The strange new debate about local planning
Town & Country Planning, September 2010
It is now more than two months since the new planning supremo for England and Wales, Greg Clark – that is ‘Decentralisation Minister’, in coalition-speak – confronted the massed ranks of UK planners at the RTPI annual conference in London.
He was polite – he talked about planning as having ‘pivotal
importance’ – but he was also pretty brutal about the status quo,
beginning by a thinly-veiled attack on post-war planning by praising
the 18th century town, Tunbridge Wells (“there wasn’t much of a
planning system in those days”).
He then went on to patronise the leaders of the profession for claiming that the planning system is “largely fit for purpose” – why is it that professional leaders are so often wedded to the status quo?
“I respectfully disagree,” said Clark, adding: “I don’t mean it unkindly”.
The whole debate about planning – if there is one – is being conducted even now in a rather oblique way. The RTPI sent a letter a month later, signed by a whole range of august bodies from Friends of the Earth to the British Property Federation, urging the importance of strategic planning.
Clark, to give him credit, also appears to support strategic planning, he just doesn’t seem to think that Whitehall should do it.
The real dividing lines between both sides are still unclear, which is why both are projecting their greatest hopes and fears onto the government. Including, I suppose I must admit, me.
I am pleased by the localism rhetoric, and found myself cheering quietly to myself as Clark pointed out the distinction between all those screeds of target figures and the number of homes actually built on the ground.
I’m also excited at some of the possibilities about neighbourhoods taking real control over the land use of their areas, even down to the level of parishes – or groups of neighbourhoods formed into mutual trusts.
My former T&CP columnist colleague Barry Cooper has even launched a website, www.decentralisation.org, to guide the people of Herefordshire about the emerging new world.
As he told me, the most telling aspect of this was that the domain name was still available.
But we are all still in the dark about so many aspects of this. Clark talked about squaring the circle, so that the government could be both pro-local and pro-development.
Which is all very well, but unless communities are also able to say no– especially to some of the monopolistic supermarkets – then this will not be a prescription for localism at all, but just another form of centralisation.
Localism is all meaningless hot air if communities remain powerless supplicants to Tesco.
But Clark did hint at a potential way out: the idea that communities should be able to benefit financially from their planning decisions. I know he is talking about a re-localisation of planning gain, and maybe business rates too, but that is not really enough.
Real localism is where communities can own some of the housing they commission, and draw income from it – either through co-operative ownership of low-cost housing, or through local pensions (local pensions? No, they don’t exist yet, but they should).
This is even more applicable to renewable energy. Of course, these need to be owned partly by local people, as they so often are in Scandinavia. Why should people put up with the inconvenience unless they have a stake in the project?
I mention this because of news from the USA that a fifth of the huge
burst of local energy projects agreed until temporary rules last year
have been community projects. Unlike projects by big utilities, they
tend to have widespread local acceptance, mainly because they have an
ownership stake in it.
What is more, community wind projects seem to have had a major effect on the independence of local economies. A study by the National Renewable Energy Lab shows that they support more local jobs than commercial projects — three times as many during construction and nearly twice as many long term.
Localism without local economics, as I keep saying, is really only half the battle.
This is all really rather intriguing, but the coalition still has some rather basic things to learn about localism.
I opened the newspaper this morning to find the Communities secretary Eric Pickles is instructing local authorities – yes, that was the word– to clear the environment of unsightly street signs and clutter.
He may be right, but it isn’t exactly localism.
ends
