The planning power vacuum

Eric Pickles announcement that housing targets are scrapped and with them the Regional Spatial Strategies is all well and good, but what do Council’s do now?

The Conservatives and Liberals current view is that all things to do with central government are bad. They have an ideological aversion to the role of government in society; therefore planning matters should be devolved away from government.

By removing the only mechanism that existed to provide a framework and context for development beyond the individual local authority and placing the responsibility on local Council’s for determining numbers, the coalition have simultaneously created a planning vacuum and removed themselves from responsibility for its consequences.

How many houses do you know you can build if the money for a new motorway junction, or hospital or school isn’t confirmed?

Is there a role for the old County Structure Plans?

Now Council’s are waiting on every announcement as they have no idea which way to jump, and the uncertainty that this creates in the development industry is not healthy in a time of fragile recovery.

The Con Dem idea is to devolve the responsibility, but at the moment this responsibility is handed down to Councils without the means to deliver. The government are able to blame the Council’s if they get it wrong because it’s their role now to determine how many houses get built, where and with what infrastructure.

There is an idea that Council’s could keep a sum of money from each unit built, a Council Tax rebate to the authority for infrastructure. This could be millions for localities based on building thousands of units, but it will be a trickle down fund that will not meet major infrastructure costs of motorways, hospitals or schools. Also, Council’s do have a tendency to divert monies into pet projects rather than focusing investment on the bigger picture.

The aim of this localism is sound, to empower local communities to directly influence what housing gets built where.

In reality the localism the current Coalition are delivering is devolved responsibility to Council’s who, as a reaction to over a decade of disempowerment, will horde their new powers and decide for communities without necessarily listening to them. The Councils that use the new framework in the manner it is intended by truly enabling a bottom up planning system will be few.

It’s all well and good unpicking the previous government’s policies and structures, but you need a coherent idea of what you are replacing it with. Interestingly, as we slowly move towards the publishing of the Localism Bill, the drip of reality is taking hold. SHLAA’s are now valuable pieces of evidence, Council’s can now work together in cross-boundary economic partnerships, and entities such as Thames Gateway which make sense and are good examples of regionalism working are now to be kept in some form. Opposition rhetoric is becoming government reality

Watch this space; localism won’t go that far because it isn’t in the politician’s interests that it does.

Dr Paul Harvey, Curtin&Co

More political commentary from Curtin&Co

Stay tuned for our Labour consultant's analysis of the coalition's planning power vacuum.................

Coalition halves eco-town funding

The coalition government has halved funding for eco-town projects, the Department for Communities and Local Government has confirmed.

In a letter sent last week to local authorities working on plans for eco-town developments, housing minister Grant Shapps told council leaders he was reducing funding for 2010/11 from a total of £70 million to £35 million.

Earlier this year the previous Labour government pledged £60 million to fund homes and infrastructure projects on the first four confirmed eco-town sites in Hampshire, Cornwall, Norfolk and Oxfordshire. A further £10 million was pledged for 11 projects in the second wave of the eco-towns programme. Those amounts have now been reduced to £30 million and £5 million respectively.

A spokesman for the DCLG said: "While there has been a 50 per cent cut in eco-town funding awards for 2010/2011, this still provides a good level of start-up funding for these projects in the current circumstances."

Pickles blasts ERDF mismanagement

The Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles MP, today pledged to end the mismanagement of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

The Communities and Local Government accounts for last year, laid today, show the extent of the financial irregularities in the administration of the ERDF by the previous Government. The failure to ensure compliance with EC rules has left a bill for more than £150 million to be picked up by taxpayers.

EC Auditors found instances where projects allegedly failed to keep proper records or used the funding inappropriately. The Department is challenging these issues robustly. But where there is no convincing case, the EC will impose financial penalties on the Government for these failures of monitoring and, where the misspent funds can't be recovered from projects, the taxpayer has to bear the loss.

"The 'financial irregularities' which have been reported mean that we are likely to need to find up to £155 million to pay back to Europe.

"This mismanagement ends now.

"I am urgently reviewing how we manage and distribute these funds to make sure taxpayers have confidence that their money is not being wasted. And I will be pressing the EC Commissioner about the needless bureaucracy which holds up the money from being spent to kick start the recovery in Britain."

Pickles calls for planners input

Secretary of state for communities Eric Pickles has invited "council staff and sector experts" to suggest regulations which could be scrapped to improve their ability to do their jobs.

Unveiling the initiative today Pickles published a list of what he described as "unnecessary regulations, ridiculous micromanagement or outdated laws".

The list includes a proposal to combine the Town and Country Planning (General Development Procedure) Order 1995/419 and 16 amendment orders into one. Pickles said this would "greatly clarify the planning application system for local authorities, applicants, and other interested parties. The greater clarity provided will free-up valuable local planning authority officer time, which can be redirected towards more fruitful actives than wading through pages of amendments to secondary legislation."

Pickles LGA speech

Click on the link below to view Eric Pickles' speech to the Local Government Association this week:


http://www.24dash.com/news/local_government/2010-07-07-Eric-Pickles-speech-to-the-Local-Government-Association-annual-conference-in-full

Pickles scraps Labours 3 million homes target

Labour's plans to build three million new homes by 2020 have been scrapped.

Gordon Brown announced plans shortly after becoming Prime Minister in July 2007 to build three million new homes by 2020 in a bid to stimulate new house building.

However the Government said yesterday that "the reality is that construction has slowed down so much the country is facing the lowest peacetime housebuilding rates since 1924".

Mr Pickles said he was "hammering another nail in the coffin of unwanted and an unaccountable regional bureaucracy".

"Communities will no longer have to endure the previous Government's failed Soviet tractor-style top-down planning targets. They were terrible, expensive, time-consuming ways to impose house building and worst of all threatened the destruction of the Green Belt.

"They were a national disaster that robbed local people of their democratic voice, alienating them and entrenching opposition against new development."

Pickles confirms RSS scrap

Secretary of state for communities Eric Pickles has announced the revocation of Regional Strategies (RSSs) with immediate effect.

Pickles made the announcement in a letter sent today to chief planning officers in Local Planning Authorities across England.

The letter includes guidance which reads: "In the longer term the legal basis for Regional Strategies will be abolished through the 'Localism Bill' that we are introducing in the current Parliamentary session.


Click on the link below to read the letter in full, which includes a Q&A appendix:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/1631904.pdf

U-turn on LEP funding

The coalition Government has withdrawn its stipulation that the public-private partnerships with which it intends to replace the regional development agencies will have to fund their own day-to-day running costs.

Earlier this week, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Communities and Local Government jointly wrote to councils inviting them to bid to become new local enterprise partnerships.
A version of the letter uploaded on the DCLG website on Tuesday morning said that LEPs would have no dedicated funding for running costs. The news cast doubt on coalition government assurances that, in areas of the country where councils and businesses backed RDAs, they would be able to retain them more or less as they were, albeit in a rebadged form.

Localism Bill Analysis

The cut and thrust of the Localism Bill looks set to focus on three main elements: transparency, accountability and, most prominently, devolved decision-making powers.

Devolved decision-making - Regional Spatial Strategies and Comprehensive Area Assessments will be consigned to the scrap-heap in a planning system shakeup that promises to be ruthlessly comprehensive in tackling ‘waste’ and centralised bureaucracy.

However, in spite of some over-zealous rhetoric and enthusiastic cuts of RDAs amongst other cross-Council organisations, do not expect ‘umbrella’ authorities to disappear entirely. The Conservatives Green Paper in early 2010 is clear in its assertion that it is uniformity in the application of planning procedures that is the enemy, not the administrative network itself.

Greg Clarke’s announcement this week regarding obligatory cooperation between Council’s on cross-boundary policy further acknowledges the limitations of localism as a panacea for the ills of Labour’s planning system. Elements of its ties to central government will quite necessarily and sensibly remain, and it would be a mistake to assume that some of the slash and burn rhetoric flying around parliamentary press conferences will translate into concrete legislative proposals.

Accountability - Unelected regional bodies will almost certainly go in their entirety, with Local Authority Leader Boards the first to feel the sharp end of the Localism agenda. The proposal of a democratically elected Infrastructure Unit will be of particular interest to developers involved with Transport projects, who may find political motivation begins to play a greater role in securing project approval and funding. The power for residents to instigate local referendums on ‘any local issue’ will prove a thorny topic, and is likely to be dropped at least in part if the coalition is to avoid stalling development further following the standoff that has emerged since Eric Pickles letter to Councils on 27th May.

Transparency - There is a real appetite for Council boss salaries in particular to be exposed, a desire that has verged on blood-lust in the local press since the Coalition’s formation brought with it a sense of opportunity for radical reform. Councils will publish the names and wages of salaried staff members, as (in all likelihood) will the vast majority of all other publicly funded bodies.


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Speculation over the Localism Bill’s contents will doubtless continue until it is first tabled in Westminster in September (a date that will be subject to the successful passage of George Osborne’s emergency budget). The potential disparity between the ‘localism’ of Conservative rhetoric and the Bill’s legislative program is certainly there, although one suspects that by and large the Localism Bill will deliver, at least in part, on the Conservative’s program of greater flexibility and civil engagement in local government. Whether the Coalition’s legislative program will have its desired effects, on the other hand, remains to be seen.......