By Bridget Rosewell.

Planning Curses shows how despite efforts to streamline planning, vital projects are not going ahead because of over-elaborate and unrealistic economic predictions.

Planners waste too much time looking for a “perfect” solution while using deeply-flawed tools to make predictions. According to the original business plan, London Underground’s Victoria Line should still not be full while the Jubilee Line extension failed to pass any conventional tests but has been a stunning success.

Planning has become captured by experts and vested interests who use language that only bureaucrats understand and excludes everybody else.