As the new UK government starts to take shape, we have an interesting task on our hands. Though the full new cabinet has not been announced, Chris Huhne (LD) will be the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary and Eric Pickles (Con) will be Communities Secretary. It is not yet known who the Environment Secretary will be.
Why does this matter? Frankly, because the Conservative positions on planning, design, biodiversity and the landscape were a shambles before the election and in many respects they seemed to have little grasp at all of what these things might mean even conceptually, let alone in terms of practical and deliverable policy.
Over the past year, the LI has engaged with the Conservative shadow team and contributed to the internal development process which produced their environment policy. We have also commented on their draft planning policies, which seemed to us to fall a long way short of the level of coherence one might expect from a party expecting to form a government in a matter of weeks. On the other hand, the Liberal Democrats were in some respects the most enlightened of the major parties on landscape-related issues. They talked knowledgeably about green infrastructure, and they are, as far as we can tell, serious about promoting green space and biodiversity.
This seems likely to produce a curate’s egg of a government, with part of the cabinet very much on our wavelength, and another part tuned in to a station in a foreign language. On the positive side, we will have some key people in the new cabinet who really will get our message in a way few cabinet ministers have done before, and we will have to take the best possible advantage of this while the opportunity remains.
While the battle of ideas will continue on this front, the news on employment prospects for landscape architects threatens to get considerably grimmer. In late April, there was a shock announcement that over 250 jobs in the Northern Ireland Planning Service are under threat, and this could well include the entire team of landscape architects working within the service.
NI Ministers and Assembly members have been lobbied both by the LI centrally and by the local branch, who were also urging the importance of retaining the landscape team with their Westminster candidates in the final phase of the election campaign. So far, we have had the most positive response from MLAs of the Ulster Unionist Party, who seem to have grasped most readily the significance of what the proposed cuts would entail.
All of the devolved governments have been advised of reduced funding allocations, and local authorities across the country are bracing themselves for drastic cuts echoing those of the early 1980s. Such cuts threaten not only members who work in local government and the public sector, but also the members working on projects commissioned by them. Large-scale cuts combined with ill thought-out Conservative planning reforms and a cash-starved private sector could lead to what has been rather delicately described as a ‘double-dip recession’.
At a Construction Industry Council meeting yesterday I heard it referred to for the first time as a ‘nuclear winter’.