The landscape is changing. I don’t mean the landscape you can physically see from your window, but the way in which we plan for that landscape, its people, places and wildlife.
Where I live in Cambridgeshire, there used to be a strategic plan for the county, and then a more detailed, local plan for the district. In some parts of the country, mostly in the larger urban areas, these were combined in a single, ‘unitary development plan’. Back in 2004 the county plan (or ‘structure plan’) was replaced by an even more strategic plan, the regional strategy. Mine covered the counties or former counties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
2012 will be the year in which this all changes again, at least in England outside London (London is always a special case). The incoming Government has always made plain its intention to get rid of the regional strategies, largely because of their highly-contentious housing targets, but also because of concerns they took power away from people. The Localism Act 2011 allows them to do this, and also introduces an entirely new layer of planning, neighbourhood plans. So where I live I’ll have a local plan for my district, but also possibly a neighbourhood plan for my town, or part of my town.
This is all very well, but the natural environment doesn’t recognise administrative boundaries. The river which is the main feature of my town passes through many local authorities and probably dozens of neighbourhoods on its way to the sea. And many people in my town actually work or shop somewhere else. There’s still a need to plan at a more strategic level for people and for wildlife.
The Government proposes to deal with this by giving local authorities and other public bodies a ‘duty to cooperate’. We welcome the way in which the duty was strengthened during the passage of the Localism Act through Parliament. But will it really deliver effective strategic planning?
That’s one of the questions we pose in our response to the Government’s consultation on its environmental reports on the revocation of regional strategies. To cut a long story short, the road to abolishing regional strategies has been very bumpy. A series of legal challenges more or less forced the Government to consider the environmental implications of getting rid of regional strategies. Unfortunately it’s a case of too little, too late. Too late to make any real difference, too little because it only asked, do you get rid of them entirely, or not at all (how about asking, ‘what good environmental policies could be saved?’). Moreover, the reports place unquestioning faith in the environmental benefits of the Government’s planning reforms; anyone who’s been following the debate over the National Planning Policy Framework will know how contentious that is. Our verdict on the environmental reports is, nul points.
But there are things that Government could still do to encourage effective strategic planning, and our response suggests six, which I summarise as:
Here’s to effective strategic planning in 2012 and beyond.