The irresistible pressure of economic fundamentals: radical planning reform moving into the mainstream – but still need to get the details right

[Posted by Prof Paul Cheshire] It was excellent to see concern and rational debate about the English housing crisis and its causes getting coverage in the mainstream press over the weekend. There was an ‘exclusive’ in the Sunday Express on 6th July, linking concerns about housing supply and the shortage of land produced by two generations of ‘urban containment’ with the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England’s warning that the housing market now posed the greatest single threat to economic recovery. Much of the piece was based on a phone conversation I had with the Whitehall correspondent, Marco Giannangeli. No concerns about his representation of my basic message. But there were some issues with the details! Maybe it is the academic’s inner pedant; or the form of Chinese whispers which a phone conversation to a reporter, however skilled, who then writes his story which is then edited and subedited by people who have not heard the original conversation and finally cut to fit the space available given daily news pressures. Maybe the problem was that the season is not yet silly enough so there is still an awful lot of serious stuff happening in the world squeezing out other subjects