the extra housing costs of key workers in unaffordable areas.

You don’t need to be Einstein — or even an economist — to see that giving the market its head isn’t always the right answer.

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