Across Whitehall ‘growth’ has become the rallying cry, and localism is being sacrificed to the urgent demand for economic development
Localists are dismayed to discover the Localism Bill isn’t. In matters of planning and development, they’re saying, it’s the opposite – a charter for ministers to fast track building schemes. Sir Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the National Trust, fulminates against the rape of the countryside. ‘Every rural acre’ is threatened, he writes. PF’s own contributor, Peter Hetherington, fears new estates being ‘plonked miles from anywhere’.
Can this be the same piece of legislation that strengthens the local voice in planning matters and gives citizens more opportunity to register their views, both through and to local authorities, and only a few months ago had secured the localists’ warm backing?
The answer is yes and no. The Localism Bill is deeply confused in its purposes, but no more so than the localists who initially hailed it, believing Eric Pickles’ rhetoric. When localists bemoan the end of regional planning on the grounds that, given a choice, local people might opt for development on green fields, their localism looks compromised – but no more than that of government ministers who say they are expanding popular participation in planning then bring in clauses making a presumption in favour of development overriding local choice.
Ministers’ minds have changed during the past few months. There’s a whiff of political fear in the air. Government is getting anxious about growth. Expanding economic activity is the justification for and supposedly the result of the cuts but it isn’t happening. Across Whitehall ‘growth’ has become the cry. Every policy has to be stamped by its relevance to the great growth project. Hence the switch in the Localism Bill, which now can be read to imply that ministers will say yes to each and every bid to develop, the green fields of Olde England included.
Philip Hammond’s determination to push the new rail link from London to Birmingham despite the political cost is of a piece. Only last week Greg Clark, the planning minister, set out a ‘planning guarantee’, implying councils would be penalised if they did not process applications to develop quickly enough. ‘Yes’ rather than ‘no’ must be the default response of local authorities, he says.
But the localists have also changed their minds. Now, it seems, the people can’t entirely be trusted. We need a corset of (national and regional) planning restraints, in case they do actually favour development. Simon Jenkins, the great apostle of local decision making, deplores the fact a large number of councils have not produced community plans, as if that were not also a local choice.
The truth is that in planning, as across the gamut of policies in the local-central government space, high dogma just does not apply. There’s a balance of interests to be struck and it’s perfectly appropriate for national government to signal in favour of growth. Of course citizens should be involved in determining the physical and economic fate of where they live – but not exclusively.
We have, in England at least, a ‘national’ interest in increasing the supply of housing. Not to do so blights life chances and retards growth. That probably means forcing councils to allocate land for housing, whatever the neighbours think. That was the Labour government’s policy and Pickles, with the cynicism for which he has become renowned, junked it, calling it Stalinist. It’s now a matter of months before the Cameron government introduces something similar.
Peter Hetherington asks what will happen when ‘the rock of a recently approved community plan meets government supported development’. The answer is, as it should be, that wider considerations triumph and localism goes to the wall.
