Making space on a crowded island

Immigration seems to be a topic we avoid for fear of being branded racist. I take the view that all are welcome here as long as they benefit the country.
This is different to asylum seekers who come here for their own safety. Admittedly it was us who were making the places dangerous as in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq so we had a moral duty to invite them here, especially if we are raining bombs on their neighbourhood from thousands of feet up.
Sorry just didn't seem to cut it somehow.
The problem we have is that Britain is a cramped little island and so have little room to expand and so as the population grows, the infrastructure doesn't keep up.
It is obvious that more people means we require more schools, hospitals, prisons and houses. But where to build them? Slowly we are creeping into land previously designated as green belt and ring fenced as places not to be built on. They are now redefining large swathes of it brown belt and calling in the builders.
One of the housing solutions is to renovate buildings into homes, with any unused office block or pub rubbed down, sold off and turned into flats.
There are some certain buildings that we never see converted although they hardly get any use at all.
Controversially, these places are churches and probably have some sort of legal protection dating back to Oliver Cromwell that renders them safe but i say we are surrounded by the damned things, let's rip some down and build on the plot.
Apart from on Sunday mornings when three men and a dog wander by, these places are largely empty and each city has many of these buildings of various size within a shake of a collection tin of each other.
Not only must they cost the local authorities a fortune to run and maintain, they are only used by a tiny percentage of the population who would only suffer the indignation of an extra 10 minute walk to the next nearest church.
They are a relic of a by-gone age, take up more than their fair share of land and mostly stand empty so tear up that ancient law (if there is such a thing) and let's have less Bishops and more builders.