egulars at the Winston Churchill pub showed the true value of people power when plans to demolish it to make way for a car park were withdrawn last week.

Bosses at a neighbouring electrical company in Wakefield Road, Bradford, had intended to buy it and had been granted planning permission to pull it down.

It was an all-too-rare victory for the power of local protest after Council planners had insisted that their “hands were tied” by planning rules and regulations.

Planners are often mistrusted by the public or disparaged by impatient developers.

Whatever they do, they will be criticised for either acting against local wishes or being too slow and bureaucratic.

They are rarely praised for getting it right and often pilloried for every unpopular decision no matter how pragmatic, realistic or legally necessary it was.

Neither do people tend to differentiate between strategic planning and planning decisions based on the force of law.

Few, nowadays, would argue that the strategic plan to clear Bradford’s streets of its hotch-potch of characterful buildings to make way for the original Broadway shopping centre (which eventually shared the same fate) was a wise one.

Most Bradfordians bemoan the loss of gems such as the Swan Arcade and Kirkgate Market.

The planners didn’t have to take that decision: it was the result of a strategic Council policy to regenerate Bradford.

Some argue today that clearing the site to make way for a new Broadway falls into the same category – and they’d be right: it was a strategic decision but it’s easy to forget the dreadful rundown ’Sixties mess that existed at the time. Would it really have been better to leave it standing – and rotting?

The opposite applies to the Odeon site. Council planners took a pragmatic decision based on all the available expert advice which said that the building would cost more to make safe and refurbish than anyone was willing to pay – and on the fact that it had been on the open market twice and no private developer wanted it.

Now it stands as a dishevelled symbol of the planners’ fear of public disapproval. The reason it hasn’t been knocked down already has less to do with public protest and more to do with the fact that Bradford doesn’t want to show the world another empty building site to illustrate how tough it is to kickstart regeneration here.

Once again, the planners are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

When Roger Owen retired as a director of Morrisons, the man who had guided the expansion of the Bradford-based supermarket for 22 years publicly blamed planning and regeneration chiefs for Bradford’s stunted regeneration.

He said: “The hole in the ground where the retail mall should be is not a good advert for Bradford and didn’t help us to persuade good people to move north after we bought Safeway.

“My personal view is that Bradford has shot itself in the foot by going for glitzy schemes which have not been achievable… The powers-that-be should go for attainable schemes and build from there.”

Bradford has an abundance of unwanted buy-to-let one-bed flats. This month, Jez Lester, chief executive for asset management for the Incommunities housing association, told the T&A that single-bed flats were “obsolete to requirements”. Bradford people wanted family houses, he added.

The reality is that in many cases, as the law stands now, councillors’ hands really are tied. They have to have strong and genuine reasons to turn down an application and if it meets all the legal planning requirements they are likely to provoke an appeal to an inspector or a heavyweight legal challenge if they do so without them. And legal challenges, especially public inquries, can be very expensive.

Turning down a legitimate plan on purely emotional grounds fuelled by the strength of local protest might win a councillor kudos with voters in the short term but when the bill for a failed legal battle hits the Council Taxpayers pocket it’s a different matter entirely.

Bradford Council’s executive member for culture, planning and housing, Councillor the Reverend Paul Flowers, says planning laws should be reviewed and amended.

He said: “There needs to be a fundamental review. What concerns me is some of the things alluded to: people’s feelings about loved buildings and the arrant stupidity of some proposals that have to be put through.

“Planning ought to be about what local communities want and the needs of local communities. A one-size-fits-all policy decided by civil servants in Whitehall doesn’t work.

“Planners are tied by the law as it stands. Planners are not responsible for some of the things developers put up which they have to make a judgement on under the law as it stands.

“Subjective judgements would be subject to an appeal that very likely would be upheld by a planning inspector and cost tax payers many thousands of pounds.”

But the question remains whether we’d really be any better off if the rules weren’t there and planners were able to make their judgements based on which local protest group shouts the loudest and how many votes there might be in making one choice or another?

Or perhaps a centrally-imposed level playing field is better after all?