Planning for Sale

Today's revelation that local councillors are selling their knowledge of the planning process to those who would devastate our countryside will be used as further evidence of the corruption of politics, but really the culprit here is national government, whose planning policy is being written by developers for developers, much as banking regulation has been written by bankers for bankers.

One of the Tory government's first acts when coming to power was to sweep away 64 years' worth of planning policy, carefully made to respect social and ecological needs, and to replace it with the National Policy Planning Framework. The NPPF has been identified by many as a developers' charter. Even the far from radical Friends of the Earth have judged it to adopt a deregulatory approach 'designed to prioritise private business interest in the name of economic growth.' It represents a significant shift in power in favour of development and against the environment.

There are profits to be made here: the ‘communications consultant’ Curtin & Co.  bought up the web address http://www.thelocalismbill.co.uk/ to give their jubilant account of the significance of these proposals:

‘There is no doubt that the local government and planning landscape will change considerably in the next 12 to 18 months. There are still significant holes in the proposed legislation and Curtin & Co will be monitoring the progress of the bill as well as making representations on its community engagement aspects. Curtin&Co’s founder and chief executive is the author of Managing Green Issues (Macmillan, 2001) which advocates many of the aspirations of the Localism Bill and this is embedded in our methodology.’

So much for 'green planning' which, like the green economy itself, is becoming a corrupted concept.

My Green House colleague Jonathan Essex, a civil engineer who works for the sustainability consultant Bioregional, transcribed a recent presentation by Hugh Ellis, Chief Planner for the Town and Country Planning Association given at EcoBuild on 7 March. Mr Ellis outlined how the need for developments to be 'viable', for which read 'profitable' could reduce the ability of local planning authorities to require high environmental standards or address the issue of climate change when giving planning permission. He concluded as follows:

'Ultimately I will leave you with this thought. The climate science has got much worse over the past five years. We planning in this country for the wrong future. We are planning for example on sea level rise for 60-80cm where we know now scientifically we will have at least 2m of sea level rise. I go and talk to Hull and many places on the East coast who do not have a future beyond 2050 if we do not make radical changes to the ways in which we organise ourselves and our economy. Set in that context my challenge to government and all of you is that we need a national plan that can take this nation through the challenge of climate changes and manage that process with social equity and with great outcomes. The national planning policy framework doesn't do that. Why? Because it has no strategic context. We've got rid of regions. We've got rid of the Royal Commission on the Environment and Pollution. I do really wonder whether this framework is the beginning, truly of the Age of Stupid.'

This is a disturbing conclusion: we can no longer use the planning process to save ourselves at the national level. But for me the issue also has a much more personal aspect. I represent Valley ward, and that is no ordinary valley, it is the Slad Valley where Laurie Lee wrote Cider with Rosie and, as I claimed without embarrassment in our local paper, the most beautiful valley in the country. Profit-hungry developer Gladman are using the NPPF to attempt to opportunistically destroy this valley by putting 140 houses onto a green field. This will be an example that will soon become obvious to us in all our precious landscapes that the government we have now is allowing greed and profit to destroy the hopes and homes of the hard-working people of Britain.
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Open Source Planning

In a comment on an earlier post to this blog, a reader asked where George Orwell is when we need him. I believe I may have found the answer: he has been employed as a Discourse Adjustment Analyst in the Department for Communities and Local Government, where doublethink is thriving. How else could we have a planning document that draws its title from the free software movement and yet is deliberately designed to commodify nature and sell it to the richest developer? His work can also be seen in the title of PPS4, called Planning for Sustainable Economic Growth, published under the Labour administration. It is rumoured that he will shortly be setting us his own consultancy, Oxymoron Inc.

During a training session organised by two members of the Planning Officers Society earlier this week I was told that my definition of Localism was entirely wrong. In spite of any lingering hopes about the Localism Bill, the trainers made it clear that it is hierarchy dressed up as subsidiarity: ‘The localism agenda is there to promote growth’ was the message. The National Planning Policy Framework has a presumption in favour of development where no core strategy exists, as in Stroud, and now that the Regional Spatial Strategies have been swept away this leaves us extremely vulnerable.

Unsurprisingly, the voice of the developer, the British Property Federation, has welcomed the new Framework. The changes are all, apparently, about efficiency and the removal of red tape: 'The planning system has become unwieldy and needs to be pared back'.

While regional planning has been all but swept away, there is a new level altogether: that of the neighbourhood. This is as yet undefined for urban areas, but in rural areas must be defined by parish boundaries. Neighbourhoods will be able to organise themselves to develop their own plans and, so long as they stick to the council's plan, the council must provide them with expertise and fund a referendum on the plan. If the neighbourhood votes in favour the plan must be followed.

This is not quite as exciting as it sounds, since the system is still hierarchical so that the neighbourhood can only make minor changes. For example, if it has been decided by the higher-tier authority that nuclear waste will be desposited in your neighbourhood, you are only at liberty to decide its precise siting. As the recent decision by Eric Pickles to permit the dumping of radioactive waste in a community near Peterborough that had clearly voted against this course indicates that the real motivation is profit and the real power still the national government.
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The Parliament of All Beings

So, the worthy Kate Barker has allowed her rational and enumerising mind into another area of our national life. Not content with skating the surface of the inequity that is the ‘housing market’, as though something so essential to human well-being as the need for shelter could possible be bought and sold like a CD or piece of underwear, she has now passed judgement on the nature of the planning process. I have not looked at the report; nor shall I. It will be the usual hundreds of pages of text garnished with incomprehensible graphs assembled as weaponry rather than to facilitate understanding. Instead I invite you to consider how planning might be if we extended its concerns beyond the desires of property developers and the rich, beyond the needs of our fellow citizens in the wealthy North, beyond even the unrecognised and uncounted needs of our brothers and sisters of the South, and included all the species of planet earth. I invite you to consider the Parliament of All Beings.
The thought experiment of the Parliament of All Beings is an illustration of the narrowness of the current approach to policy-making. We begin by considering a national parliament in the UK or the USA, which is made up of representatives of a significant number of people in those countries, only excluding those who could not or will not vote or whose votes do not translate into seats. Now we imagine a world parliament, where each country sends a number of representatives so that all countries’ interests are equally represented. We now have a much broader-based and democratic way of deciding whether the solutions to Iraq’s problems will be solved by a US invasion, or about policies to tackle climate change. But now we need to extend this further, to include all the other species with whom we share this planet in our decision-making. We need a representative from the deep-sea fish, the deciduous trees, the arctic mammals, and so on. If we imagine putting to the vote in such a parliament the issue of a planning decision over an out-of-town-shopping centre, not to mention ten new nuclear power-stations, we begin to see how narrow our current decision-making structures are. In the case of most of what we do for economic reasons we would have just one vote against the collected votes of all the other species of planet earth.
The lesson of ecology is that, as species of the planet, we are all connected in a web of life. A Buddhist parable brings to life this rather stark and scientific lesson from ecology. During his meditation a devotee fantasises that he is eating a leg of lamb, an act proscribed by Buddhism where a strict adherence to vegetarianism is required. His spiritual master suggests that when this fantasy comes to him he draws a cross on the leg of lamb. The devotee follows the advice and, on returning to self-consciousness, is amazed to find the cross on his own arm. A more prosaic way of reaching the same sense of connection is to think about a time when you might have hit an animal or bird when driving your car. The sense of shock and horror that you have destroyed something so precious is the same no matter how insignificant the animal appears. Tweet