Decoding the planners
CRACKING the human genetic code is kindergarten stuff compared to cracking this country's planning regime, as the Wellcome Trust, the world's largest medical research charity, has had every chance to find out. At Hinxton in Cambridgeshire it funds the Sanger Centre, which has done much of the work so fulsomely praised this week by the Prime Minister. Next door it owns a patch of land on which it wants to develop a biotech- nology park, so that companies setting up shop there could tie their work in with the Centre's. In time, this would help the Trust to recover some of the £80 million it has spent on the human genome project, and to put it back into the next round of research. First, though, it would have to get planning permission, but its application has been in the toils of the planning process since before the Prime Minister took office and negotia- tions are still going on. The planners have codes of their own.
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