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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The Slow Death of Mother Earth

During my research into bioregional economics I have been struck by the universality of the conception of the earth as our mother. This is our own spiritual heritage in these islands, and is ubiquitous in pre-rational religions across the world. In Latin America, as our colleagues in Liverpool told us, she is Pachamama, the source of fertility and nourishment.

In the rational West we have lost this aspect of reverence towards the earth. We have bureaucratised our relationship with nature and lost the sense of both her mystery and her power. It is not an over-dramatisation to say that the earth is dying. I have never experienced the slow death of a person I love, but friends who have tell me of their feelings of rage and despair. These are the feelings that we share now, but strengthened by the knowledge that it is people just like ourselves who are doing the killing.

For some who are struggling to protect the earth the creation of a new crime of 'ecocide' would lend support. I am unimpressed by this attempt to use the bureaucratic system of legal rights, which seems to be as misguided as attempts to reconceptualise nature as 'ecosystem services'. Both routes contribute to what Wordsworth called the laying waste of our powers, both encourage the escape from the body into the head, from passion to argumentation, which have led us into this mire.

We should remember Mary Midgley's warning about taking the image of mother earth as the wounded mother too literally:

'This medical imagery at once made it much easier for scientists to accept the notion of Gaia. When the point is put in medical terms, they begin to find it plausible that the earth does indeed in some way function as an organic whole, that its climate and oceans work together with living things to maintain a normal balance, and that what gravely upsets any part of the system is liable to upset others. They can see that, for such a whole, the notion of health is really quite suitable. And of course they find the patient Gaia, lying in bed and politely awaiting attention, much less threatening than that scandalous pagan goddess.' (Midgley, Science and Poetry, p. 181)

But none the less the idea of the killing of nature by those who are guiding our policy, as demonstrated in today's National Planning Policy Framework, can help us to explain our own sense of despair and rage, and to realise that what they lack is not evidence but spiritual or moral wisdom. We should not follow them down their bureaucratic roads to nowhere, but rather affirm our shared love for mother earth and reframe our politics so that we use the power of this love to sweep away the nonsense of costing and enclosing the earth.
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The Government that Likes to Say 'Yes'

The parliamentary Communities and Local Government Committee has come out clearly against the plans made by Pickles and his ilk to tear up the Town and Country Planning Act and allow untrammelled development of the countryside. Their report into the National Planning Policy Framework lays bare its fetishisation of simplification and its attempt to prioritise the narrowly 'economic' at the expense of people and planet. As I discuss in a short paper on localism published recently by Green House, this makes a mockery of the government's espoused support for community-led decision-making.

Bizarrely, the original NPPF document relies on the Brundtland definition of sustainable development as 'Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.' I am constantly mystified by the way in which people can spout this without considering at what point development would have to stop. Where between the situation we have now, with species becoming extinct but there still being enough green land to enable breathing, and the future development paradise where every scrap of field and hill is covered with concrete and tarmac, is development supposed to stop? Assuming that future generations will still need air to breathe, there must be a boundary, so how do we know that we have not already reached it? And if not, when will we know we are there?

Gamely, the CLG committee has, in its para. 67, added to this definition of sustainable development to include the concept of limits: 'Policies in plans and decisions on development should be assessed against the principles that the nation and areas within it should live within their environmental limits; should achieve a sustainable economy and should seek to ensure a strong, healthy and just society.' It also requires a locally based and democratic basis to planning: 'The achievement of sustainable development through planning should be based on the responsible use of a sound evidence base and developed through an open and democratic system.'

The presumption in favour of development has nothing to do with national well-being or sustainability: it results from the lobbying undertaken by the big construction companies who dominate Tory policy-making. Note the following quotation from the website of Curtin & Co, who are not only experts in planning but also in 'managing green issues':

‘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.’

On this day which our ancestors celebrated as a festival of hope that life would return after the darkness and cold of the winter season we need to remember that 'there is no wealth but life' and resist the equation of development with progress while utterly rejecting the possibility of future economic growth.
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