I was a "Nimby" once, planning minister tells Telegraph The other owner of Woodman's Orchard won planning approval for a new estate of up to 30 three bedroom homes, he says, much to the fury of the Boles' family. He says: "My grandfather, father and me as a 12 year old were very much against this and I remember hearing stories of my grandfather fighting the development and arguing against planning permission being given." The Boles family lost their battle and construction on the housing estate went ahead. Mr Boles" father responded in the only way middle England knows how - he planted an enormous Leylandii hedge so he could not see the new homes. Mr Boles continues: "What I distinctly remember is my father and grandfather planted this enormous Leylandii hedge all along the border in order to try and minimise the impact of the estate on our view. It was slap, bang in the middle - we look at the village from the house and this was in between the two, so it was very visible. Over time, Mr Boles" father moved into the house, and Mr Boles says he got used to the new homes, even though "they were not the best looking houses in the world." Now, he says, they are "completely part of the landscape of the village" adding: "The homes are visually integrated, and the community would have died as an economic community without them. The final postscript was 15 years ago when my father chopped down the Leylandii hedge. Mr Boles tells this story because he wants Telegraph readers, many of whom backed a Hands Off Our Land campaign opposing changes to the planning system, to see how he came to realise that opposing new development can be self-defeating and wrong. He says: "We need to build more, not all of it can be satisfied by empty homes and "brownfield" sites, so will need to build quite a lot on currently undeveloped land. England is not massively overdeveloped. He says: "I am not a critic of Nimbys my job is to create a system that persuades them not to object but to get involved." To reject a new development out of hand after receiving notification of it through the post from the council is "a completely natural response," he says. But he adds: "What I am trying to move to is a system where you say to people "if want to shape your community" get involved, do a neighbourhood plan." Part of the problem, he says, is that the planning system fails to give communities a stake in new developments. Under plans he is announcing on Thursday, local people will be able to keep up to 25 per cent of revenues from in the Community Infrastructure Levy which builders pay to win planning permission to spend it on community projects, like a new village hall. People's surrounding areas "cannot stay in aspic," he says: "Work out what you want, where you want it, what you want it to look like, the money that enables you to reopen the municipal pool." Mr Boles says the country needs more new homes because the projections for the households being created in this country, particularly over the past decade, were "terrifying." He says: "Between 2000 and 2010 the population of England went up by 3.4million, of which half was immigration. What are you going to say "sorry you can't be a separate household." We have comprehensively failed to persuade people to embrace the level of housebuilding that is required. We are in this terrible vicious circle where we have built ugly stuff, which does not involve local people and does not bring them any benefit in terms of improved local infrastructure or anything else. They hate it and so they fight any further proposals tooth and nail, perfectly understandably. And the process of fighting it means much less land gets planning permission and the value of land goes through the roof. So the cost of building becomes completely unaffordable so people build c***, design rubbish. The fundamental point is that we have to make more land available. People have to recognise that "either they will spend their retirement propping up their kids and their grandkids, or they can accept more development so their grandkids don't have the problem." He says: "I genuinely think that the single biggest way in which we are failing to deliver social justice in this country at the moment is unaffordable housing - more than schools, more than jobs, more than benefits." It was simply "immoral" that young people had to wait for so long to save a large enough deposit to buy a new home. He refuses to say green belt land around towns is completely safe, instead saying carefully that "the protection of the green belt is absolutely firm in policy and that is not going to change," largely because councils can build on it in exceptional circumstances. Turning to the projected increase in number of on-shore wind farms, Mr Boles says there is a "balance that needs to be struck" in terms of slowing the march of on shore wind farms across large parts of the countryside. He says that he wants councils to set out in new local development plans where new wind farms should be sited, their "intensity" and whether they will look at "separation distances" between the turbines and people's homes. Councils could even look at whether there was a community benefit, he says, before giving approval. Are the community getting free electricity or something off their bills, or something. My concern is that the last two and a half years very little of that has been taken into account. We can have a national policy that it is OK for local authorities to have local policies on those matters. We have a lot of on-shore wind built in the last few years, actually we are getting to saturation level in what people are willing to live with but also enough to meet our targets. He says that Britain should focus instead on becoming a world leader in off shore wind technology, and not worry too much about on-shore turbines, because other countries have developed better technology.