IT’S a staple of local news.

Open any copy of this fine publication or any other regional newspaper and there’s a decent chance you’ll find yourself confronted with something along the lines of ‘Resident’s fury over new home plans’.

It seems no planning application, whether it’s for homes, schools or a football stadium, can be submitted without someone launching a petition against it.

Just this week, we heard people living in Claines were up in arms about plans to build 128 new homes at Gwillams Farm in Bevere.

On one hand it’s understandable – no one wants to endure months or potentially years of noisy, dirty and unsightly building work on their doorstep.

But, on the other hand, it’s a fact that the population of Worcestershire, the UK and the world as a whole is getting bigger and, barring a 28 Days Later-style outbreak, isn’t likely to start going down again any time soon.

You can be all Daily Mail about it and claim it’s because of a tsunami of scrounging immigrants coming over here to take our jobs, live off our benefits and steal our women.

Or you can face facts that new homes have to be built, and they have to be built somewhere.

Yes, most people who chose to live on the outskirts of a city or a rural area do so because of the pleasant surroundings.

But it would be pretty short-sighted of them to think it would stay that way forever.

Of course it’s not fair to say everyone objecting to a development is a NIMBY – in some cases there are genuine reasons not to build somewhere. But these have to be weighed against what is becoming a very pressing need for more housing.

In my previous job, I lived in a new development right on the outskirts of Cirencester, and it was genuinely one of the most peaceful, pleasant places I’ve ever lived. But I wouldn’t have been terribly surprised if an army of diggers had pitched up in the adjacent field and started building a few hundred new homes.

In an ideal world, none of England’s green and pleasant land would be lost to urban development.

But this is far from an ideal world.