Tower Blocks

When I was about to fall asleep last night, it occurred to me that the best metaphor for the planning system is a game of jenga. (I can't recall my subsequent dreams, so can only hope that they were equally fascinating in content.) The UK planning system consists of multifarious and lengthy pieces of legislation, statutory instruments, and policy documents. Since planning began, a few of these have been removed but more piled on the top. The whole thing has therefore become increasingly voluminous, complex, and unstable.

This is due to the strange fact the governments are unable to leave planning well alone. Although widely ignored, misunderstood, and marginalised, planning is an important conduit of power between local and central government. Moreover, it has a not insignificant role - mediating between different interests to decide how land is used. During the Blair years, a whole regional layer of planning was added between the national and local, requiring decisions on each individual planning application to take account of a seemingly endless amount of policy.

The coalition government does not approve of the word 'regional', and to be quite honest I can see why. Regional planning suffered a democratic deficit, as John Prescott's regional assemblies never took off as they were meant to. It also spawned a horrifying level of jargon and TLAs (three letter acronyms). I once read a regional planning document that proposed to monitor 'synergy' and 'leverage' on an annual basis, which very nearly made me cry. That said, regional structures did bring a lot of funding into planning, infrastructure and economic development. And naturally the people working for these regional structures meant well and did their best with the powers and resources they had.

No longer, though. The abolition of Regional Development Agencies and their planning duties has been repeatedly announced since Eric Pickles become Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. This sudden wholesale removal of an entire tier of planning has caused considerable confusion, making the whole jenga stack wobble. However the government does not intend to leave planning with just local and national tiers. The recent CLG Business Plan confirmed the introduction of a new concept: the Neighbourhood Plan.

The idea of setting out planning policies, by each neighbourhood for each neighbourhood, comes from the Conservative planning Green Paper, titled Open Source Planning. This was released back in February, and at the time was widely derided by planners as unworkable, whilst horrified developers claimed it would end housebuilding. Apparently, the Conservatives didn't listen. I can see what they're trying to do: replace a distant and seemingly unaccountable layer of planning with a hyper-local and responsive one. That's laudible, until you consider the sheer magnitude of the problems that the planning system is expected to tackle. To name but the two I know most about:

The housing shortage; regional plans set targets for house-building, which often caused local controversy. Despite these targets, not enough homes were built. Thus, house prices remain stubbornly high despite the lack of first time buyers and the housing benefit bill climbed inexorably. The planning system is one of the biggest determinants of the quantity and quality of housing being built at any given time.

Environmental sustainability; the planning system must somehow reconcile interdependent and sometimes conflicting environmental objectives. Flood risk, air quality, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste reduction must all be considered and balanced when putting a plan together. Renewable energy is a particularly fraught topic - how can you reconcile national targets for renewable energy generation with rampant anti-wind turbine NIMBYism?

Both of these issues, and many others, are far, far bigger than a neighbourhood. I am all for people having a say in what happens where they live, but that isn't a new idea. Neighbourhoods elect local councillors, who decide whether or not to give planning permissions. Local councils put together local plans (noticing the many uses of the word 'local' here?), which people are encouraged to comment on. Most don't bother, unless something particularly controversial is at stake - like a wind turbine or a site for gypsies and travellers.

What the government's proposing is, like the Big Society, a much larger role for the community whether they like it or not. As the concept of neighbourhood plans remains hazy, I have a number of questions.

• What is a 'neighbourhood'? In rural areas, parishes are a helpful existing designation and have established Parish Councils to lead the process. But in towns and cities, is a neighbourhood a set area, a set population, or are the boundaries to be chosen by the inhabitants themselves?
  
  
• In order for a neighbourhood plan to have legitimacy, what proportion of the population need to be involved? Or indeed need to agree it? Will this agreement be through a mini referendum?
  
  
• Who will have the most influence over a neighbourhood plan? Will only those who have lived in the area for a certain period of time be able to speak up? Isn't it likely that those with the most time on their hands (the retired, I expect) will be most heavily involved?
  
  
• Regional and local plans were legally required to be consistent, or at least not conflict. Will it be the same for local and neighbourhood plans? If there is dissention between the two about how land is to be used, which would prevail?
  
  
• Local plans require a mass of evidence to back them up - data on infrastructure, housing need, and environmental constraints, for example. Will neighbourhood plans also need to be evidence-based? If not then they are bound to become unrealistic, but what safeguards will prevent this?
  
  
• A patchwork of neighbourhood plans, possibly overlapping and inevitably conflicting, will create huge complexity for the development industry. Will developers be given the chance to comment on neighbourhood plans? How will planning decisions be made when sites cross the boundary between two or more neighbourhoods?
  
  
• Neighbourhood plans will only be able to reflect the wishes of current residents of an area, not future generations or those wishing to move into the neighbourhood. How will the system safeguard against NIMBY enclaves, which further entrench inequality by safeguarding their patches against anyone new? What about often-excluded groups like the disabled and gypsies & travellers, how will their housing needs be taken into account?
  
  
• How will conflicts of interest be managed? Suppose someone with a large garden wants to put it in the plan for redevelopment but their neighbour objects. Who mediates in this situation?
  
  
• Putting together neighbourhood plans will require training, local government officer time and expertise, as well as funding. Local councils are facing 30% cuts over the next three years, how are they expected to cope with this additional resource-intensive requirement?
  
  
• What use will neighbourhood plans really be to communities? The frustrating nature of the planning system is that it only reacts; it can't proactively cause things to be built. Putting together a lovely plan for their neighbourhood will be a waste of people's time, if it is full of aspirations that will never be met as public funding is tightly squeezed.
  
  
• Let's be honest. Can you really imagine neighbourhood plans welcoming new housing and infrastructure like recycling centres and bus depots? These things are necessary, but will the vociferous members of communities really be able to make the most considered decisions about where they should go? What about the BANANAs*?
  

Funnily enough, planning is not a particularly popular or desirable profession. I toyed with and then decided against becoming a planner, on the grounds that the devil was in the really dull detail, like kerb heights and child yields. Being dragged into writing a plan for the community isn't terribly enticing when you've seen how difficult it can be. Moreover, the points in my Big Society post also apply here; the life of a private renter doesn't really encourage long-term thinking about where I live right now.

There are undoubtedly problems with the planning system, which I won't go into at length due to their utter tedium. Planning is in need of reform to address the challenges of climate change, housing shortage, and austerity. People are disconnected from planning, which I think is largely due to its over-complexity and incomprehensible language. There is a lot that could be done to simplify local plans and put them into plain English, without radically changing the whole system. That should at least be tried before putting precious time and money into more reorganisation. It strikes me that neighbourhood plans could be the final block that knocks the whole tower over into chaos.

* BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Absolutely Nowhere near Anything.