It’s difficult to know where to start with “build build build” – a mantra facile enough to be worthy of Trump. The next raft of permitted development rights (PDR) is being enshrined in law even as you read this. Forced through at lightning speed – either in an effort to impress us, or in the hope that we barely notice. Both, perhaps, depending on which side of the fence you sit.

I’m not sure which will be worst: the top boxes soon to be perched on the roofs of “detached blocks of flats”; the new housing that will systematically replace the office blocks that haven’t already been converted; the crude extra storeys on existing homes; or the net curtains and wheelie bins that will appear at random along our high streets as shops are converted to housing with little or no control over where or how.

Whatever you feel about PDR, it is inexcusable that the government has failed to publish the independent, publicly funded report on the outcomes of the office-to-residential conversions that have taken place in the seven years since the policy was introduced.

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