Planners – the new enemy within?

Ian Phillips MRTPI, CMLI, says David Cameron's comments last weekend that paint planning officials as the "enemies of enterprise" is intemperate language for a PM...

Ian Phillips

In his speech to the Conservative Party spring forum, Prime Minister David Cameron identified what he called “enemies of enterprise" and has pledged that the Government will confront them. The enemies, according to Cameron, are "town hall officials who take forever with those planning decisions that can be make or break for businesses" and  "the bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible”.

This is intemperate language for a prime minister. It unfairly blames public servants for operating regulatory controls and systems that have evolved through past parliamentary debate, scrutiny and legislation. Much of our legislation has emerged to address adverse effects, events or behaviour that have occurred as a result of the absence or ineffectiveness of controls.

The English planning system has developed to control the use of land as a limited resource in a small country with a relatively large population. It initially responded to concerns about unregulated development leading to ribbon development, urban sprawl, erosion of the countryside and loss of local identity and character, sometimes affecting our most precious landscapes. It has always sought to balance the inevitable tensions between narrowly-defined vested interests and those related to wider and longer-term public benefit. It has evolved to promote and enable good, well-designed development and allow the acceptable, while protecting much of the environment from harm. It has incorporated over the years an informed approach to the importance of landscape issues. 

It embodies checks and balances, with most decisions being made by democratically elected local representatives, following public consultation and advice from professional staff. It incorporates the right of appeal to an independent and professional inspectorate. The process inevitably takes some time and may create frustrations, but this is widely accepted as worthwhile to restrict the unacceptable and promote the desirable. And it is worth noting that the Government’s own statistics indicate that 80 per cent of planning applications in 2009/10 were approved, which may indicate that the system has generally promoted a good standard of application.

I am worried that the Government’s declaration of war on planning and, by implication, those professions associated with good planning, such as landscape architecture, will create long-term damage. The indications are not good. They include the abolition of regional planning, cutting of funding to CABE and Planning Aid, potential shredding of national planning policy advice, promotion of potentially unrepresentative neighbourhood planning – if the proposed neighbourhood forums are not democratically elected – and the loss of skills and expertise in most of the publicly funded organisations that contribute to the planning system. Will landscape design and management, and the treatment of open space generally, be viewed as a bureaucratic obstruction to enterprise? The writing is on the wall.

It cannot be in the national interest to dismantle a widely respected (if not necessarily loved) system of land use regulation and strategic planning. We can see the unhappy results of a less regulated approach in the sprawling, ubiquitous suburbs and roadscapes of cities in the USA and Australia.

Mark Twain said: “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.” England’s limited supply of land and its rich heritage of landscape and townscape is a capital asset that needs to be managed sensitively and carefully. Issues such as climate change and the sustainable use of resources need to inform and influence decisions. Favouring an unrestricted free-market approach to development fails to heed the lessons of history and is likely to end in tears. We should expect the ‘greenest government ever’ to manage and invest in our environment competently and to demonstrate a better awareness of the broader implications of its decisions.

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