It is romantic but misguided to think that anyone living in Britain can gaze out over wild countryside. Perhaps a few lighthouse keepers once looked on to raw nature, but that was before their work was automated. From the Highlands, with its vast hydro schemes, to the well-tended gardens of Kent, Britain is a hard-worked plot and has been for centuries.

What we have been extremely good at is creating a countryside that is beautiful to look upon. Perhaps, hemmed in by water, we have taken more interest in this than most. There is a bucolic tendency running deep in the national character, expressing itself in a love of rustic poets and painters, and it is this part of us that has turned to fury at the coalition government and its prosaically named Draft National Planning Policy Framework.

This consultation document, suspiciously launched in the dog days of summer, seeks to simplify the complex planning laws that the government rightly says are strangling development. Unfortunately, it appears to be written by property developers. It contains this terrifying sentence: "Decision-takers at every level should assume that the default answer to the development proposal is 'yes'." So goodbye to planning restrictions, then, and farewell to a green and pleasant land (it relates only to England).

Groups such as the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England have assaulted the government by return. After a rough week, planning minister Greg Clark was backtracking a little yesterday. People were getting "the wrong end of the stick," he said. "If some groups think that some of these principles… could be expressed more clearly still then I'm certainly open to suggestions on that." None the less, he reiterated his main purpose and said there would be no U-turn: "We are not building enough homes for the people needing them for the first time. We are contributing to homelessness, to overcrowding, to poverty."

That last statement is true. Previous governments have been too keen to sell off council stock and too wary of building new homes. House prices are now out of reach of the young. In the countryside, where wages are low and housing scarce, this is doubly the case. Nationally, the proportion of people who own their homes has been falling for 10 years and is expected to drop from its current 67% to 63.8% over the next 10. The question is whether untrammelled development is the answer.

There has been surprise in some quarters that the Conservatives seem so keen to alienate their natural supporters, the shire residents famed for Nimbyism. If the Chipping Norton village fete wasn't already difficult enough for David Cameron after threatening to sell off the forests and falling out with all the local News International executives, this bill will surely see him buried under thrown pies.

Yet it is perfectly in line with Conservative governments of the past. Over the years, it has been Labour that has moved to protect the countryside, if not, as in the case of foxhunting, rural pursuits. Clement Attlee's government of 1945 introduced the Town and Country Planning Act which brought an end to urban sprawl and then they introduced national parks. By contrast, it was the Tory/Liberal national government which suburbanised much of Britain with a building programme in the 1930s that at its height saw 350,000 houses go up in one year. And it was Tory policies in the 1980s that saw a boom in out-of-town development, shopping malls, business parks and the like.

Still, the beating the coalition is taking is unfair on some levels. Planning laws are clearly hindering large infrastructure projects. Britain needs clean energy, which is almost impossible to achieve without wind farms, hated though they are. We must have a good railway network and that means a proper consideration of the merits of High Speed Two. Sometimes, the nation's quality of life has to come before the interests of the few.

The government is also correct to say the current system is too complex; 1,300 pages of planning law are being used (understandably) by anyone who thinks a development project would wreck their view and damage the value of their house. As a result, rural communities are growing stale, strangled by prices that allow entry only to those who earn in the cities. Rural homelessness is a major problem and absenteeism is killing local commerce. It is correct that a system be set up that allows a broader view of development.

Mr Clark wants to stress to us that these planning changes work in conjunction with the coalition's localism bill, introduced late last year. The idea, he says, is to devolve responsibility and give local officials a free hand to act. But here is where he falters. If those officials are instructed that "the default answer to the development proposal is 'yes'", then they lose the control that the coalition is supposed to be offering.

It is also disingenuous because blanket deregulation is unnecessary. The previous government may have had a shabby record of building houses, but it can boast of forcing developers on to brownfield sites; 80% of newbuild now happens on previously developed land. That has made towns and cities feel more packed, and has seen gardens disappear, but that's the price to be paid if we are to avoid turning the countryside into a vast suburbia. Meanwhile, property developers are estimated to be sitting on land with planning permission for around 300,000 houses. Finding ways to get them building would be better than opening up greenfield sites.

Instead of slipping this frighteningly cavalier document out, the government should give a strong indication of what sort of development it is looking for. It is all very well asking authorities to come up with "local plans" which take account of housing needs, design and population mix, but national guidance would help those local authorities. It could also take account of the many voices clamouring to be heard in this debate. Everyone from the National Trust to homeless charities could help build a plan those authorities could work with. That is a long way from allowing developers freedom to seek nothing but profit.

The countryside comes into its own at this time of year, as autumn plays itself out. Such extraordinary beauty is the result of long and careful tending, of planning, not the wilder reaches of nature. And certainly not the wilder reaches of a developer's nature.