One rule for the rich?

Can't say fairer than Simon Hoggart in The Guardian:
'Let me get this straight. They passed a law this week which will make it easier for well-to-do people who want more rooms to build extensions in their gardens.
Meanwhile, people who live in social housing will lose their benefits if they have more rooms than they strictly need. In the same way, benefits must be cut for the poor to encourage them to work. Wealthy people, by contrast, are getting a large tax reduction, to encourage them to work.
The other day Channel 4 re-broadcast the famous Clive Anderson show in which Peter Cook played a variety of appalling characters, including a demented judge. As I recall, it included this exchange: Anderson: So you're saying there's one law for the rich …
Cook: Oh, no, there's far more than one law for the rich.'

Planning reforms - evolution or revolution?

Tomorrow is the NPPF's 1st birthday and the occasion has woken me from my blogging slumber to wonder if we are witnessing an evolution or a revolution? Let's look at some of the main reforms:
1 NPPF: a revolution in terms of its brevity, but only an evolution of policy content. The impact of the end of the transitional period is being debated elsewhere, but I suspect that some developers in some parts of the country (those with no plans or post 2004 plans out of kilter with the NPPF) will be submitting highly speculative applications. What could make the policy landscape more revolutionary would be if valuable extant guidance is deleted on March 28th, as suggested by Lord Taylor.
2 Abolition of Regional Plans: a revolutionary idea that had to evolve as 2 rounds of SEA took place. The gap left in 'bigger than local' planning remains to be filled. The Duty to Co-operate could be a sticking plaster in danger of not covering the gap (wound?) and peeling off.
3 Local Enterprise Partnerships: their potential role as envisaged by Lord Heseltine is truly revolutionary - it appears to encourage local government reorganisation by the backdoor, being led by unelected and unaccountable business leaders.
4 Extensions to nationally significant infrastructure projects regime: an evolutionary concept, although one that could just as easily been achieved by extending the call-in powers of the Secretary of State.
5 Extensions to permitted development rights for changes of use: an evolution in terms of its use of existing legislation, but a revolution in that it will be carried out against the clear wishes of many local authorities and could lead to plenty of unintended consequences.
6 Neighbourhood plans: an evolution of a revolutionary idea bogged down in red tape and looking like its only to reach fruition in wealthier corners of England.
7 The public profile of planners: Hey, we got our own series on BBC2 and came out of it looking like reasonable human beings (not enemies of enterprise) doing a tricky job.We're even in danger of becoming sex symbols - we got someone into The Guardian's Blind Date (did they talk about the DMPO? Apparently not, they want to meet again) and the love interest in BBC4's Parks and Recreation is a city planner. A true revolution.
 

Sustainable Development RIP?

Today's speech by the Prime Minister David Cameron to the CBI perhaps marks the end of the 30 years lip service paid to promoting sustainable development. He made it quite clear that economic growth is more important than anything else, including maintaining legal rights to challenge and European legislation.

I've always been taught to consider what the audience wants to hear about when planning a presentation and I'm sure he knew the CBI would lap this up. But the section of his speech on reducing the scope for legal challenges to infrastructure projects seems not to be based on evidence. Andrew Lainton and the BBC has already analysed the growth in legal challenges and the majority of them are on asylum and immigration. So planning, justice, social development and environmental protection look likely to pay the price for the unfounded fears (or, perhaps the unfortunate experiences) of a few CBI members.

Does planning have a future?

My mind and body have been elsewhere for a few months, but planning has scrambled its way back to the front of my consciousness again and I don't think I've ever been more depressed about the future of the profession.

I'm struggling to think why any young person considering a career path would even consider planning, given the Government's constant and strident demonisation of its practitioners and the relentless attempts to take power away from local authorities through the Centralism Bill (aka Growth and Infrastructure Bill), changes to permitted development rights, attacks on construction standards and doubtless other fiendish, risible schemes being dreamed up by the wunderkind at the Policy Exchange and their chums.

Without new planners coming into the profession, planning will get harder for those remaining, decision-making will get slower and poorer and calls to scale back planning  will escalate. And lo, planning disappears down the plughole.

Census 2011 - where will all the people go?

Today's first census returns prove what many have suspected - that London and the SE is getting overcrowded. This should (but probably won't) get politicians thinking and debating about if this tilt towards the most crowded corner can be sustained given the pressures on infrastructure, housing, the countryside, climate change etc etc. Most sensible planners will be able to see the problem and I hope our Institute and others such as the TCPA make the most of it. Certainly, the Map for England could come in useful now.

Will localism deliver the homes and infrastructure in the right places at the right times? So far, the conclusion has to be that it looks unlikely. Local plans are almost always delivering less homes than the RSSs forced on them. There seems to be confusion over what the duty to co-operate really means and the effectiveness of the duty to help deliver hard and soft infrastructure or deliver resilience to climate change seems untested.

An extraordinary dream...that urban planning could change people's lives

This was the killer line from an excellent BBC programme in the Secret History of Our Streets series about urban planning in London's East End that made me cry - and how often can you say that about our beloved art and science?

The programme featured Arnold Circus - the first council estate in the country built by the London County Council on the site of appalling slums.  The programme cleverly used a new poster boy for the planning system - a fresh faced chap in his early 20s called Finn - to explain the ideas of the fresh-faced, but spectacularly-whiskered, chap in his early 20s called Frederick who led the LCC team that devised the new layout based around a wedding cake tiered park which provided enough spacious flats with running water to house all the ex-slum dwellers. 

The programme featured the descendants of the original slums (sadly priced out of the new flats) and the mainly Jewish immigrants who fist settled there. They survived the brownshirts of the 1930s, the Blitz of the 1940s. There were also inspiring (to left libertarians) stories of the radical squatters of the 1970s who forced a U turn from the Tory led GLC to allow Bangladeshi squatters to occupy vacant Council flats and were then  rehoused in flats elsewhere in the East End.

Arnold Circus is now a yuppies dream - a mile from the City, flats worth a quarter of a million and chichi little shops. History repeats itself though - the Bangladeshi families cannot afford to live there and will, sadly but probably inevitably, be forced out. Butchers have been replaced by shops selling over-priced trinkets and baubles; an old school is now an art gallery. The most hilarious line came from one of the new yuppy flat-owners who admired the area becaise it contains 'real people', presumably unlike him!

There's an accompanying booklet with the series which includes copies of Charles Booth's original maps - one of the first attempts to map social geography. The other episodes are available on the BBC website as well. Essential viewing for politicians, planners, architects and housing experts, this clearly shows that urban planning can change people's lives for the better and that - left to its own devices, the lack of planning will change people's lives for worse.

Shared spaces - mainly for cars?

Yikes, its nearly 2 months since I last posted. A thousand apologies to my avid followers. I hope you've been busy digesting the NPPF and have perhaps come to a conclusion about what its going to do to the planning system.

Anyway, more about planning in action. I've been on a couple of site visits in my spare time with day trips to London and Brighton. In both places I saw shared space streets in action. In Exhibition Road (top) near to the national museums a street has been expensively paved and pedestrians set free to roam among the vehicles. The idea is that they will be tamed by the prospect of running someone over. This scheme caused a terrible hullabaloo in the Evening Standard when it was introduced. Standing at the traffic lights for a few minutes it seemed as if it had made little real difference. Cars, vans and taxis still carved ahead and pedestrians fled their approach. Things were a bit more civilised towards South Kensington station.

In Brighton meanwhile, a street near the Royal Pavilion has been given the same treatment, but much more successfully in my humble etc. Vehicles were definitely tamed, pedestrians sauntered down the middle, bikes weaved their way in between and cafes and bars spilled out into the thoroughfare. An evening visit revealed an even more continental atmosphere with buskers and revelers aplenty. The difference between here and Exhibition Road seemed obvious - it was a question of the scale of buildings (more human = better) and the types of uses (more lolling about = better) and perhaps the seemingly more militant nature of Brighton's residents.

Of course, whether cities can afford to build and maintain these kinds of shared spaces in these cash-strapped times is debatable.