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Warning: Planning minister Nick Boles has said that the amount of developed land may increase by a third to ease the housing crisis

Up to two million acres of green fields may have to be sac
rificed for housing, the planning minister warned last night.

In comments that will alarm conservationists, Nick Boles said the amount of developed land may have to increase by up to a third to tackle the growing housing crisis.

He told BBC Two’s Newsnight that ministers would protect the Green Belt - but warned that large areas of ‘open land’ may have to be given over for housing.

And he hit out at developers for building ‘pig ugly’ housing estates that deter communities from accepting any new development.

‘We’re going to protect the Green Belt but if people want to have housing for their kids they have got to accept we need to build more on some open land,’

Mr Boles said: ‘In the UK and England at the moment we’ve got about nine per cent of land developed. All we need to do is build on another two to three per cent of land and we’ll have solved a housing problem.’

The UK land mass covers about 60 million acres. Using another three per cent for housing would mean concreting over 1.8 million acres of undeveloped land.

Mr Boles’s figures suggest that tackling the housing shortage may mean building homes on every square inch of a county the size of Devon, which has 1.65 million acres.

Ministers believe the public would be more willing to accept new housing if people realised how much of the countryside remained undeveloped.