New towns, same old story

As we know, one of officialdom’s favourite phrases is “lessons must be learned”, but how many more lessons do they need regarding plonking houses down in the middle of nowhere after the new towns of the sixties?

Of course, planning law incorporates a series of checks and balances, doesn’t it? Not any more! Flood plains? Don’t worry about those! Jobs? The usual fantastical thinking about money spent equals jobs created. And worst of all, open farmland “mistakenly” described as brownfield (well, it’s brown when it’s ploughed …)

People living near these proposed monster housing-only developments now have only six weeks to scramble together responses to deflect the efforts of £500,000 worth of top planning experts. How fair is that?

Thank goodness it doesn’t affect me personally, because, as we didn’t get an EU referendum, are in a war we didn’t want, and have a prime minister we didn’t vote for, I think we can safely predict that any reasonable objections will be steamrollered (or should that be JCB-ed?) out of the way …