Members vs Evidence - How do we get the balance right? - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

This is top of the agenda for us at basingstoke & Deane, not because of a change of administration here, but because - to our great relief - the RSS revocation (in our case the SE Plan) means we no longer have to use an externally imposed house building target. The challenge is, how do we agree on a target we can call our own? Although I believe we have as dug deep as any council into the evidence, the most coherent part of the evidence (demographic forecasts) includes a built-in self-fulfilling prophecy, and is in any case built on shaky data foundations. Our clear and consistent policy has been 'the right numbers and types of houses in the right places'. But how do we get to know what is 'right'? In the absence of reliable 'evidence' of a formal kind, how do we reach, explain and defend a set of policies that will deliver what is 'right'? One thing I'd like to see is a much shorter time frame. In public engagement, my next door neighbour cannot be expected to have any way of thinking about what is needed in his or her community for the next twenty years. Better to have policies that require continual monitoring of what is really happening out there, what effect existing policies are having, and feedback that changes policies in a more flexible and dynamic way based on current and recent evidence, rather than on forecasts based mainly on dodgy data from the past, when what can be certain is that the future will be different! All suggestions and clues welcome!

I think you're right in terms of thinking about how monitoring should be more about evaluation, and examining the impact of policies on the ground. This should always have been a 'plus' of the new (in 2004), flexible system. The policies in the plan should be able to be altered to respond to monitoring, without having to re-write the whole strategy. However, no-one really got that far yet! I agree also about the idea of thinking shorter term. However, I do also think that a degree of 'certainty' (and I use the term advisedly at the moment) built in through a long term strategy is essential. We should be able to combine both. Perhaps the worrying thing is the point you make about the evidence. It is still going to be of prime importance, but if even you don't trust it, you have to look at why not and how to change it. What are the shaky foundations it is built on, for example? Coventry have done some work on doing their own projections, presumably without a 'built-in self-fulfilling prophecy'. It may well be worth a look on their website for starters. We at PAS are looking to talk to them about it in more detail as well.

Adam, I don't think for us the balance is about whether or not to review our CS, because we haven't got them yet! The balancing act we will have to play will be between 'evidence' and 'community views' and achieving consensus. We are undertaking work with the counties examining household projections and will be doing extensive community engagement, but I still don't think we're clear on how to reconcile the two further down the line. Harriet