Regulate the big, set the small free

Town & Country Planning, December 2010

As I write, a report in the excellent Columbia Journalism Review is taking the business media to task in the USA for being so uncritical about the policy of what they used to call ‘smokestack hunting’ – which meant, then and now, providing tax breaks and public subsidies to attract corporate and factories.

The particular complaint is about an article in the Wall Street Journal praising Utah for its ‘business-friendly’ policies.

These amount to a payment – one might almost call it a legal bribe – to Adobe, creator of the ubiquitous PDF format, of $40 million to set up in the state. As they point out, this is about $40,000 of public money per job and Adobe is not short of a dime or two. They seem likely to have profits of about $750 million this year.

With this kind of scheme around, on both sides of the Atlantic, you can begin to see why you get budget deficits.

The Utah scheme is on a scale beyond any similar phenomenon in the UK, but we still see the same kind of idea happening here, whether it is simple planning permission, privileges or subsidies for Tesco or the huge European payments for companies developing biotech, nanotech or nuclear energy.

So when the Sunday Telegraph tells me that the long-awaited Localism Bill is going to include a provision for neighbourhoods to deregulate household planning decisions entirely – if the local neighbourhood decides to – it is through this lens that I see it.

Now, the Localism Bill has been delayed so many times that it begins to remind me of Waiting for Godot. When we finally read it, there will be endless scope for arguing about the details of this proposal.

But I am attracted by the idea, despite its huge possible pitfalls, that we might find ways of allowing loft conversions or wind turbines without needing planning permission.

I say that, realising that is this probably anathema in a magazine with a name like this one. Because we seem to generation by generation, to have got regulation so wrong in this country.

By this I don’t mean that we have too much regulation, or that we have too little. Those kind of generalities are precisely the problem. But we have allowed the big and powerful to proceed with huge advantages, minimal regulation and often tax breaks as well, at the same time as we overwhelm the small and powerless with bureaucracy and process.

We can all point to the most hideous planning blunders, nodded through after a series of generous lunches with officials, while the dormer window gets bogged down in difficulty.

The truth is we regulate ordinary people and their homes far too much and we don’t regulate the big corporates, or of course the big banks, nearly enough. Let's try imagining it the other way around.

There are bound to be a thousand practical difficulties about letting people add a storey to their homes without planning permission – though not nearly as frightening as letting them do it without building permission – and minor planning issues have the potential to overwhelm these new ‘neighbourhoods’ with warring neighbours.

What Greg Clark calls ‘mature debate at local level’ will undoubtedly disintegrate in some places. That is localism; it isn’t a reason in itself to reject the idea.

There are also dangers that the Tescos of this world will find their way through this kind of system as easily as they find their way through all the others, to the great detriment of our local economies.

But the ‘neighbourhoods’ idea, where people can draw down the powers from the local authority to achieve what they see fit takes off where the Sustainable Communities Act – so revolutionary and yet so little used – blazed a trail.

That is reason enough to be open-minded about them.

But perhaps what worries me the most is that, if it is going to work, localism has to discover an approach to local regeneration that goes beyond the smokestack hunting that has bedevilled it for the past generation or so – or any other magic bullet that is supposed to miraculously drag places out of collapse, but without other effort.

There are no magic regeneration bullets. A recent wander through the town centre of Croydon, which is planning another pointless and dehumanising office tower, is a horrible revelation of what a failure the whole office-led property development boom has been.

It is hard in the area around East Croydon to find any purpose-built offices with tenants, or any of the multiple office building sites showing much sign of progress. Another effortless magic bullet. Thanks a bundle.

So yes, let’s have neighbourhood planning. Let’s rebalance the burden of regulation. But it does require that the people responsible for making this work move on a little from the failed regeneration ideas of the 1970s and 1980s.