Ossett has no public swimming pool. Jon Gardiner has one, at 67 Station Road, and for five months he opened it to the town. Schools came. Children's parties came. Disability groups came. Up to 1,000 swimmers a month, in a place with nowhere else to swim. Wakefield Council refused him permission and served an enforcement notice, on noise and traffic grounds. 170 people had written in support of the application. 60 objected. He appealed, an inspector came out in February, the appeal was dismissed in March and the notice upheld. He has since taken his own business apart trying to satisfy them. Bookings capped at eight people. Gaps built into the schedule so no two groups arrive or leave together. Opening hours cut back. The music switched off altogether. He has submitted the whole diminished thing as a fresh application and is waiting to hear whether eight people at a time in a bungalow in West Yorkshire can be permitted to swim. The council had a town without a pool on one side of the scale: a thousand swims a month, schoolchildren learning not to drown, disabled people with somewhere warm to go. On the other side, sixty residents who did not care for the traffic. The sixty won, and they won without ever being required to demonstrate that any concrete harm had occurred, because our planning system does not ask that of them. It asks the man with the pool to prove a negative, and it goes on asking until he gives up. That is the whole machine in a miniature, and it is why nothing gets done in this country. The burden always falls on the person creating something and never on the person blocking it; the authority, meanwhile, always stays with the blocker. Delay costs the objector nothing and costs the builder everything. A system arranged that way produces exactly what Britain has: a scrapyard of ideas not allowed to come to fruition, not because they were no good, but because of the peevishness of regulators and, in this case I suspect, by local authorities aggrieved that motivated constituents can do things better than they can. Progress inverts the burden. Under our planning reform the default is yes, and an objection has to establish real, evidenced harm rather than the remotest of anxious feeling about traffic. Applicants should not be required to prove their innocence to a committee. The committee must be required to prove the damage. Gardiner has asked nobody for a penny. He built a service, filled his pool, insured his facilities, staffed em, and opened them to his neighbours, and his reward has been two years of hearings and a business cut down to eight people at a time. It's the story of the last fifty years of our history. Can you imagine what this country would look like if all of that kind initiative were unbound? I can.