It is the end of June 2020. Boris Johnson’s government is riding high in the polls, buoyed by a kind of unifying blitz spirit generated under the first national lockdown and only starting to fray at the edges following his adviser Dominic Cummings’s ill-advised lockdown trip to Barnard Castle. Johnson makes a set-piece speech, branded “build back better”, where he promises “the most radical reforms of our planning system since the end of the Second World War” – necessary reforms, he says, to unleash a wave of post-covid economic growth.

It is little over a month later, with parliament in recess, and Johnson’s then housing secretary Robert Jenrick brings forward the white paper Planning for the Future, designed to deliver on this. Johnson’s foreword to the document promises a “levelling [of] the foundations […] building, from the ground up, a whole new planning system for England”.

Now, seemingly having been announced in haste as a post-covid stimulus measure, the reforms appear to have been repented at leisure in the months since. Complaints were dismissed as grumbling from the usual shire Tory suspects until the electoral disaster of the Chesham and Amersham by-election: pundits hung the Tory defeat squarely on the shoulders of the unpopularity of the proposed planning changes.

…