If I had to make a prediction for this year that I would stake my life on, it would be that the amount of artificial light in the sky at night will increase. That is what has happened, at an accelerating rate, every year since the second world war.

It is curious that we don’t worry more about the pollution that obscures the most culturally universal and pristine of all natural vistas, the night sky, with its planets, constellations of stars and galaxies. Without a daily reminder of it, we are cut off from any sense of the scale of the universe and our own rather small place in the wider scheme of things.

I am particularly struck by the comments about the night sky collected in the course of a recent inquiry into artificial light at night by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Here is Prince Harry on his time in unlit Afghanistan: “Actually being out in the middle of nowhere, with the stars out ... was just a fantastic place to be.” Or Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich: “This is part of our heritage that we are losing. If we concreted over the countryside and bulldozed the forests, there would be an outcry, but this has sneaked up on us and people don’t realise what we are doing. The night sky is an amazing spectacle that 90% of the population doesn’t get to see.”

While light pollution seems to matter a lot to some, it is a form of pollution that almost nobody seems to be doing much about. This is because the planning process pays it little attention, as the commission’s report says. I know this all too well. For I have played my own inadvertent part in the expansion of outdoor lighting into once-dark areas.

I was on our parish council’s planning committee when we rubber-stamped improvements to the local hotel. This is a valued business, but it is now visible for miles at night, dominating the area of outstanding natural beauty in which it stands. Nowhere in the planning application do I recall reading that the front of the building would be lit at night or that lights would bathe the lawns and shine into the trees. If you happen to look that way from high ground, the place now blots out several constellations and merges into the orange glow from our two nearest towns.

Lighting at night is usually assumed to provide valuable benefits — such as preventing road accidents and giving a sense of security on urban streets — which outweigh the negative impacts. The valuable job the commission has done is to point out that these assumed benefits are often more arguable than they seem. It is said that stronger lighting in an urban context deters crime. But where these benefits have been measured, they persist into the day, so they clearly result from a package of improvements that make an area look well managed, rather than from the lighting alone. Indeed, the floodlighting that illuminates lorry parks often creates glare and deep shadows that can aid the crimes it was installed to prevent.

The commission also questions whether it is cost effective in terms of accident reduction to light motorways other than at junctions. A lot of lighting is there to satisfy expectations. People who move to our dark village from the town often install lights outside their houses.

In cities we have grown used to office buildings being illuminated at night. But thousands of birds are killed on their annual migrations because they become disoriented by the lights and fly into the buildings. In some parts of the world the lights are dimmed during the migration season. Why not dim them all the time?

The orange sodium lighting that still illuminates many of our streets takes a long time to warm up, so is left on all night. With more modern technologies this need not be so. The commission recommends that motorway lighting should be turned off or dimmed for the hours after midnight, which happens already on parts of the M4 and M5.

Since lighting — indoors and out — accounts for 20% of all energy consumption, the energy savings from using less light must be considerable. It is a defect of the commission’s short report and that of a Commons select committee study in 2003 that these savings remain unquantified. What the commission does do, valuably, is to show there is still a problem that needs to be addressed. For one thing, there remain, in England and Wales at any rate, far too many exemptions from the law of nuisance — for instance, for lorry parks. And the government appears to have fluffed drawing up the planning guidance on lighting that it once promised.

The value of a visually unpolluted night sky clearly needs official recognition. It would help if it became the responsibility of a single government department. Then officials might busy themselves ensuring that there are at least some places in Britain where people can go to experience the night sky and that our national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty should be “dark sky parks” where unnecessary outdoor light is eliminated. Too bad if this requires the law of nuisance to be applied retrospectively.

A lot of people will be writing manifestos this year. Better protection for the night sky would be on mine.

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