Courtesy of Boris Johnson, we now know that Brexit will solve all our problems, including even the planning issues that dog the housing market. “There may be ways of simplifying planning procedures, post-Brexit, and abbreviating impact assessments without in any way compromising the environment,” Johnson wrote in his utopian vision statement last weekend.

If that sounded suspiciously like another example of having your cake and eating it, maybe it is not so very different from the aspiration of Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, whose big announcement last week about changes to housing and planning policy entailed some wishful thinking. As Tim Smith, of Berwin Leighton Paisner, observes: “Successive governments express the same two objectives when changing the planning system: to increase the level of public…