Tories' long and winding road to sensible planning | Simon Jenkins

At last the government has reined in the cowboy lobbyists and allowed urban renewal to trump rural development

The final redraft of last year's cowboy raid by lobbyists on English town and country planning suggests that the Tories have narrowly rescued themselves from becoming not so much the nasty party as the ugly one.

What last summer read like a builders' manifesto has been replaced with proper planning guidance. The new document is a vast relief. It restores the concept, central to...