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Flesh
Local Government
Chronicle - 26 February 2007
“and the word was made flesh.”
Well, deep in the bowels of the Department for Communities and Local Government, no doubt pushed, prodded and provoked by the Treasury, the word is indeed being made flesh.
The word in question is the report by the diminutive member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, economist and Treasury out-rider Kate Barker. The flesh will be the forthcoming White Paper on Planning. And a glorious, heaving, confused melee of a row is likely to break over the equally petite frame of planning minister, Yvette Cooper.
If ever there was an issue where the Great British Public says one thing and believes another it is planning. The world of Whitehall and industry and the think-tanks which straddle them, are united in the belief that the planning system is archaic, slow, inefficient, anti-competitive and locked into a process which is implicitly anti-development. The GBP, by and large, thinks the planning system is constructed so as to allow development to ride rough-shod over the views of local people.
Kate Barker was originally signed up by Gordon Brown to set out an intellectual case against joining the single currency on the grounds that the volatility of house prices in Britain made it impossible to surrender national control of interest rates. She duly obliged, and prescribed a house-building programme which could bring Britain more into line with Continental trends in housing inflation. That study evolved into a full-dress critique of the planning system which Whitehall sees as standing alongside the Lyons report in local government finance, the Eddington report into transport infrastructure, and the Leitch report into skills as setting the agenda for a Brown Government.
The problem for any planning system is easily stated. Essentially it must mediate between a suspicious public and politicians who see the need for action. If changes appear to tilt the balance towards politicians there will be an outcry. And however strong the arguments Barker advances for individual changes, the cumulative impact of her recommendations is to tilt the balance against the safeguards in the present system.
Four suggestions illustrate this tilt. Barker argues that if a plan in out of date the assumption should be in favour of development; that the presumption against car-parking should be re-visited; that the “needs test” should be re-designed; and that the boundaries of the green belt should not be regarded as immutable. There is a fifth which will have an intense impact on the local communities in the eye of particular planning storms - that large public interest projects (airports, waste disposal facilities, energy projects) should be decided in a national body and by-pass the existing hierarchy of local planning.
Green belts are, of course, defended as if they sheltered the spirits of generations of tribal ancestors: all but the most exceptional disturbance is desecration. But the needs test issue will exercise local authorities more closely. The Association of Town Centre Management gives a flavour of the concern when it declares that: “the removal of the needs test will accelerate the decline of town and city centres in England by undermining the strength of the existing planning policies and by permitting more out of town development.”
Green pressure groups are already orchestrating letters to MPs protesting against the dilution of planning protection for areas of special environmental importance.
The Government has made a rod for its own back by its angst-ridden declarations about the need to get an increasingly disenchanted public to re-engage with politics and embrace civil activism (though presumably not be signing petitions against road pricing on the Downing St web-site!). It is difficult to see how the removal of local processes over big planning issues will re-engage anyone except planning QCs.
There is one little idea in the Barker proposals which could ease the burden on planners and, I suspect, prove a nice little earner for local solicitors and some tricky leg-work for councillors. If No 47 Acacia Avenue wants to build a nice little conservatory or put a granny annex over the garage and the only people affected would be the neighbours at No 49 the two households should be able to reach a private agreement to let the work go ahead.
Now that really would be the word made flesh!
© Local Government Chronicle
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