LibDem peer Lord Taylor is lobbying for housing firms to have the power to seize farmland to build “garden villages” of up to 5,000 homes. He has just published a pamphlet calling for “new local development corporations” to be given the power to confiscate land, compensating them at just 50% more than the agricultural land value.

What Lord Taylor forgets to mention is that he is director of Mayfield Market Towns Ltd, which is seeking to build up to 10,000 homes bang in the middle of rural Sussex. As local MP Nick Herbert told Guido in the Sun yesterday, “It stinks more than the manure he wants to concrete over for profit…”