Kudos to @BBCr4today for asking me to discuss one of the more interesting aspects of the Desmond saga - why planning consents for a London borough are ending up on a Secretary of State's desk in the first place (1/?)

The answer ties in to all the reports about the govt's planned planning reforms. It's that the British planning system is (compared to other countries) both unpredictable and adversarial.

Elsewhere, the arguments are generally about what you can build, not exactly where. In Britain, everything is about getting permission for specific plots of land, but there's a lot more room for manoeuvre on what exactly you build

The result is often wrangling between developers and councils, arguments over s106, CIL, affordable housing, and essentially a long tug of war which is won by whoever has the best lawyers/advisers

The direction of travel (eg via local plans) has been towards a more zonal system, in which you designate an area where you want development, specify far more the type of development you want (ie high quality, in keeping with the local area, infrastructure alongside)...

...as a result of which getting approval to build a specific property in that area in that style becomes much more of an automatic process. Hopefully this all also speeds up planning and reduces/eliminates hope value.

(Alongside this there are other ideas such as using development corporations to build new towns etc, which we haven't done properly for AGES)

The idea is that you keep the best bits of current planning system, including making sure communities are happy, but get more and better-quality homes built faster. Though as ever with planning/housing, the pushback from vested interests will be intense.

Lots of good people have done lots of good work on this (eg our own head of policy, Alex Morton). Encouraging that it could be moving forward though will be rows aplenty ahead...