Coronavirus could pave the way to change for planning laws – but is Cummings’ plan too radical?

The pandemic could give us the first real opportunity to change our built environment for over 70 years. But in a post-coronavirus world, the government’s plan could be divisive, writes Oliver Bennett

The special adviser arriving for a cabinet meeting on 21 July, the first since mid-March due to the pandemic (Reuters)

The infamous government adviser Dominic Cummings was obviously going to turn his disdainful eye to planning. He was the power behind Michael Gove’s war on “the Blob” – the pejorative name for the educational establishment – and he shattered the Brexit barrier, as well as the ceiling at Leave HQ, to celebrate that victory. He has it in for cushy Civil Service seat-warmers and the resignation of Sir Mark Sedwill a few weeks ago, attributed to Cummings’ machinations, spoke of his intention to continue his long march through the institutions.

Now Cummings is said to be turning his attention to the built environment, and true to his reputation as the Savonarola of complacent state inefficiency, there’s set to be a bonfire of the planning regulations. Cummings will go through the current planning system like a dose of salts through a drain, getting rid of blockages and downing naysayers like ninepins. Local authority functionaries will quake as they see their power disappear. Last week’s “planning overhaul” from Boris Johnson was, no doubt, the fruition of plentiful meetings, augmenting Johnson’s earlier rallying cry of “Build, Build, Build” – a programme that will bring in radical reforms to our planning system to coincide with a new £5bn recovery plan for the property market and get rid of a system that has lasted since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. It will set the stage for “the most radical reforms of our planning system since the end of the Second World War”.

Part of the Cummings-Johnson objective was to supplant the local authority-based planning system with a “zonal” one, perhaps modelled on those in the US and France. Mostly it is set to steer a new frictionless path by way of data science, statistics, prediction and AI – motivated by a deeply-held detestation of logjam bureaucracy, local objectors and the “closed and impregnable” Civil Service who just serve to hold everything up. Plus, Cummings has got personal beef with the ancestral gaff in the north.