Planning as it is practised in the town halls and across the desk of the Secretary of State for the Environment is a matter of using government powers to juggle the interests of one middle- class group against another, the existing owners of land vs would-be developers.Why on earth would a well-known fast-food chain employ a leading fixer to invite Tory ministers to a dinner (where beefburgers were not on the menu)? The answer: planning applications Planning is a kind of socialism. Astute contenders for the Tory leadership - step forward Mr Redwood - have already trimmed their free market principles to accommodate not just the planners but also the councils that employ them.For this is territory where consistent right-wing principle tends to give way to gut political instinct The Tory party is a party of planners. State planning - setting government targets for this industry or interfering with that money market - is ideologically unacceptable. But town planning - bureaucrats stopping someone building in the fields next to your four- bedroom house - that's only fair.To the naive, town planning is about the environment, green belts, about how the country should look. But many will, and they will want to live not just in the stressed areas of East Anglia, the near South-west and the South-east but also in plush Cheshire and the Vale of York. During the past few months the Town and Country Planning Association has been sponsoring regional meetings around the country of house-builders, financiers, councillors and professionals asking: where are the people going to go? Its final report is published today.Fitting the extra households into already crowded parts of England in the face of opposition from the very vocal and organised countryside lobby that favours keeping it green will breathe new life into planning. Between now and 2016 we have it, on the authority of the Environment Secretary, John Gummer, that the number of households in England will grow by over four million. Not all those will want or have the money to pay for separate dwellings.

Given how difficult it is to generate foreseeable social results by tinkering with existing legislative structures, I think the government is probably wise to be suspicious and reluctant about this "pension-splitting" burden it has had foisted upon it. There is one bit of the welfare state that after 17 years of Tory rule looks pretty much as it did in 1979, and, it's safe to predict, would actually expand were John Major to win the next election. It seems at least as likely to discourage earners from getting married in the first place, or keeping up substantial payments for future provision, as it does to keep them in miserable marriages.PS: Who else noticed the pleasing irony that another leading domestic news report yesterday was also about the wages and conditions for the provision of sexual services: the legislation of prostitution.. (I would only believe it from an organisation that made real opportunities and equal pay for women a central part of any pro-child platform.)Promoting family values has become a knee-jerk reflex in a vote- chasing political environment - the next stop on from the Law-and-Order sloganeering of recent elections It has little real political content. But nor do I believe that true concern and positive care for our children's well-being and happiness directs the thinking, planning and economic policies of any political party or right-wing pro-family pressure group in this country. Some government ministers have made it clear that their objection to pension splitting is about the loss of Income Tax revenue.It is so much cheaper (for the nation) to have children brought up at home by unpaid carers than by any other method The trouble is that fewer and fewer women are interested in taking it on, and no-one wants to call it a job.There is another possibility, and one sincerely and disinterestedly held: children - the collective responsibility of all citizens, for both moral and financial reasons - flourish best in small households where both biological parents are present, regardless of their interpersonal harmony and satisfaction.I personally do not believe it. Least of all should she expect such a government to prosecute and punish her employer if she is made redundant.