Everyone seems to be expecting the CSR to be a doomsday for business. I am not surprised that planners are worried for their jobs – it is a feeling most industries will understand well after the last few years.
However, speaking regularly to politicians, there is a firm belief that the CSR is going to hit local government even worse than has been anticipated. When this has sunk in and budget deficits have become clear where will they find the plug for their spending gap? Development.
Localism says that there will be incentives for councils to build in order to meet their housing requirement (read “target”, if you like) and, even if this is not at the level that Shapps has been promoting to date, it will still be necessary in order to fund community projects.
So we should be looking at localism in a different way: as an opportunity.
The Government is right that it will mean less of the top-down, target-driven development which we saw under New Labour, but this does not (indeed, it cannot) mean the end of development full stop.
Instead, we need to begin from a new starting point: not the pristine masterplan which has been worked up for months before being released upon an unsuspecting public; but with that public itself. Planners will still be key because nobody else fully understands the complexities of the job they do. Under localism, though, they will not be the first cog turning in the planning machine any more, but will have to learn to respond to what the community wants. In this way, effective communication is the most important feature of localism – mediating between two distinct parties (communities and developers, planners, etc) to create win-win developments.
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