"Communities should be given the greatest possible opportunity to have their say and the greatest possible degree of local control." So said the Conservative Party in its policy Green Paper, Open Source Planning, published before the last election. "Restoring democratic and local control" has always been at the heart of the party's proposals for planning reform and sits at the centre of the localist agenda.

Designing local plans "from the bottom up" to reflect the "aspirations of neighbourhoods" with "every single resident of the neighbourhood approached to take part" and allowing residents to sell their support for local schemes in return for financial compensation from developers were all firmly on the localist agenda, and apparently integral to the emergence of the Big Society that is itself so fundamental to over-arching government policy.

There was also a written ministerial statement by Greg Clark urging upon councils the importance of "driving and supporting the growth that this country needs" and encouraging them to "support enterprise and facilitate housing". These developments appeared to signal a change of direction best illustrated, perhaps, by Chancellor George Osborne when delivering his Budget: "Yes, local communities should have a greater say in planning, but from today we will expect all bodies involved in planning to prioritise growth and jobs. We will introduce a new presumption in favour of sustainable development, so that the default answer to development is 'yes'."

The picture, then, is one of compromise, and a somewhat unhappy one at that. As the CLG Committee noted in another of its reports, "the concept of 'localism' is far from new, nor is it particularly controversial." It is the manner of its application in the current economic climate that has caused so much anxiety in the industry. This, according to the Committee, "has thus far been marked by inconsistency and incoherence". One of the reasons for this is surely the fundamental tension between the need to secure development for the sake of economic growth and the desire to put planning powers in the hands of the communities expected to accommodate that development. (Source: Michael Gallimore, Harry Spurr)