In trouble again: Planning under threat. What’s worth fighting for?

Summary of PNUK meeting

On the 15th of March, 2011PNUK held a meeting at the offices of the Town and Country Planning Association in London to consider the coalition government’s reform agenda for planning in England.

Entitled “In trouble again: Planning under threat. What’s worth fighting for?”, the meeting was called to try and open up some space for critical discussion at what feels like a pivotal political moment.

The aim of the day was to explore a range of questions, including: how should planners and planning assess and respond to what’s going on? How can we define and defend a conception of planning worth fighting for? And how does reform fit into the wider picture and struggles that are emerging in response to the cuts in public funding? Below is a summary of some of the main points raised in the discussion. The final section contains a list of possible actions that were discussed as a way of building resistance. If you don’t have time to read everything scroll down to there, and find out what you can do!

Assessing the threat

In the morning the meeting sought to assess the threat to planning, and of the wider cuts agenda and ideology of the government. We started by outlining and discussing the content and implications of the planning sections of the localism bill. Hugh Ellis from the TCPA opened by outlining the key elements of the Bill proposals. This was followed by a short presentation by Bob Colenutt (download a summary word file on the right) who outlined his understanding of the politics of this agenda, and its implication for a more humane planning system.
The discussion that followed ranged widely but converged in agreeing that the current government poses a serious ideological threat not just to planning, but to wider, fundamental values of social and environment justice and the public interest.  Key concerns included:

• The diminution of strategic capacity (and of the duty to pursue sustainable development and to tackle climate change), and its possible consequences for spatial development where, for example, neighbouring authorities all race to produce ‘regional’ shopping centres, or housing needs in one authority aren’t met because they cross boundaries.
• The logic of changes to housing benefit and the complex changes to local government finance suggest a concerted ideological attack on public services and those communities reliant on them, a fundamentally regressive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.
• The spatial implications of this agenda also raise questions about justice. It seems clear that the government’s agenda comes from a particular shire county view of the world that is rooted in conservatism and privilege. It is much less responsive to the needs of other parts of the country: the north and the cities.
• The interaction of this wider change with the proposed incentives to communities that build more housing contains a further spatial bias towards areas where market demand is strong, and away from areas of low demand that will further institutionalise inequality in the operation of the system.
• Incentives also raise issues around the quality of development where they, along with the mooted ‘presumption in favour of (sustainable) development’, may promote the development of ‘easy sites’, disregarding the social or environmental implications of so doing.
• This tendency may be further reinforced by the possible marketisation of planning permission if large corporate interests are allowed to develop neighbourhood plans in exchange for the grant of permission
• Democratic accountability is clearly absent from proposals for neighbourhood planning and the democratic legitimacy of planning decision-making and local government is being further attacked
• Concern was also raised about how the agenda might develop. Whilst it was acknowledged that tensions in the government’s proposals might stymie planning reform, it was also noted that it might simply bring on reform mark II, unleashing the full force of the voices in BIS and the Treasury that have been calling for the full scale marketisation of the planning system. the closeness to government of the Policy Exchange and other right-wing think tanks that have proposed such changes was noted.

Amidst these concerns questions were also raised about the coherence of the planning reform package, and the practical significance of some of what has been proposed:

• There are some serious tensions here that might derail the agenda: shire county voters are unlikely to embrace growth in the way the government claims and may well revolt once they realise they aren’t being empowered to block development. There are also real environmental limits to further development in the south. Moreover there are a range of different voices within government, from apparent supporters of localism to those arguing essentially for the marketisation of planning. This may yet return to trouble the government, though political hopes should not rest on the agenda collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
• The proposed mechanisms for neighbourhood plans are also complex and cumbersome, likely to be slow to produce and unable to resist development. It’s possible that there will not be a rush to get involved once this becomes apparent, though it’s also clear that being involved will only be an option for well resourced neighbourhood groups.

There was also considerable discussion about the scope for fighting back and the capacity of planning to respond to this agenda in a progressive way:

• Neighbourhood planning was acknowledged as politically problematic, since many of those present had long argued for more genuine community planning. The failure to resource this was, however, a symbol of the government’s true commitments. However, it was also felt that neighbourhood planning could be co-opted as a tool for progressive purposes.
• It was also felt, though, that many local authorities and professional planners lacked the necessary skills or commitments to take on this challenge.
• In general the planning voice was considered weak and compromised. Professional and other pressure groups are constrained by the need to work with government, academics seems slow to respond and unwilling to take sides and there is little sense that planning has any progressive supporters at all in Whitehall or wider political channels.

What’s worth fighting for?

In the afternoon the discussion moved on to consider the values that a progressive conception of planning would seek to defend. Michael Edwards offered his thoughts on what some of the key campaigning points, alliances and instruments might be (download a summary word file on the right). He was followed by Duncan Bowie who outlined a manifesto for housing and planning policy based on work he has done with the Highbury Group in London (links and files again available on the right). This was based on an analysis that set out a series of preconditions for housing delivery, and then showed how successive governments had failed to meet them.

Though there was not necessarily full agreement on the agenda for a progressive planning there was a lively discussion about the ideological roots of the current agenda, and the way that planning and planners should position themselves politically to react to the challenges it posed. Key points here focused around:

• A need to communicate what planning is and what it’s for: people struggle to relate to the bureaucratic complexity of the system when they engage with it and it becomes an easy target, but there are many ways in which people do experience (and get angry about) issues which only planning can resolve: house prices, or the cost and length of their daily commute, or the closure of local shops. There is a need to connect this kind of argument to a positive role for planning in the public mind.
• There is a need to connect this kind of argument to a positive role for planning in the public mind.
• The crux of this lies around a conception of the commons and the common good, and this represents a much wider progressive political agenda that images of the good city can help to shape
• This needs to be done at a moral-political as well as an evidence-based professional level
• It needs to involve a range of alliances, making the case for planning to be a part of progressive responses on issues such as public health and climate change, but also as part of the wider campaign against the cuts
• Examining planning’s own culpability: there is no single ‘planning’ voice and it is certainly not necessarily progressive, large parts of the profession have been co-opted into the neoliberal agenda, others have proven unwilling to get beyond technical argumentation or to take a strong stand against governmental agendas. For some, the discipline as a whole has failed to examine its own impacts, successes and failures and as a result is not able to articulate a clear sense of its own values.
• Overall, certain pillars of a progressive planning were forwarded: questions of land value and of planning as a progressive intervention in the workings of property markets; how to empower people to participate democratically and take control of processes that affect their lives; and how to re-assert some conception of a collective public interest were all suggested.

What’s to be done?

This led on to a discussion of the possible responses and actions that might be developed through PNUK and other channels. It was felt that a manifesto for planning was perhaps not the right goal, but that a strong and ongoing debate about the values of progressive planning was necessary (for recent work along these lines see the TCPA’s future of planning work, or PNUK’s draft statement of principles).
A series of possible actions were proposed, including:

• To encourage all interested parties to contribute their thoughts about the event, the government agenda and the principles that should underpin a progressive planning. This can be done in writing and posted on the website as part of an ongoing conversation.
• Production of a short article for Planning magazine offering a critical comment on the agenda
• To keep track of and contribute to the development of possible tools to support neighbourhood planning, e.g. lists of questions/ prompts to help neighbourhoods shape progressive, people’s plans
• To write up and collate existing stories, or produce short films about the difference that good and bad planning can make, e.g. the implications of losing strategic level planning
• To seek some charitable funding to pursue the last two as a project
• A follow up meeting in a couple of months asking where we go from here, how we build alliances, what research and analysis we can do, how to widen the base for alternatives .ie. to develop a campaign which focuses not just on planning but on land, property and the built environment generally   

We hope to take forward work on these themes in the coming months. If you’re interested in getting involved then contact either Andy Inch (a.inch@sheffield.ac.uk) or Tim Marshall (tmarhsall@brookes.ac.uk).

 Particular thanks to our speakers, but also to all those who attended and made this such a stimulating event.