“A walk through any Westcountry market town at 8am on a weekday ought to be enough to convince us that Matthew Taylor, the former Truro and St Austell MP, is talking sense.

Matthew, now Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, says our housing policy is sick – and those pointless traffic jams in what should be rights be quiet country towns are the most obvious symptoms.

The worst of the traffic congestion comes from the new housing estates that ring our historic towns like encircling armies.

You can’t blame the people who live in these estates – like all of us, they are just looking for an affordable place to live.

But their homes are not affordable – the policy of allowing only this suburban doughnut of development has driven up prices to the point that in some parts of the country a single building plot will set you back £500,000.

And their homes are not even desirable, whatever the developer’s adverts say. They are increasingly tiny – the smallest in Europe, bar flat-dwelling Italy and Romania. They must drive into town because they have no schools, shops or jobs, and usually their streets aren’t even leafy.

The developers may have promised such luxuries when they were granted outline planning consent but, oh dear, when push comes to bulldozer, it’s “just not viable”.

The councillors on the planning committees shrug: at least they have met their Government-set housing targets.

Each time one of these new estates goes up, there are scores of angry, unhappy people who have lost their views and their access to the countryside. Multiply that across the country, and it’s no wonder town planners have such a bad name.

Is anyone happy? The suddenly rich former landowner almost certainly, as he flies his shiny new helicopter to his shiny new villa in Bermuda.

In a convincing speech to an audience at Plymouth University last Thursday, Lord Taylor called for a new planning strategy in which rural councils are given the power to acquire farm land to build new Garden Villages of 1,500-5,000 homes, separate from existing communities.

Legislation to allow councils to pay above market rates for agricultural land but below that for development land would kill two birds with one stone. The farmer will be handsomely compensated, and the resulting profit will be ploughed back into the new community for schools, shops and other facilities.

But you’ll be concreting over our green and pleasant land! I hear you cry.

Not so, says Lord T. Today, just nine per cent of England is developed. Another million homes in Garden Villages would barely take that figure to 9.5 per cent.

Unlike the present system, which seems designed to create unhappiness, “a new Bodmin, off the A30 and over the hill, would be seen by hardly anyone,” he says. Being smallish, it won’t require new dual carriageways. And being at least partly self-contained, it can become a real community.

What’s not to like?”