Wayland Hilton Young, 2nd Baron Kennet (2 August 1923 – 7 May 2009) was a British writer and politician, notably concerned with planning and conservation.

In between and after, Young was a journalist – Observer correspondent in Rome and North Africa, and weekly columnist on The Guardian ("Sitting on a Column"), and theatre critic for Tribune.

[1] He served as Parliamentary Secretary (Junior Minister) in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (under Richard Crossman, then later Anthony Greenwood) where he worked, among much else, on planning and conservation, and on devising the soon-to-be-set up Department of the Environment (Secretary of State, Tony Crosland) He was responsible for setting up the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

After the fall of the [first] Wilson Government in 1970, he was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and became Chairman of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, of the Advisory Committee on Pollution of the Sea (ACOPS), and various other organisations.

[4] In 2005, he sought to return to the House in the by-election among Liberal Democrat hereditary peers caused by the death of Earl Russell; he was unsuccessful, receiving no votes.

[4] Until late in life he remained chairman of the Stonehenge Alliance,[5] and an active member of the Avebury Society[6] and Action for the River Kennet (ARK).

[10] The family homes were in Bayswater and in Wiltshire, where in 1908 Young's father had bought The Lacket,[11] an 18th-century thatched cottage on the edge of the village of Lockeridge, near Marlborough.