The other day, on my wanderings around the streets of the suburbs, I came across a sight which made me both sad and angry.

It was a new three-storey building - whether houses or flats I couldn't tell - being constructed at the top of The Bank in Eccleshill.

The people who live in it when it's finished will enjoy a splendid open view right across to Rawdon and down the valley past Woodall hill towards Leeds. It's a view which, until that new building went up, was enjoyed by the people living in the houses behind it in King Street. Now their windows will stare at someone else's across the street instead.

The residents of those houses are not alone in their plight. There are plenty of other people whose enjoyment of their home and the outlook from it have been spoiled by new development as the race goes on to cram houses on to every available patch of land.

And if they have complained to the planners, they will probably have been told that "you can't buy a view" (as we were when we objected in vain some years ago to plans to build a row of large detached houses in the field immediately behind our house).

Maybe not. But often the outlook from a house will have been a deciding factor which persuaded its occupants to buy it in the first place. Its situation will be why they chose it above all the other houses they looked at before making the biggest investment of their lives.

If that view is then taken away from them, their house loses a fair chunk of its value to them. It perhaps becomes one of those houses they would have rejected, no longer worth to them the money they paid for it.

Yet that doesn't seem to be acknowledged in the planning procedures. The effect of new development on the occupants of existing houses isn't sufficiently taken into account - if, indeed, it's taken into account at all.

But it should be. The planning laws need to be changed to give a higher priority to the rights of existing householders. Their objections should carry much more clout than they now do. If it's decided that a development would adversely affect their enjoyment of their house and its environs, then one of two things should happen.

Either the building application should be turned down (and if there's an appeal, the Department of Environment should also heed the local view instead of summarily over-riding it, as too often happens now). Or, if it's decided that the building should go ahead, the builder should be obliged to compensate existing householders fully, out of the substantial profit on the development, for the loss of value of their property to them and the effect on its resale value.

It seems only fair and sensible, doesn't it?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.