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Showing posts from May, 2021

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 inconsiste