If you know any planners, go out and hug them. At one time or another, most people will have reason to be grateful to their profession – for mitigating the expansion of a neighbour’s house, for example, or stopping an open-all-hours club opening in their street. We take it for granted that noxious industries can’t pop up in residential areas and that historic buildings and green spaces have some protection. This is due to planning, an area of government that is nonetheless showered with exceptional levels of derision.

Planners are faceless bureaucrats. Grey. So grey that they feel the need to brighten up their world and ours with colourful swaths of red tape. Or, worse, power-crazed social engineers who tell us how to live. They put brakes on prosperity, growth and freedom of choice. “There are countless jobs tied up in the filing cabinets of the planning regime,” said Michael Heseltine in 1979 and he thought the line so good and true that he said it again in 2012.

Actions follow these words. The planning system is endlessly being reformed, to speed it up, improve “delivery”, to save the £3bn a year that its delays are alleged to cost the economy. At the same time, planning departments are hit particularly hard by cuts in local government spending. Once councils have paid for their statutory and essential obligations, they find it easiest to squeeze apparently optional activities such as planning.

So it’s not surprising that the overwhelming majority of planners, according to a report to be published this week, believe that they cannot provide the benefits of planning due to the constraints and changes in their jobs. The report argues that reforms of the planning system often don’t work. It challenges the fantasy that, if only the bolts on the planning machine could be loosened enough, private enterprise would achieve the abundant flow of new housing that the country desires. It argues that there are economic costs to inadequate planning, such as uncertainty and the cost of poor decisions.

More than this, the report says that current demands for housing mean that planning should be strengthened, so that it can go beyond its usual role of reacting to developers’ and private citizens’ proposals. It can help remove obstacles to development such as contamination and poor infrastructure. It can assemble pieces of land to make a viable site. It can help remove risks and address the long-term quality of a place in ways that private companies often cannot.

The report cites examples of cohesive and successful developments, such as the seven-hectare Brindleyplace in Birmingham, where 12,000 jobs are now based, or the new community of Cranbrook in Devon, which may provide 7,500 homes. In these places, it says, planning played a crucial role in making private development possible.

The report is commissioned by the Royal Town Planning Institute, the professional body of planners, which will prompt the nation’s Heseltines to snort that they would say that, wouldn’t they? Certainly, it describes a world where planners are more influential and respected and better funded than they are now. Its plonky title, Delivering the Value of Planning, smells of those filing cabinets. Then again the Mandy Rice-Davies riposte could equally be applied to those housebuilders who argue for ever less planning. And rather than denigrate planners, it’s worth looking at the strengths of their arguments.

When making things that are expensive, immobile and long lived, such as construction projects, it’s common sense to consider the sum of actions in advance. When building a kitchen, you don’t just plonk down a cooker, sink and fridge and hope that they will end up in the right relationship to each other. You plan them. This gets more true as projects get larger and as space for building gets more scarce and precious, as is happening in Britain now.

Inadequate planning leads to places such as Ebbsfleet in north Kent, where huge investment has gone into its 19-minute rail connection to London, but it takes half an hour to walk from the station to the nearest house, and where some of the lakes formed by former quarry workings, potentially an asset, will be filled in. Good planning gives you places where people actually want to live, where value increases such that it can pay for more public benefits, where land is used well and homes are built at a reasonable speed. The choice is not that difficult.