Tony Blair's No. 10 thinktank is considering scrapping green belt building controls in a bid to solve the housing crisis...

The proposal, says The Guardian, is one of a raft of initiatives being dreamt up in No.10 to put some spice into New Labour's agenda for a third term in office.

The current green belt restrictions have been in place since the end of the second world war, but the Prime Minister's policy advisers seem to think it may be time to replace it with national parks.

The recent Government-backed Barker review on housing highlighted the severe shortage of housing in the UK and concluded that the country needs an extra 145,000 houses a year to meet demand.

Undoubtedly, the move to abolish the current green belt would meet with fierce resistance from environmentalists and local residents, but support for more housing in the countryside has also come from some surprising sources.

Intensive Farming

Last September, Dr. Keith Porter, an information manager at English Nature's Peterborough headquarters, put forward the heretical argument that the best way to save the biodiversity of the English countryside is to build more low-density housing on farmland.

In support of this view, he noted that intensive farmland has virtually no wildlife to speak of, while residential developments with gardens and green areas, provide sustainable habitats for species such as song thrushes, skylarks and the copper butterfly that are threatened with extinction by agri-business.