AT different ends of East Lancashire and in diverse ways, a couple of campaigns were under way today to save the region's countryside from being buried under bricks and mortar for new housing.

For we find Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans commencing a two-month drive to collect signatures for his petition to Parliament demanding that two-thirds of all new houses should be built on so-called "brown field" sites rather than green fields.

And at Pendle a series of exhibitions was being staged detailing potential housing sites identified by the council that were formerly developed but are now no longer in use.

But though the objective of putting "old" sites to good use again already has some stimulus from the government, it deserves much more.

We see, for instance, that the commendable Pendle initiative stems from targets set by the government in the Lancashire Structure Plan for the local authority to earmark designated amounts of brown field land for housing.

But identifying such sites is hardly the problem - least of all in areas like East Lancashire which have an excess of derelict land that begs renewal both to improve the appearance of the region and, for the sake of economic regeneration, to make it more attractive to outside investors.

The crux of the issue, surely, is swaying the market for new houses away from the countryside and revitalising towns and cities by making them places where people want to live.

We have seen some valuable efforts in this direction already in East Lancashire - notably in Blackburn, where inner-urban new housing in developments such as the town's Waterside area in the canal corridor has provided first-time buyers in particular with affordable and convenient housing. But, on the higher rungs of the housing ladder, the market is still strongly steered to the urban fringes and heavy pressure is put on the green field sites. And with this comes immense strains on the infrastructure and on social conditions - town centres and the inner-urban economy start to suffer; increased commuter traffic creates more congestion and pollution and, as we have seen in East Lancashire, scrambles for school places start in areas where house-building has outstripped provision.

Yet, all of this is allowed by planning consent granted by local authorities who are obliged to do so on strict planning grounds and who risk costly planning appeals over refusal.

It is time, surely, for the government to set not only paper targets for brown field sites for housing, but to intervene more effectively in the planning process and give councils stronger powers to include the social effects of green field housing development in their consideration of planning applications. If consent becomes harder to come by in the countryside, its preservation will be boosted and, at the same time, so will our towns.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.