The Planning & Environment Committee meeting at Handforth Parish Council in Cheshire that made it on to national news last week was entertaining but, along with the meeting of Shaftesbury Town Council in Dorset that made the news for similar reasons last year, pulled back a curtain on the hyper-local politics that inform planning decisions in all corners of our country.

Planning as an expression of democratic politics has its problems. I’m no advocate for executive autocracy and I know the good folk of the Handforth Parish Council committee are not involved in making big decisions affecting tens of thousands of people but it is not unusual, in my experience, for a significant planning decision to be made by a group of elected officials at a planning authority who do not represent the broadest demographic of their constituency.

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