Being a little more radical still

Town & Country Planning, October 2010

 

I never know quite what to write when the editor calls me up and tells me my column is overdue. Sometimes I seem to hit the zeitgeist; more usually, I find myself wandering up some byway of my own.

But, last time, I seemed to have happened upon the issue of the moment. This was all too obvious when the September edition landed on my breakfast table: most of the magazine was about the same set of questions.

It is, after all, the primary issue in planning of the moment, which is how a radically decentralised planning apparatus is going to work in practice. Answer: we don’t really know, even now.

All we can say is that the Eric Pickles regime at the Department for Communities and Local Government, known to its friends as CLG, is more roundhead than cavalier.

How are the houses the nation needs going to be provided? How are the conflicting plans going to be synchronised across local government boundaries? How are ministers going to bring their objectives to bear in a truly localised system?

Answer: we still don’t really know.

I certainly don’t know. But it seems to me to be my job, at least in the Localism column, to be relatively optimistic. After all, it may all seem so difficult because we are assuming that other aspects of life and policy – the ones we are most used to, from volume housebuilders to housing targets – will stay the same.

Perhaps we need to be even more radical. Perhaps we need to take things an inch or two further towards their logical conclusion.

I thought this as I read Anthony Hilton’s finance column in the
Evening Standard which tried to do precisely this, struggling over the future of the volume housebuilders.

I take Anthony Hilton seriously and read him every time I rattle my way home on the commuter trains of south east London.

He uses conservative language but he is so often spot on, for example about the corrosive effect that the big banks are having on the real economy. If he says something, it is usually worth listening to.

He reminds us that the volume housebuilders are terrified that they will be unable to get the permissions they need in the new regime without relying on the full weight of Whitehall instruction.

This is certainly true. It is also true that the housebuilders, along with many other business groups, were privately reassured by the Conservatives before the general election that they had little to fear from all this localism rhetoric once the voting was over.

It wasn’t so. And Hilton’s proposal won’t be any comfort to them either. He suggests that the future is now so uncertain for them that the banks should go ahead and pull the plug on their loans.

They would then be forced to sell their considerable land banks, bringing a much-needed drop in the price of development land.

We certainly need more homes. But the planning system does not exist in order to provide profits for the biggest housebuilders, certainly not if their products are alienating hutches that leach heat and encourage motoring.

Lower the price of land and then maybe we can get some homes built that won’t impoverish their occupants in the age of climate change.

But don’t let’s stop here. Instead of worrying how to provide
national or regional planning guidance, maybe we need to embrace the fact that the UK will feel a little more like the USA.

If many American towns or states want to ban formula restaurants, or retail developments over a certain size, or projects that look likely to drain spending power from the local economy (Tesco springs to mind) – then they do so.

In fact, the new planning regime in the UK may find itself looking a lot more rococo, and more like the Napoleon of Notting Hill, than would have been entirely comfortable to policy-makers less than 12 months ago.

But let’s go even further. The noises coming out of CLG, certainly the ones that I hear, suggest that serious nerves about the implications of radical localism are beginning to make themselves felt.

It isn’t just how they can get homes built in the south east. It is how they can manage local economic development. Or, even more worrying: where are the levers to encourage local enterprise?

The answer is that, under the kind of regime outlined by Pickles and his colleagues, they have gone.

It maybe that the question is not how to get them back, but whether there is any role left for CLG as a great department of state.

Certainly there are Whitehall funds to allocate, and some equalisation of income from business rates. But that could be done quite adequately by local government itself through the Local Government Association.

Perhaps it is time that Eric Pickles did the heroic, but also the
logical thing with the CLG, and torched the place.

 

ends