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The new government says its overarching objective is economic growth. All else depends upon it.

It also believes that one huge impediment to growth is the way the planning system has inhibited essential development

in the last few years. In recent days, it's announced plans to change all that. So is it true

that our planning system has held us back? If so, why and how? What policies would be needed

to properly reform it and what price might we pay for those policies?

Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out.

To take me through all those questions, Sir John Armit, who is chairman of the UK's National Infrastructure Commission,

Katrina Riddell, who's an independent planning consultant and commentator, who advises on

planning policy, and Anthony Breach, Associate Director at Centre for Cities.

Anthony Breach, can we start with you giving me a brief potted history of planning in the UK?

Right after the Second World War in 1947, we introduced the Town and Country Planning Act,

which takes some quite a different path to planning to what we'd done before, and indeed

what other countries around the world decide to do.

So we introduced a discretionary system in which councils have the power to decide whether or not development should be allowed to go ahead.

Do you mean that before that they didn't have that power?

The government would say this is what's going to happen in your area.

Pretty much. It's more that kind of landowners had development rights themselves.

So they could decide what to build on their own land.

That became much more discretionary after this new system was introduced.

Then in the 1950s, you have the introduction of the Greenbelt that restricts the growth of cities going outwards. Then in the 1960s and 70s you have the introduction of

various restrictions that make it difficult for cities to go upwards. And so we've had a kind of

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