Why are planning issues so badly reported in the media?

A blog! An actual blog! It has been a while because my writing is mostly now preparatory material for podcast episodes, but eminent planning lawyer Simon Ricketts kindly invited me to contribute to a Clubhouse session this week and having jotted down some thoughts for that I thought that I may as well leverage the content on another digital platform…

Simon’s theme this week was both deliberately provocative, ‘Why are planning issues so badly reported in the media?’, and well-timed, given coverage in The Times this week of “new planning targets forcing councils to build on greenbelt sites”.

Planning is, for all we might hope it to be more publicly-accessible, a technocratic, quasi-judicial process and we have no more right to expect journalists to be instant experts in it than doctors have when reading articles about Covid or immigration lawyers have when reading articles about deportations and so on.

It can be striking though, and sometimes disappointing, to see an inconsistency of narrative over time and a patent lack of balance in individual pieces.

In so far as the former is concerned, and taking The Times this week as an example of the national press, a quick Google revealed that Simon Nixon wrote in a 2019 column about the ‘housing crisis being solved by radical reform, not more money’. A leading article in March 2020 said that ‘the Government needs a vision of where the growth of the future will come from and the political courage to deliver the reforms that will attract the necessary investment and jobs. And the first test of that courage is planning reform’. To my unsophisticated mind it is though the high-minded editorship are content to look down from the moral high ground on individual reporters that are free to intermittently crank up the outrage machine.

By way of an example from the local press, the Express & Star covered the Black Country Urban Capacity Review in December 2019 and it’s conclusion that there are not enough urban sites in the region to address a housing shortage. Whenever though Andy Street or any other local politician issue a press release about ‘unnecessary’ green field development it is often published verbatim and without any reference to the fact that green field development is patently necessary.

That is probably easier to accept given the hollowing out of local press (this piece about the constraints that journalists in the local press have to work under is fascinating), but, again to my unsophisticated mind, I do not think it unreasonable to expect the national media to subject press releases from the CPRE, for example, to a bit more scrutiny.

Perhaps this has always been the case, but if we do not like it then it is beholden upon us to do something about it. What might that something be though? Three thoughts came to my mind.

Firstly, the CPRE, for example, is a campaigning organisation (the clue is in it’s name). If it is not in the media regularly then somebody there is not doing their job properly. Can we point to any development industry or professional planning bodies either nationally, regionally or locally, that are as adept at manipulating, sorry, managing, the media to it’s aims? Who would a journalist reading a CPRE press release go to test it credentials or validity? And why has the CPRE got it's press release out first?

Secondly, the outrage machine loves a vacuum. The one thing that the planning system will not be after whatever reform might be coming is a ‘developers charter’, but somehow that narrative has been allowed to take hold. How has that been allowed to happen? Who’s hand at MHCLG is on the tiller? Locally, whilst it is perhaps a leap of faith to expect Andy Street or the leaders of the Black Country Authorities, for example, to talk about greenfield development, why can’t senior officers? That is where those councils’ own evidence base is pointing. Local plans or controversial applications are public debates that end up being brought to a close by Inspectors in, to all intents and purposes, private. Would it not be better for Heads of Planning to take a more prominent role and chair those local debates in public? I suspect that anybody like me who spends too much time on Twitter could name more Heads of Planning in major international cities than we can the Heads of Planning in UK cities.

Thirdly, what can we do to shift the agenda. The best thing that I have read about Green Belt in the papers of late was eminent planning barrister Zack Simon’s piece in the FT. If we are not content to rely on journalists providing balance then what can we do as professionals to foster a better quality public debate? What can we do to create a climate in which outrage is provoked by petty-minded, short-termist, hypocrisy and not the tabling of eminently sensible planning applications or eminently sensible improvements to what we all know to be, and the public need to see is, an important area of public policy.