Land policy in England is delivered through laws and regulations, statutory instruments, sectoral, environmental, and planning policies at national and local levels. The use of land is controlled and implemented by an increasingly complex and bureaucratic adaptive planning system. Successive governments in the past 40 years have sought to simplify the system. The case study is based on The Wirral, a peninsular on the edge of Liverpool’s conurbation. Housing development is proposed across seven un-related, protected green field sites. The case illustrates several fundamental misunderstandings, including that of national and local policy. These aim to prevent urban sprawl and protect green land, where locally there is sufficient brownfield land to meet demand for new housing. The applicant ignores the validity of public involvement in decision-making, as well as the procedures for submission of planning applications. Following rejection of the housing sites based on long-standing national and emerging local policy, an appeal is summarily dismissed by a government inspector. Numerous questions about how and where housing should be provided are raised, but this story also seeks to demonstrate that the planning system does not need full-scale reform to ensure it is working well.