I see that our secretary of state, Eric Pickles, is consulting on removing the duty to prepare a sustainable communities strategy (SCS).

I am sure many will rejoice at this removal of a ‘burden', seen as another bureaucratic requirement full of civil servant gobbledygook which residents don't know or care about, professing to deliver an unachievable local utopia, usually by way of a 2020 Vision – how droll – that no-one believed would actually happen.