The government should rethink the Planning Bill
This post is by Dame Fiona Reynolds, master of Emmanuel College, former director-general of the National Trust, vice president of CPRE, the Countryside Charity, and trustee of Green Alliance. She writes here in a personal capacity.
Last summer the government consulted on what it described as radical reform of the land use planning system. In intemperate language, it blamed planning for much that is wrong in our society: for failing to deliver new housing (even though one million houses with planning permission are not being built); for failing to allow businesses to grow; for failing to deliver infrastructure; and for failing to involve people in decisions. It promised “a whole new planning system for England”.
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Having engaged with successive planning reforms during my time as chief executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), there is something comfortingly familiar about the 
The prime minister 
In his memoirs, Tony Blair is scathing about environmental NGOs: “Because their entire raison d’etre is to get policy changed, they can hardly say yes, we’ve done it, putting themselves out of business…. Balance is not in their vocabulary. It’s all ‘outrage’, ‘betrayal’, ‘crisis’.” Ed Balls 
This post is by Viviane Gravey and Andy Jordan of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. They recently co-led an expert 