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The Right to Build is a top billing act within the government’s Big Society circus, but the smattering of applause it received from local communities has been drowned out by the boos from the London planning lobby.
The Right to Build will allow communities to bring forward their own housing, shops and halls. If an “overwhelming majority” of local people vote in favour during a referendum, these schemes will be excused planning permission. It sounds great but are villagers across the country queuing up to launch Right to Build projects? No. Most communities do not have the skills needed to bring schemes forward. Referenda and the campaigning need to secure an overwhelming “yes” vote are an organisational and costly hassle. Seeking planning permission will be cheaper and simpler, and more likely to succeed.
Why then have planners and campaigners created such a fuss about the Right to Build? When the scheme was launched in July, the planning lobby briefed the press that a Pandora’s Box of horrors would result. “People to be allowed to build on green belt without planning permission”, screamed the Telegraph and the Mirror. Worse, the Right to Build is undemocratic. Yet there has been no suggestion from government that the green belt will be sacrificed for this scheme and it is a curious view of democracy that thinks that a referendum is undemocratic. And why would villagers wish to trash the countryside with ghastly developments when they have been fighting to protect their landscapes for decades?
This week the planning lobby’s tack changed. The Rural Challenge report published on Monday is just possibly a historic moment in rural policy. It gives an urban-minded government the tools to tackle rural issues. For too long, rural Britain has been something on the outside, something the Whitehall must address in the same way that it must respond to the problems of developing countries. This report gives government the guidance and some of the policy tools to bring rural Britain to the heart of central and local government.
How curious then that the press release for The Rural Challenge targeted the Right to Build ludicrously claiming that referenda would “create long lasting conflict within communities which brings local development to a halt”. Rural Challenge does talk of referenda being divisive, but it makes no mention of long lasting conflict. Neither does the report even hint that the Right to Build will bring local development to a halt. It is nonsense to suggest it will do so, because most rural development will be delivered through the existing Local Development Framework process.
So why is the planning establishment so angered by the Right to Build, a scheme that will not make a huge difference to the supply of rural housing? Perhaps it is because we have a planning community that has thrived on more than a decade of centralisation. John Prescott’s targets, national policies and regional plans gave them a certainty and authority that has now largely been swept away. Prescott came and thankfully went, but his stamp of authoritarianism pervades our current planning system.
And that is why I have doubts whether The Rural Challenge is a historic moment in rural policy. The report is written in the private language of planners. The now utterly meaningless “sustainable” word is mentioned no less than 90 times—only John Prescott could do better. The Rural Challenge fails to communicate with the communities it is professing to help. It’s the “does he take sugar?” syndrome writ large, of those in charge believing they know best.
That’s the paradigm the planning lobby is locked into. They are in control and they know how to set things up for communities. If the Big Society is to mean anything, and if Mathew Taylor’s vision for a thriving rural England is to be delivered, the planning lobby will very quickly need to learn that communities must have a role in shaping policies, as well as the details of local plans. That’s what the Big Society show is about and, love it or hate it, if the planning community is going to be part of it, it is going to have to learn to trust communities.
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brianwelland
Commented 77 weeks ago
Planning control is vital to the future protection of our townscapes and villages. Planning control freakery is not vital. Indeed it strangles. Many of the authors of the Rural Challenge belong, as Mr Boddington suggests, to the control freakery wing of the planning establishment. As an ex-local government planner, I can read how planning authorities are talking of devolving power while negotiating to maintain their stranglehold on the planning process.
The planning community has failed rural England. The Rural Challenge, for example, talks about prioritising community led plans, such as parish plans. Recommendation 33 in The Rural Challenge says “The Government should recognise and adopt community-led planning as ‘best practice’”. There have been no barriers to planning authorities adopting community-led planning. The South West may have made some progress but other parts of the country have routinely ignored community plans in the Core Strategy and Local Development Framework process.
No central government action is needed to elevate their importance in planning but local authorities will have to learn to learn to listen to communities, not dictate to them. I suspect that is true of the Campaign to Protect Rural England too, which seems to talk a lot about communities while acting as a champion to the current oppressive planning system.
A lot of senior planners are reaching early retirement age at a time when local authorities face swingeing cuts. There is a need for a cull of Prescott era planners to allow younger people to come through. Only when that happens will community-led planning and services be taken seriously by local authorities. Bring on the redundancy cheques. They are overdue.