The relevant minister, Michael Gove, now has to reconsider his decision, given that five of his six reasons for refusal have now been rejected by a High Court judge. He would have been forced to reconsider if only one of the six had been rejected, so five out of six is something of an embarrassment. We wait to see what happens next.

Predictable news on the South Bank, where the government upheld a planning inspector’s decision that a major development by Mitsubishi, designed by Make Architects, should be approved. Now opponents are seeking funding support in order to launch a legal challenge against the decision. Watch this space – this was a vey carefully written inspector’s report which Mr Gove could not reject, even though he does not like the proposal.

Our mercurial mayor, Sadiq Khan, supported both of these developments so cannot be accused of being a stereotypical left-wing opponent of development. Moreover, recent nasty attacks accusing him of being controlled by Islamists, clearly not the case, have generated a certain amount of sympathy for him, even among political opponents.

The sympathy starts to run out in respect of things he himself should be instigating or generating but has failed to. This is most obvious in respect of the ongoing scandal of the closed Hammersmith road bridge (closed to ordinary motorists, that is), where there is no extant plan to do anything about it.

But it has also applied to housing, where every announcement he makes has to be read twice in order to understand the real implications, which are that he is doing very little to help. These often takes the form of statistical wizardry where housing planning applications are elided with construction starts, then elided with completions and occupation. Another trick is to cite large number of new homes on projects where substantial demolition is involved: the ‘net additional homes’ statistic is rarely supplied.

You can understand why, since the mayor has land, planning powers and funding from government to produce those net additional dwellings – but he doesn’t do anything directly, instead making announcements about what he hopes other people will do.

On the day of writing this column, Mayor Khan announced he was going to ‘build 40,000 council homes’, part of his manifesto for re-election as mayor, which looks like a formality given a lacklustre Conservative candidate and the general state of that political party. Examine the 40,000 figure and it looks like peanuts. For one thing it will take until 2030 to deliver, so a pitiful 8,000 dwellings per year. By the way, these won’t be Greater London Authority homes, but homes actually procured by local authorities, whose track record in these matters is, to put it mildly, patchy.

In May last year, City Hall said London was in the process of ‘delivering the highest number of council homes since the 1970s’, with 23,000 council units started since 2018 – again a confusing number which ignores the lack of completions earlier this century, and amounts to a start (not completion) rate of under 4,000 a year.

To understand how pitiful this is, you have to understand what is happening to London’s population: it is rising at an extraordinary rate, with more than two million residents added in the past 30 years while housing completions have been at a historic low. With another million residents (net) by the end of this decade, triumphalism about the mayor’s proposals, let alone his achievements, looks highly inappropriate.

A near-laughable set of recommendations from the Greater London Authority to the mayor, about his next spatial plan, rambles on about gender-diverse spaces, inclusive design, the architectural design of social housing and the importance of women. There is no mention of the chronic undersupply of housing or how a planning policy might address this. Pathetic. And check out the images of the committee and advisers ‘at work’. About as an unrepresentative group of Londoners as you are every likely to see.

Meanwhile the lust for further regulation, gumming up an increasingly sclerotic planning process, is doing nothing to encourage the private housebuilding sector, including small and medium-size enterprises. We have had alarms, some exaggerated some not, about a shortage of qualified building control officers as a results of new registration requirements prompted by the Grenfell Tower fire disaster; and we now wait to see the effects of new biodiversity increase requirements (net) on production and timely planning.

Since there are not enough experienced ecologists to conduct the necessary analysis work on applications, expect a lot of cut-and-paste applications and reviews – a boon to the myriad people and groups who love nothing more than trying to block housing development anywhere near them, sometimes with the support of local authorities.

An example from a location an hour outside London: a very civilised proposal in a heritage setting of 117 net additional homes, included development on three small sites recommended by the local authority as suitable for development. The proposal was supported by the authority’s own urban design official. Bizarrely, the authority then brought in an outside urban design consultant who gave a different opinion about the merits of the scheme (ie condemned it), and criticised use of one of the sites recommended for homes by the planning case officer. Result: a planning inquiry after the architect and good clients (46% affordable homes in the project) had worked on the proposal for four years.

This gives the planning system a bad name – and a housing delivery blockage replicated in many different guises, across the country. No wonder the UK has a housing shortage.