We are a nation beset by growing social inequality and by intensifying environmental crisis, but unlike many other advanced economies we seem to have forgotten how to think about and plan for our collective future. This is a striking position for the country that pioneered comprehensive planning, and has centuries of utopian thinking to build on. Britain in general, but England in particular, seems singularly incapable of planning itself to deliver the economic, social and environmental progress it deserves. The last five years have seen the process of deregulation intensify despite the clear evidence of our need to plan effectively for more housing and to deal with the kinds of flooding chaos driven by climate change.

As the authors of Rebuilding Britain make clear, we live in a small island and we have to find a fair and efficient way of distributing growth. Talk of a north–south divide is over-simplistic; low-wage Cornwall, after all, bears many of the physical and social post-industrial scars associated with the north; ditto east Kent and pockets in the south east. But we have to recognise that a nation obsessed with lavishing so much on its capital – the lion's share of transport funding, new powers, powerful mayor and a regional authority – is failing to release the potential of all its parts. High growth areas also show the signs not just of environmental and infrastructure stress but the uneasy relationship of super-rich and the abject poor whose life chances are now dangerously divergent.

Eight years’ ago the report of a cross-party commission I chaired (serviced by the Town and Country Planning Association) produced a lengthy report to address the country's economic and spatial challenges. We called it Connecting England. Why? Because England was (and is) anything but connected. In the preface, I wrote that the ‘country wasn't working to its full potential because it lacked a strategy to guide key infrastructure projects and national programmes…’. Nothing has happened in the intervening years to address our woeful lack of foresight. In fact the abolition of the strategic English planning system has simply made things worse.

Rebuilding Britain is a challenging book not because it highlights problems we all know are real, but because it dares us to take responsibility for doing something about them.