Is planning set to make a return to the front pages?

In September and October 2011, when the furore over the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was at its peak, planning found itself in the unusual position of featuring regularly and prominently in national headlines. The Telegraph’s “Hands off our Land” campaign, in particular, ensured that an unprecedented number of front page column inches were devoted to planning. At the time, I blogged about how the newspaper appeared to be going to extraordinary lengths to keep the NPPF on its front page.

So far, in terms of the amount of national media coverage devoted to planning, 2012 has felt like something of a return to normality. But is that about to change? The last fortnight has seen the publication of a clutch of NPPF-related studies, some of which have received national media coverage. And the publication of the government’s response to the communities and local government select committee’s report into the NPPF, followed by the final version of the framework before the end of March 2012, are likely to prove to be flashpoints in the not too distant future.

I’ve used data from internet search engine Google to produce the graph below, which shows how often people have entered the term “NPPF” into the Google search engine over the past year (a figure of 100 on the graph denotes the highest volume of searches, 0 the lowest). There is obviously no authoritative way of measuring the size of a furore, or how long it lasts, but the findings from Google give us a clue as to the scale of public interest in the framework. It’s reasonably safe to assume that more newspaper headlines will spark more Google searches.

The graph, produced using figures from Google Insights for Search, shows a ripple of interest in the NPPF in May 2011, when a government-commissioned advisory group published a suggested draft of the NPPF.

According to Google’s figures, interest in the NPPF began to increase sharply in July 2011 when the government published the draft version of the document. Interest continued to rise through September and peaked in early October. After party conference season, the number of people entering the term “NPPF” into Google began to fall, reaching its lowest point at the turn of the year.

Since then, numbers of people searching for NPPF on Google has started to increase again. It’s impossible to give a definitive reason for this, but in the last few weeks there have been two NPPF-related studies published – one by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and one commissioned by the CPRE along with the National Trust and RSPB. Various interest groups continue to lobby for changes to the document (for example, Spear’s – a lifestyle magazine for the super-rich – said last week that a reform of the NPPF in relation to heritage protection is “both urgent and overwhelming”). And communities charity Civic Voice has launched a “final push” to “campaign for fair planning”. It is encouraging local civic society members to use its website to write to their local newspapers to warn that the reforms could “change the face of our local area forever”.

At present, the volume of Google searches for “NPPF” in early 2012 has yet to reach the heights of October 2011. But with the publication of the final version of the document just weeks away, don’t bet against another media storm. Time to batten down the hatches!

jamie.carpenter@haymarket.com. Follow Jamie on Twitter at @J_J_Carpenter