In her 2024 Mais lecture, the then shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, identified our planning system as the “single greatest obstacle to our economic success…a barrier to opportunity, a barrier to growth – and a barrier to homeownership too.” Planning reform, she said, had become “a byword for political timidity in the face of vested interests and a graveyard of economic ambition.” That could only mean an ambitious set of planning reforms once Labour gained power, and so it has proved