Brave New World of Localism - Part Two, Planning in the Hood

In the mayhem of the last few days before my Christmas holiday, I got through the remainder of the Localism Bill. Despite being at home and under no obligation to do anything much but eat, I've been giving some thought to its implications. Whilst eating.

Neighbourhood planning, in particular, could have a huge impact on development and land use, if the bill is enacted as currently written. I suspect that any local councillors who read it will immediately get onto their local MPs to ensure that doesn't happen. Neighbourhood planning has no role for local councillors; the onus is on parish councillors and leaders of neighbourhood fora (forums? Spellcheck is unhelpful on this point).

Three new terms are being introduced: neighbourhood development plans (NDPs?), neighbourhood development orders (NDOs?), and community right to build orders (CRBOs?). None of these are obligatory, and there are two prerequisites: a spatially defined neighbourhood and an organisation to represent it. In rural areas, it is assumed that the former will be a parish and the latter a parish council. These are established structures, probably known and supported by most people nearby. For the purposes of the localism bill, the ideal neighbourhood would probably be a large village comprising a single parish, with a well-supported parish council and a good level of community cohesion. A community centre would need to be conveniently available for holding local referenda and discussing the development plan.

There are plenty of such places, but they're the exception rather than the rule. In urban areas, the first hurdle will be agreeing where neighbourhoods are. The minimum requirement is a 'neighbourhood forum' with at least three members. To my mind, this implies that my two housemates and I could set ourselves up as a pocket neighbourhood, stretching from the front yard to the end of the back garden. The responsibility for ensuring that everyone doesn't do this lies with local councils, who have the unenviable task of mediating when competing claims of neighbourhoodity are made. If there are no such claims, presumably some areas will end up in non-neighbourhood limbo. I also assume that local councillors will seek to exert their influence at this point.

But let's say that the chaotic civil war bit is over, and we have neighbourhoods, including a small one that I will call My House. Now a local referendum can be held to decide whether to prepare a neighbourhood development plan. If less than half of the turnout says yes, no plan can be prepared and the neighbourhood forum might as well go home. But in the My House example, say I vote yes and the two other don't vote at all because they're out somewhere. That's a mandate for the preparation of a neighbourhood development plan, which the local planning authority would have to help me write.

Let us ignore for the moment the fact that I live in a rented house and would be contravening my lease if I so much as put in a picture hook without the landlord's permission. The neighbourhood development plan for My House could set out an intention to add four further stories to the place, styled in the manner of a treehouse. Assuming the neighbourhood forum (my housemates and I) are happy with this, and it doesn't directly contradict the Cambridge Local Plan (which I don't believe it does), the plan could be adopted.

The next stage would be to go for a neighbourhood development order. These are potentially powerful tools, as they specify an area of the neighbourhood and what development can take place in it. Once adopted, that development (which could be anything that doesn't need environment impact assessment) can bypass the planning system entirely, leaving the local planning authority with little or no control over it. In the My House case, the local authority would have to help my housemates and I prepare our order, setting out the development we intend (a very large vertical extension). In order to get this order adopted, we'd have to get an independent person to examine it (a planner ex-colleague, perhaps) and hold a further referendum. I could probably convince my housemates to vote yes by this point, if only because they'd want me to stop going on about it. I could then start building a four storey treehouse on the roof of my home, safe in the knowledge that planning officers couldn't stop me. Although building control might have something to say.

This example may sound totally ridiculous, but there's nothing in the bill to stop it happening. Doubtless, local planning authorities would have to deal with these kind of vexatious micro-neighbourhoods, as well as the sensible, cohesive villages making constructive decisions. I haven't mentioned community right to build orders, as these seem to some extent to replicate neighbourhood development orders. However, they can be requested by 'community organisations' (not defined – could this include businesses?) to grant permission for specific development on a specific site. An independent examination and referendum is required, but once again the local planning authority is being taken out of the loop.

Three final points to make about neighbourhood development orders. Firstly, they might never catch on. A lot of legislation is piggybacking on local development orders, which were introduced in the 2004 Planning Act. Since then, ten pilots have been set up and one local development order has been adopted. Neighbourhood development orders are intended to serve exactly the same purpose – extend permitted development rights within a specified area. The difference is the procedure; rather than being introduced through the local planning process, the new orders will supposedly be led by neighbourhoods. So will they be any more popular than their predecessors?

Secondly, neighbourhood development orders are alarmingly powerful. They override duties to consider conservation areas and the historic environment. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the bill is that they also override green belt designations. There's no detail as to how they'd be enforced, but once in place they effectively convey planning permission in perpetuity and can only be challenged through judicial review.

Thirdly, I'm glad I don't live in London, because if these orders look worrying, the powers being given to the Greater London Authority in the final clauses of the localism bill are a hundred times more so. The mayor of London is being given power to designate 'mayoral development areas' when he/she considers it 'expedient'. These amount to mini-urban development corporations with regeneration objectives. The Secretary of State can pass property, rights and powers to them from councils, the Homes and Communities Agency, the Olympic Delivery Authority, or even a government department. No public consultation, let alone a referendum, is required to set up a mayoral development corporation. Boroughs and the London Assembly must be consulted, but the mayor doesn't even have to accept their comments. A mayoral development corporation may do 'anything it considers appropriate for the purposes of its object or for purposes incidental to those purposes'. This looks to me like an extraordinarily unconstrained power, presumably intended to speed up projects like the Olympics and Crossrail. Entirely mayor-appointed and with no safeguards at all, there's a lot of potential for abuse in these development corporations.

The localism bill is a strange document. The name totally belies the content. It takes a considerable amount of planning power away from the local level, and hands it to neighbourhoods if they want to take it. It also introduces a number of duties on local authorities that smack of centralism. Even the much-touted power of competence on local authorities is constrained, restricting precisely what they need to use it for right now – raising money. This bill is trying to do a lot of things at once, and relying in many places on regulations to be introduced later. I hope that parliament will notice during the second reading that it has the potential to cause total mayhem and paralyse development. Recent news has suggested that chaos is what the government wants, but I can't help doubting that most businesses, local councillors, and people-on-the-street would share that sentiment.

The Brave New World of Localism - Part One

Today I have attempted to read the whole 405 pages of the Localism Bill. A meeting, quite a few phone calls, and the need to respond to emails prevented this, but I got half way through. Nerd that I am, I believe in reading the legislation rather than the government summaries. They always leave out critical points. So, from the first half of the Localism Bill...

Three Centralist Things

• Local authorities have a new duty to ‘determine whether council tax is excessive’. A referendum must be held if a proposed increase is ‘excessive’. The decision as to whether it is excessive must be based on a set of principles determined by the Secretary of State annually. The net result here is central control of council tax levels, because few would answer ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Do you want an excessive increase in council tax next year?’ justified or not. (Vol 2, section 52ZB)
  
  
• A 'community right to challenge' is being introduced. This will allow voluntary bodies, charitable trusts, parish councils, two or more local authority employees, or other bodies to be specified in regulations, to express interest in providing public services. Local authorities can accept or reject expressions of interest, but only based on grounds to be specified by the Secretary of State.
  
  If an expression of interest is accepted, a procurement exercise must take place. The regulations require the social, economic, and environmental well-being of the area to be considered as part of the procurement process. However this can only apply (as the Act notes) insofar as is consistent with procurement law. This obscures the fact that the contract may very likely then be awarded to a private company rather than the community body that originally challenged. There are no provisions in the bill to deal with the possible failure of the ‘challenger’ to adequately provide the service, nor any recognition of the contracting and enforcement challenges this would pose for local authorities.
  
  It is also worthy of note that this power results in local councillors having effectively no say in whether local services are outsourced. If an expression of interest must be accepted according to Secretary of State guidance, procurement has to go ahead. (Vol 1, section 66)
  
  
• Local authorities will no longer have the ability of local authorities to encourage domestic waste reduction by payments and charges. It would be interesting to see if similar schemes could be managed under the ‘power of competence’... (Vol 1, section 29)

Three Random Things

• Fire and rescue authorities will be allowed to charge for extinguishing fires - as long as they are at sea or under the sea (Vol 1, section 18B).
  
  
• Failing councils will have their elected mayors taken away as a punishment, until the Secretary of State decides they deserve to get them back. Given that the vast majority don't want them in the first place, how is this a punishment? (Vol 2, section 9HI)
  
  
• Which comes first, the neighbourhood or the neighbourhood forum?
  
  Local authorities must designate a ‘neighbourhood forum’ for each neighbourhood. This must be an open organisation, established to further social, economic, and environmental well-being of people living, or wanting to live, in an area. Membership must be open to people living, or wanting to live, there. Only one forum can be designated per neighbourhood and they must apply for the privilege.
  
  ‘Neighbourhood areas’ must also be designated by local authorities, but only when a neighbourhood forum has applied for their area to be designated. If no such body existed, presumably the area would remain in non-neighbourhood limbo. Moreover, how do local authorities arbitrate between overlapping applications? There is a real chicken and egg situation here! (Vol 2, section 61G)

One Thing That We Will All Need To Get Used To In The Localist Future

The plural of referendum. There are going to be a lot of them. Local authorities will have to hold referenda if:

• 5% of electors in a district or 'neighbourhood' sign a petition;
  
  
• A local councillor requests it;
  
  
• The council passes a resolution to hold one. (Vol 1, section 40)
  

That's a pretty low bar. Referenda can only be denied if they're unlawful, non-local, vexatious, abusive, or cover something the Secretary of State doesn't like (to be specified later). Results of local referendums must be published and local authorities must decide what to do about them & why. But they are free to do absolutely nothing if they see fit. I've yet to decide whether this is sensible or just renders the whole procedure an entirely pointless waste of time.

Stay tuned for Part Two, featuring What the hell are Neighbourhood Development Orders and Why Should I Fear Them?

Edited To Add Like an idiot, I forgot to link to the bill itself, which can be found here. Also, it's 431 pages, not 405. Bugger.

The Way We Live Now

When I started this blog in July, it seemed to me that those working outside the public sector hadn't yet realised that there were massive changes ahead. To be fair, I had only a hazy idea myself, but enough to feel alarmed at the prospect. There has definitely been a shift in recent weeks. I've noticed that conversations with colleagues, family, friends, in fact just about anyone, circle inexorably back to the telling phrase, 'We live in interesting times.' Everyone is saying this, and the required response is to nod sagely and murmur, 'Interesting times indeed.' This sequence confirms that you, like the other party in the conversation, are an observer of dramatic events beyond your control.

The next step, of course, is to shift from observer to participant, as the protesting students have done. I subscribe to the view that the protests are about a lot more than tuition fees. Young people are protesting now because they feel they have nothing to lose by doing so, because they feel that their opportunities are being taken away. Whatever the actual impacts of the complex new tuition fees scheme (which might be more progressive than the current system, I haven't examined it in sufficient detail to say), putting a price of £9,000 a year on a degree is an ideological statement. Whereas previous governments emphasised the value of higher education to society, the coalition is framing it as an asset to the individual, one that needs to be purchased. I don't think the government understand how much of a shift in the social contract this is, nor how hypocritical it looks in light of their fairness and social mobility rhetoric.

When I was a student, the times weren't especially interesting. I graduated prior to the introduction of top-up fees. During my degree there was a general election in which the incumbent Labour government faced no serious threat, and the economy remained boringly stable throughout. Despite this, as students do, I spent long hours sitting round a kitchen table putting the world to rights with my friends. There is a vast gap between those debates and the protests now. They are manifestations of the same student political awareness, altered by the seismic economic and political changes of the intervening years. The twentisomethings of my generation graduated with plenty of debt (£10-£25,000 for the most part), but we expected to and for the most part did find jobs. Our future looked stable.

It isn't anymore. Many of my university friends now work in the public sector; in education, the army, Whitehall, the NHS, quangos, or local government. I don't think any of us can say with confidence that our jobs aren't to some extent at risk. My whole team is now officially at risk of redundancy, although we've yet to receive the letter confirming this. Most importantly, we have little reason to believe that there will be other jobs available if/when we are kicked out of the public sector. In the mixture of positive and negative economic news, it remains a fact that there are already more job-seekers than there are vacancies in the UK. Unlike our older colleagues of many years experience, we twentisomethings will get minimal redundancy payouts, certainly not enough to start our own business or keep us off Job Seeker's Allowance. We have been basically priced out of the housing market, so are unlikely to have either the asset of a house or the burden of a mortgage.

Where does this leave us? Certainly in a better position than teenagers and students, which is why we've yet to take to the streets. In my opinion, it leaves us as prime brain drain material. I wonder if my generation will take a look at the lack of jobs, collapsing public services, and disgust with politics in the UK, and decide to go elsewhere? Being stuck in renting makes us mobile and our degrees apparently now command a great premium. Although many other countries are experiencing austerity, we are the only one to be saddled with the sickening spectacle of David Cameron and Nick Clegg telling us that we are all in this together. For those with languages, France and Germany beckon. For others, Australia is having an economic boom (unsustainably based on exporting raw materials to China, admittedly), or what about New Zealand, Canada, and the less Tea Party-ridden parts of America. In fact, there's a whole world out there, and it's looking increasingly appealing.

I can't understand why the government seems amazed that instability causes protest. Perhaps they're just feigning surprise that young people complain when their certainties and security are suddenly stripped away. During 'interesting times' you can either get involved or watch from a safe distance. A lot of people my age will soon be faced with that decision.

Meanwhile, Cambridgeshire County Council has announced that its budget is being cut by £160 million over the next five years. £50 million must be saved next year, and that front-loading will have an especially significant impact. An estimated 450 jobs will go. Suffolk-esque kamikaze outsourcing does not appear to be the preferred option, encouragingly. A consultation on where the cuts should be made can be found here.

Edited To Add: Having had a go at the consultation survey, I'd urge everyone who lives in the county to do the same. It's eye-opening - whatever distribution of cuts is decided, it's clear that support for the most vulnerable people (the elderly and at-risk children) will be cut. In addition, up to 19 libraries could be closed and up to 80 bus routes stopped.