As I flew into Stansted on Sunday from Istanbul, a fantastic but gridlocked city of 13 million, southeast England looked like a green, pleasant and largely unpopulated land, with plenty of room to house a few million more.

Yet today the debate about “concreting over” the region restarts in Woking, close to where I grew up, with a public examination of the South East Plan, the latest in a forest of planning reports that could replant the green belt. Which seems pretty much what some want to do.

This plan came from the South East England Regional Assembly, a body I do not recall being invited to elect. Of 13 issues highlighted in its “development” report, housing supply comes 13th. With the inevitable emphasis on reducing the region’s “resource footprint”, it sets a miserable target of building 28,900 “dwellings” (not houses) a year — even less than the 32,000 built in 2004-05. Worse, new housing is to be concentrated on brownfield sites in 21 urban “hubs”, which means Woking becoming even more of a one-bedroom town with a block of tiny flats on every street corner.

It is official policy to keep the grubby masses penned into brown zones of southeast England, out of the green pristine bits. So you cram micro flats into hubs and refuse to build new transport links elsewhere. People huddle around commuter towns and Tube stations, house prices rocket — and you get less for more money. Yvette Cooper, Minister for Housing and Planning, boasts that housing density has increased under new Labour from “only” 25 dwellings per hectare to 42. As James Woudhuysen points out in his critique of “brownfield brutalism”, this means the average dwelling space has been cut from 400 sq metres to 238 sq metres. Hurrah!

With planners and the Campaign to Protect Rural England telling the plebs to “keep off the grass”, the future looks dull and brown. So plans to build along the Thames Gateway have effectively been reduced to turning the Olympic village into an East London estate.

The suburbs may be largely substandard, lacking decent houses, infrastructure or soul — one reason why some of us stay in London, even if we cannot afford the urban renaissance bits. But people should not have to live where they are allocated. And the millions who do aspire to the suburbs need less contempt from social engineers, and more decent homes and transport links on greenfield sites.

Today’s hearing is in H. G. Wells House. Wells landed the Martians in Woking in War of the Worlds, apparently so that he could enjoy them blowing it up. I know how he felt. But I also know that where and how others choose to live should not be dictated by alien bodies such as the South East England Regional Assembly and their masters from Planet Whitehall.