SIR – I have been reading with interest all the various protest groups regarding building on greenfield sites and the comments by local councillors and the local MP.

I too was disappointed at the failure of the protest regarding Buck Lane, but I always felt it was a lost cause.

Most new housing developments do not attract VAT and so the reason for developers’ attraction to them is economic.

This is the reason why the Buck Lane protest failed. If the brownfield sites had subsidies to allow for preparing the sites, then developers would build on them. This could be changed quite easily by Government.

Currently, the developers seem to have all the power; my own experience was very negative when we were building our own house. We had to pay a lot of money for a streetscape to prove that it was the norm to have a bay window.

I am also surprised that people thought that the new planning guidelines would work in local people’s favour when the remit was to speed up the planning process.

The balance of power needs to be vested in local people and not wealthy developers and the only way we can do that is to change the economics and make it cheaper to develop on brownfield sites.

Jane Dunn, Lucy Hall Drive, Baildon