David Cameron's war on planning regulations won't promote economic growth, undermines localism and risks alienating many in his own party
Good news. David Cameron wants to get Britain building, making things, creating new businesses, while removing obstacles to job creation and industrial expansion. 'The cabinet I chair is now a growth Cabinet,' the PM told the CBI annual conference this week – as if, up to now, it has either been anti-growth or ambivalent about the issue.
As ever, his speech was sprinkled with passable one liners, lamenting endless bureaucracy, consultations, judicial reviews – implicitly the whole planning system – for holding back progress, rather than, up to now, government indifference and, more especially, a sclerotic banking system. 'If Christopher Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably be stuck in the dock,' he told us.
Of course, it took a few senior Conservatives in local government to remind the PM that judicial reviews are an important, last-ditch weapon in the armoury of shire Tories bent on derailing high-speed rail projects and other contentious developments – 'incursions', for them – like wind farms, unwelcome housing projects and much else. Had he thought this one through?
The problem is, like so much else on the domestic policy front, Cameron’s foray into planning – for him the enemy of enterprise rather than, as planners see it, the engine of growth – is little more than a saloon bar rant in one of his Oxfordshire watering holes, pint of Hook Norton doubtless in hand.
The planning system ain't perfect, with the professionals often tied down in development control rather than place-shaping, speaking a different language to mere mortals. But in the latest issue of the Town and Country Planning Association’s monthly journal (here I declare an interest as a TCPA trustee) David Lock admirably underlines the system’s virtues.
Harking back to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act – once the envy of many countries – he says this legislation, 'nationalizing and regulating the right to develop land' created open and democratic plan-making and decision-making, 'worth its weight in gold.'
Lock, who heads a large private planning practice, makes the point that the system, far from deterring development, gives developers certainty. 'People like planning and it makes us what we are, and it makes our homeland attractive to investors,' he maintains. 'Someone tell the Chancellor, please.'
Lock should know. He helped plan Milton Keynes – not, I grant you, without its detractors, but very popular among its residents – which investors still regard as a prime target for development.
Osborne and the Treasury, driving a de-regulatory planning regime – the antithesis of the '47 Act – rather than the ostensible planning ministry absorbed into a sidelined Department for Communities and Local Government, will have none of it. A Growth and Infrastructure Bill, now passing through parliament, will give sweeping powers to the Planning Inspectorate. Developers will be able to by-pass councils and make applications to this quango. The bill will also allow applicants to have their planning applications determined by Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, where council planning departments are deemed to be ‘under-performing.’
No matter that, at a stroke, this signals another nail in the coffin of a once-vaunted ‘localist’ programme, aimed at handing more power to local communities. You won’t hear the PM extolling its virtues now over a pint of Old Hookey in the Horse and Hounds.
