Reader’s letter: Declining population could help with housing issue

Hardly a week goes by without a letter in the Herald expressing disquiet about yet another housing scheme in the area, and understandably so.

Last week Becky Jenner pointed out what is anticipated for Horsebridge and Hellingly click here to read.

Recently Karina Robinson wrote in The Financial Times an article bemoaning our population projection starting to shrink in 2025, not 2043 as the ONS has predicted.

It should be something to cheer about.

Population Matters, an organisation that includes such green luminaries as Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough, has long opined that for our land mass the optimum number of human beings on it should not exceed 30 million. We are well over double that now.

If the projection is accurate, we will not be alone.

Four years ago the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, found that 91 out of 195 countries now had fertility rates below replacement level.

One of them, Bulgaria, had boasted nine million residents in 1989.

Three years ago there were fewer than seven million.

Up to now we have, scandalously, been able to poach doctors, nurses and other health workers continually from abroad, but it looks as though the time will come when the global source will dry up and we shall at last be forced to think of another solution to plug our employment gaps.

Whatever the answer might be, it would not appear to be the importation of foreign labour.

Instead, therefore, of continuing to genuflect to the great god of continual economic growth, let us take advantage of the joys of an apparently slowly decreasing population.

Then perhaps we won't have to worry so much about building more houses in the likes of Horsebridge and Hellingly.