Would You Actually Care if We Lost 1% of Agricultural Land to Create New Homes?

Every time I travel any distance by car, I am struck by the vast amount of green land there is between towns. Prompted by a question posed on Twitter by George Clarke, presenter of Channel 4’s The Home Show, my curiosity got the better of me and I did some digging.

I found that 72% of England is actually agricultural land and another 8% is forest and woodland. Of the agricultural land, which is some 23,250,000 acres, over half is grass and rough grazing.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/land/lduse.htm

I also learnt about the town of Cambourne and the proposed new town of Northstowe, both in Cambridgeshire.
http://www.cambourne-uk.com
http://www.northstowe.uk.com

Each, it seems, has a core site of just over 1000 acres, but the number of new homes to be built differ dramatically. Cambourne will have about 4,000 new homes while the Northstowe proposal is for nearly 10,000. Each will be completely self contained with shops, schools, libraries and business areas and, importantly, both will return acres of land to green and open space for leisure and play areas and both will create new habitat for local wildlife. Cambourne has reserved 60% of land to green and open areas and Northstowe about 35%.

While researching I found myself liking the Cambourne model a lot, so I have made assumptions based more on this than the Northstowe proposal.

OK, so here goes!

Let's suppose that we allocated 225,000 of our 23,000,000 acres for new towns built closely to the Cambourne model. Staggeringly, I calculate that we could build ONE MILLION new homes and return 125,000 acres back to green and open space for everyone to enjoy.

On these calculations we would have used 0.0097% of our agricultural land, yes that's less than 1%, and solved our housing crisis, our construction industry crisis and probably have solved our rising unemployment crisis.

Considering all of the benefits, would anybody really miss the one percent of our agricultural land?