Localism Implementing the Red Tory Agenda - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

I must admit I didn’t spend much time reading “Open Source Planning” when it was first published, I couldn’t see for example how in practical terms plan-making could start “at ‘ground level’ in neighbourhoods with every single resident of the neighbourhood approached to take part” or how “a presumption that the ‘modules’ of the local plan provided by each neighbourhood will be incorporated in the final plan unless there are strong grounds for modifying them” would actually be realised. I therefore expected that these ideas would not be followed through. It is now however clear that for as long as this coalition government lasts we are clearly going to see even more radical, though not necessarily new ideas put into practice. If the ground level up modular approach is to be achieved then the changes to planning have only just begun. The end state is not yet known, except that the smaller the state the better. The vehement dislike of centralist targets and measuring them as tools of policy and service development and delivery is giving way to a “distributist” approach. Phillip Blond in “Red Tory” argues for an associative relationship between public sector workers and the communities they work with. Blond also points out that the community needs to be given real incentives for this to work and we are beginning to see how this might play out in relation to housing delivery. While Blond does not have a great deal to say about how this will be work in the field of planning, “Open Source Planning” has started that job and the decentralization bill might well finish it. It is clear however that as Blond’s ideas are followed through we must expect to see even more radical changes to local government than we have so far had sight of. The restructuring proposals for CLG published a couple of days ago, for example don’t seem to have enough detail in them yet to judge what this might look like. After this rather lengthy intro, I just wanted to put forward an idea about how one small aspect of the planners work might be affected, namely the implementation and review of policies and see what people thought about it. In this hypothetical example a newly regenerated (and successful by most measures) major city centre still faces a few hurdles, in particular to grow its office/commercial area, which has not for a long time done quite as well as other core cities but the signs had been looking good. At the same time it has nearby a major development opportunity which many recognise could play a major role in the future of the whole city region. Naturally the success of both areas is desirable, but it looks like the timing needs to be right or an alternative competing centre of gravity could be created potentially threatening the good work of the last decade or more as well as bringing about a perhaps less sustainable pattern of land uses, growth and decline. In the not so distant past we might have tried to find “market signals” that we could constantly monitor to tell us when the time was right to release the planning ‘sluices’, an easy job I am sure we would all agree. It seems that we can now expect to turn to an alternative way of making this judgement which involves the direct input of the concerned community. I would be really interested to read peoples views on how this could be made to work as soon as possible please. In thinking about this it is worth noting that in Blond’s analysis of what has gone wrong with Britain and global systems is as much the over-dominance of big capitalism as it is a big state. Finally I would point out that Blond believes that if his approach is put into practice “people would no longer need to leave the North for the job markets of the South. Population could spread more evenly, as opportunities and genuine access to wealth and markets, to careers and the good life, could be found beyond the boundaries of the M25.”