Sprawl’s Silver Jubilee

Given this country’s propensity for bad policy to flow out of Whitehall, I sometimes wonder if we should have jubilees celebrating the moment long-term destructive policies were launched.

It’s coming up to the 25 year Silver Jubilee of John Prescott’s defenestration and destruction of his powerful Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, following the 2001 general election. A quarter of a century’s destructive policy, promoted by the ever-more powerful Treasury, followed.

I’ve lived through that miserable process, which began with the Treasury’s Barker reviews of housing supply and land use planning to today, when we have a new and destructive Planning and Infrastructure Act and yet another horrifically bad and destructive NPPF proposal, the last of which is already trashing our green belts and much else.

Throughout this grotesque process, one objective has burned like and out-of-control industrial fire – the belief that smashing up (sorry, “streamlining”) the planning system would prompt builders to build more.

“Firms of all sizes, from SMEs to FTSE-100 companies, and all types of development retail, commercial, residential, industrial and warehousing – need development plans and planning decisions that are sufficiently responsive to the pressures discussed above so that they can expand their businesses and serve the needs of their customers,” warbled Kate Barker’s 2006 review of planning.

Now, pause to remember that, in the 20 years since, we’ve degraded and destroyed England’s planning policy guidance, installed a National Planning Policy Framework that gave huge blank cheques to developers, brought further destructive changes into that Framework at regular intervals and promoted legislation to further damage planning.

So, should we assume our house builders are now showing themselves desperate to meet the ever more fanciful building targets flowing out of Whitehall? Stop laughing at the back there.

A Government statistical release last week demonstrated that the number of planning applications received dropped by almost a third following the 2008 Crash – and has continued to decline ever since. This despite the planning system being torn apart at the behest of developers and their admirers at the Treasury.

Quarterly number of planning applications received, decided and granted (thousands) [MHCLG]

Meanwhile, house builder Berkeley Homes this week has said it will stop buying development land, hiring staff or engaging sub-contractors because of the state of the economy.

Some years ago, economics students at Manchester University revolted against the neoliberal orthodoxy they were being fed and demanded economic theories which weren’t largely designed to enrich the wealthy.

I sometimes wonder if it’s time that students at planning schools realised their chosen profession is being reduced to a mere adjunct of architecture and development, and started looking at creating a profession geared up to address the massive challenge of rethinking our geography to meet the vast challenges of the 21^st century.

Jon Reeds