Landscape protection

SIR – With reference to your report (June 10) on saving the stretch of Hertfordshire countryside known as Forster Country from housing development, one wonders at the impotence of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) in challenging this and similar housing projects nationwide, many involving the sacrifice of green belt land.

Despite this body’s £9million fighting fund, it has not mounted any significant legal challenge to local plans for housing currently being ushered through at the behest of central government. The broader problem is the basic divide within the conservation movement between bodies such as RSPB, which campaign for flora and fauna, and those such as CPRE, which are only concerned with landscape.

By any logic the two areas of concern are inextricably linked, yet the housing development juggernaut carves an easy path between them. Tom Coates and Wendy Gross Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire