A quick point on planning reform (apart from 'it's a good thing and we really need to do it')... (1/?)
The planning reforms that are coming forward are actually built around giving local communities more say! The design codes and local plans, which are set locally, are meant to ensure that only nice stuff gets built and only in the areas you want it.
This obviously cuts against the need to actually build more homes, and the fact that these homes do actually need to be in the areas where there is greatest shortage, ie London and South-East.
(There is a certain type of Tory MP whose answer to 'But where would you build instead?' is 'Brownfield sites in the North', which is like prioritising people with ingrowing toenails for treatment and then claiming the NHS has carried out more operations than ever before...)
But a big problem isn't that the reforms themselves are bad. It's that (as we veterans of the planning wars saw in the 2010s) there is such visceral distrust/dislike of development in certain areas that literally anything you do is condemned out of hand.
The central problem with @NickBoles's generally v g reforms, as I pointed out at the time, was that they assumed that if you increased the incentives/rewards for permitting building - ie more infrastructure for your community - people would be more inclined to say yes.
In fact, it turned out there were a load of BANANAs out there - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. You can address some of that (eg by delivering infrastructure first, the design codes etc) but that hard core of opposition is a v tough nut to crack.
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