There’ll be no u-turn on planning

This government has developed rather a reputation for u-turning. But I would be extremely surprised if it did one over its planning reforms. When you talk to ministers and advisers one is struck by how up for this fight they are. They’re convinced that it is only by taking on these vested interests that they’ll get their message across to the public. And unlike on forests or the NHS, Number 10 and the Treasury are fully on board.

There are those who claim that these reforms are profoundly un-conservative. But, in fact, the opposite is the case as Charles Moore argues with his typical eloquence in today’s Telegraph. As Charles says, planning isn’t a conservative concept it is a socialist one. It is not planning that produces—or preserves—beauty.

If, as the National Trust seems to want, we treat the countryside as a museum we will kill off rural life. To quote Charles:

“The landscape we love, then, developed out of the normal human need to make a living. I cannot believe that its interest is best served by making future livelihoods almost impossible. The men who put up those rustic dwellings did so in the hope that their children would be able to live and work there. If they had been told, as they are today, that it was an anti-social act to build more houses to accommodate them, they would scarcely have understood what was being said. In southern England today, you have to have access to an amount more than 10 times the average wage to buy a country cottage which was once inhabited by some of the poorest people in the land. This means that such villages can offer no place for the next generation, which is another way of saying that we are killing the thing we say we love.”