As the regular reader of this magazine may recall (and I thank the regular reader for her support!), I sometimes find that a train of thought is sparked by one of those curious or unfortunate juxtapositions of stories that have featured in our news.

This time, it came in the shape of the launch by the government of its new draft National Planning Policy Framework. A long-awaited document, it sets out how the government sees ‘sustainable development’ as being at the heart of planning decisions and in theory guides councils and communities on the framework within which local and neighbourhood plans are to be produced.

As with anything on planning, the document successfully manages to please nobody. It was criticised very publicly by the National Trust (NT) and other conservation and environment bodies and this of course led to a public row with the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), which in typically robust manner responded by saying the criticism was “plain wrong”.

This spat however, masks the true target of the NT’s criticism. It said that it had “grave concerns” about proposals that could lead to “unchecked and damaging development in the undesignated countryside on a scale not seen since the 1930s”. The key word here is undesignated, as DCLG went on the offensive saying the NT had it wrong and that protection for greenbelt, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty would remain solid. As well it should! But the critique from the NT is far more serious and was ignored by the bombastic department’s press statement. The trust’s concern is about planning reforms that may lead to haphazard and potentially corrosive developments on a consistent scale outside protected and designated areas. This is a potential result of a revised system whereby planning finds more regularly in favour of development as economic interests are deemed to be the overriding priority.

The NT’s critique wasn’t an expression of concern about protection of designated areas and should be taken seriously. It appears to have been deliberately avoided by DCLG in an attempt to divert attention from the serious issue.

But this is where the positioning of the story comes into play. Arriving as it did on the same day that the government’s economic figures for the April-June 2011 quarter showed a 0.2 per cent growth rate – negligible by any statistical standards – the planning concerns were drowned out by moaning about the flatlining of the economy and the usual obsession with growth generation. In this climate, it will always be hard to get a decent airing for serious thoughtful concerns about planning. Of course, the greener readers will not need reminding of the stupidity of the way we measure and are obsessed by conventional economic growth aspirations and will point to measurement indices that give better explanations of how a steady-state sustainable economy might be accounted for. Visions for a greener economy abound and none of them are built on the status quo approach to economic growth and so-called sustainable development.

On this day though, I fear that the tin ear of government will leave the National Trust and others to regroup and find a space to revisit these concerns afresh. It’s the driest of subjects but it has such an impact on our lives – we should watch developments very closely indeed!

By the way, you may be wondering if the National Planning Policy Framework had much to say about waste management infrastructure. It had very little of course, as usual. But we must leave that grim and complex tale for another day.