Calvin Po - Planning a Town and a Country in a hundred and eighty pages AND EIGHTY PAGES

MINISTRY

OF

WORKS

AND

PLANNING

PLANNING AND A COUNTRY ON ITTEE COMM EXPERAT TOWN IN A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY PAGES

COMPENSATION AND

RMENT TTE BE A EXPLORATION OF THE UTHWATT COMMITTEE’S REPORT THROUGH A WALK IN HATFIELD

FINAL REPORT

Presented

of Works and Planning Command of His Majesty

by the Minister

Parliament by

September,

to

1942

PUBLISHED BY HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE be purchased from

423 Oxford Street, London, w. 1 P.O. Box 569, London, s'e.1 1 St. Andrew's Crescent, Cardiff 13a Castle Street, Edinburgh, 2 Tower Lane, Bristol, 1 39 King Street, Manchester, 2 80 Chichester Street, Belfast Edmund Street, Birmingham, 3 or from any Bookseller

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To

House, Kingsway, London, w.c.2

History and Theory Studies 19+2 Thesis by Calvin Po Reprinted

1952

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION 6d. net OF ARCHITECTURE Price 4s. SCHOOL

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–1–

CALLING AT HATFIELD The train journey from central London to Hatfield, Hertfordshire feels like a condensed history of Britain’s urbanism and town planning in the early 20th century, all in a brief 33 minutes.

Around the Kings Cross area, lingering examples what would have been the overcrowded and ‘diseased’ Victorian settlements are still visible, sited cheek-by-jowl amongst what would have been noisy, polluting industries1. Remarkably, these survive despite the blanket bombing of central London by the Luftwaffe, and much later, in the 21st century, one of the biggest urban redevelopment sites in Europe2. Among what was inner-city Dickensian squalor, Lewis Cubitt’s Kings Cross Station3 gleams as a symbol of Victorian civic pride, and it is where I board the train on the Great Northern Route.

The train speeds through the late-1800s terraced residential neighbourhoods of London in a blur: Finsbury Park, Holloway, Hornsey, Alexandra Palace. Upon arriving in Barnet, however, there is a marked change in the townscape flying past in the train window. Here is the Metro-land, a marketing invention Metropolitan Railway’s marketing department in 19154 and later famously canonised by John Betjeman’s namesake BBC documentary in 1973. It would have been scenes of inner-city overcrowding like that of Kings Cross that sent middleclass families flocking to these interwar detached, semi-detached houses, repeating ad infinitum like a blanket unfurling onto London’s outskirts — this is the suburban sprawl that threatened to smother the

1) Survey of London, The King’s Road and Agar Town, 1938.

2) Wainwright, 2018.

3) Survey of London, Euston Road, 1952.

4) Forrest, 2015.

–2–

countryside in its settled, idyllic monotony, and needed to be reigned in with the eventual establishment of the Metropolitan Green Belt.

Piercing through a brief strip of Green Belt past Hadley Wood, then the M25, the train officially leaves London. Apart from the occasional town or village along the rail line, the views are now of Hertfordshire countryside. It is a patchwork of agricultural land, presumably used for some productive purpose. Despite its bucolic romanticism, it is a battleground of land and planning policy, with the land itself caught in a tussle between competing demands of development and preservation on this space-limited island.

The terminus of this Great Northern train is actually Welwyn Garden City, the second Garden City founded in England by Ebenezer Howard5. In the midst of the overcrowding and unplanned sprawl, Howard’s Garden City Movement emerged as an alternative and filled a political and legislative vacuum in positive town planning with a private effort. Its newly planned settlements under the philosophy of ‘town-country magnet’6 combined the amenity beauty of nature and socio-economic opportunity of cities, and Welwyn Garden City was one such experiment, founded in 19207.

Hatfield, however, is one stop before on the train, and also perhaps one stop before in the story of town planning, and the close proximity of the two towns means Hatfield’s “imperfections”, its preWW2 unplanned, haphazard building has been a regular source of comparison with Welwyn Garden City8, perhaps as its ‘ugly sister’ town. On that note, the train has arrived at Hatfield Station, and this is where I get off the train.

5) Smith, 2010.

6) Howard, 1902, p.17.

7) Smith, 2010.

8) The Times, Saturday, 3 January 1948, p. 5

–3–

APPOINTING THE UTHWATT COMMITTEE On the day of 29 January 1941, London was four months (almost halfway) into the Blitz. 18 miles away from Hatfield, in the Palace of Westminster, a piece of routine government business was being announced by Lord Reith1, then-Minister for Works and Buildings (and previously inaugural director-general of BBC), inside the ornate, gilded interiors of Pugin’s masterpiece, the House of Lords debating chamber. This rather quiet day of business in the House of Lords and this brief debate would mark the beginning of a radical shift in the relationship between land, land-owners and the state, and lay the groundwork for a modern system of town planning: Lord Reith was announcing the appointment of an expert Committee. The Uthwatt Committee would produce what would come to be called the Uthwatt Report.

For a short one hundred and eighty or so pages, the power of this bureaucratic, technical exercise was immense. While, as an expert committee, its recommendations were advisory and nonbinding on the government, the analysis and recommendations it produced would fundamentally alter the conception of the legislative apparatus of planning in England, and its proposals would be adapted (if not implemented in full) in the legislation that followed it, including

the Town and Country Planning Act 1944,

and the watershed Town and Country Planning Act 1947,

the definitive milestone cited as the birth of England’s modern planning system 2 .

For a Committee’s report that could claim such a large impact, its terms of reference were fairly innocuous. Its mandated purpose was to examine the long-term problem of compensation and betterment, then part of the rudimentary fiscal machinery of planning under the dysfunctional

Town and Country Planning Act 1932.

Under areas designated under ‘planning schemes’ drafted by a patchwork of local planning authorities, land owners who had their rights of land use restricted by such schemes would be entitled each time their development was refused to claim

1)

HL Deb (29 January 1941) vol. 118, col. 259-63.

2)

Ellis, 2017.

–4–

compensation of “the amount by which his property is decreased in value”3 . This notion of compensation was in line with the principles of English common law, where it is a longstanding right that the expropriation of property (or its rights and interests) by the state must only be done with fair compensation. In converse, if the planning scheme results in any increase in property value, the act allows the state to charge betterment: to “recover from the person whose property is so increased in value an amount not exceeding seventy-five per cent of the amount of that increase”4 payable “either immediately or by such instalments spread over a period not exceeding thirty years”5 , in effect a land value tax.

The intention was clearly influenced by Georgist economics of land value6: the increase in land value from action by the state (such as building vial infrastructure such as roads), should accrue to the state: a progressive vision of justice in the land system. While compensation and betterment was an attempt in theory to stop land speculation, in practice its implementation was highly flawed and imbalanced, with the valuation of betterment incredibly impractical to calculate and collect (especially ascertaining whether the state was responsible for the land value to rise7), and the high liability of incurring compensation costs while local authorities attempted to exercise their planning powers meant that the entire system was reactive and largely ineffectual8. In fact, this brief debate in the House of Lords was telling — both sides of the political divide were unanimous in recognising the flaws of the current system, with Lord Reith (Conservative) and Lord Addison (Labour) both describing it as “obstruction to planning throughout the country”9 .

It is against this context of failure where Uthwatt Report will arrive at recommending vastly strengthened and centralised powers in an attempt to resolve the compensation and betterment problem.

3)

Town and Country Planning Act 1932, s.18(1)

4)

Town and Country Planning Act 1932, s.21(1)

5)

Town and Country Planning Act 1932, s.21(6)

6)

George, 1879, Ch. 2.

7)

Uthwatt, 1942, 1942, p.17

8)

Cullingworth and Nadin, 2006, p.18

9)

HL Deb (29 January 1941) vol. 118, col. 259, 260.

–5–

The other concern much more immediate: what to do with the war damage and its reconstruction. This issue was at the forefront of the minds of lawmakers in Blitz-ridden London at the time.

In a matter of months after the appointment of the Uthwatt Committee, on 10 and 11 May 1941, Parliament suffered heavy bombing and the House of Commons was completely destroyed10.

The urgency with which the government and lawmakers contemplated the reconstruction of the Commons Chamber mirrored the urgency of the reconstruction of the country at large — the Uthwatt Committee was in its terms of reference tasked with advising “as a matter of urgency, what steps should be taken now or before the end of the war to prevent the work of reconstruction thereafter being prejudiced”11.

Despite the unifying Blitz spirit of the war, land speculation amidst the destruction was a pressing

Fig 1. Damage to the interior of the House of Commons in 1941

reality, and the government was anxious to avoid “reconstruction after the war [being] hampered or prejudiced in any way by speculative transactions or any other such individual operations carried out in advance”12 .

The long-term focus on fixing the system of compensation and betterment would benefit the more immediate aim of “stabilising the value of land required for development and redevelopment”13 in reconstruction. However, on the issue of reconstruction there is more to its scope: to consider “any extension or modification of powers to enable such land to

10) UK Parliament, (n.d.).

11) Uthwatt, 1942, p.1.

12)

HL Deb (29 January 1941) vol. 118, col. 260.

13)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.1.

–6–

be acquired by the public on an equitable basis”14 and allow for “redevelopment as a whole”15 and possibly necessitate “a complete disregard for existing layouts”16. Uthwatt’s emphasis on preventing prejudicial development and prioritising positive, comprehensive replanning is a notable step change in ambition and the role of the state. These renewed comprehensive ambitions would lead the Uthwatt Committee to reconsider where, in the exercise of planning powers by the state, to redraw the line between individual property rights and public interest, a fundamental concern of planning in the decades prior and since.

THE GENRE OF THE ‘EXPERT REPORT’ In the operations of government, despite the “growing propensity of governments to seek counsel from committees [and] commissions”, according to Susan Owens “we do not have a well-developed theory of policy advice”17. There are times, such as this, where the workings of political machinery are more clearly and incisively encapsulated in political satire than perhaps any theoretical text. Armando Iannucci’s biting political satire of British politics and government, The Thick of It (2005)18 reveals the conventional wisdom behind the political utility of the expert report, the advisory committee, the Royal Commission, and other such manifestations of independent expert advice to government. In one episode, the character of Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s fearsome ‘enforcer’, berates a minister’s decision over a particular policy, saying, “my expert would totally oppose that” and when asked about which expert has provided the advice, replied, “No idea, but I can get one by this afternoon.

You have spoken to the wrong expert. You’ve got to ask the right expert. You’ve got to know what an expert’s going to advise

14) Ibid.

15)

Ibid., p.2.

16)

Ibid., p.57.

17)

Owens, 2011, p.73.

18) Ministers who have served in various governments have testified to the surprising accuracy of this satirical comedy, even though it is fictional; sometimes its plots have even preceded actual political events in instances of life imitating art.

–7–

before he advises.”19 In pithy lines of dialogue, Iannucci sums up the inherent contradiction in ‘expert advice’ as a political tool in government: although advisor’s technical expertise lends an impression of studied objectivity, the choice and appointment of the expert is motivated by a political preference, occasionally with a view to legitimise an already foregone conclusion.

Although written six-and-a-half decades prior, not much has changed since, and the Uthwatt Committee and its eponymous Uthwatt Report, similarly reflects these tendencies for confirmation bias. The Second World War context of the Uthwatt Report crucially shaped its overall direction: the entire British economy was mobilised into the war effort, and as a result, it led to the establishment of “overall central planning” and “central allocation of scarce resources” to an extent far beyond that of the First World War20 — the prevailing mood of total war lay the groundwork for the so-called post-war consensus. Nationalisation and centralised government economic planning was the new norm for apparatuses of government, and would continue to be the new normal in the post-war decades, until Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 government. This war-based impetus for national economic planning was especially influential on the conception of the (physical) planning system in the deliberations of the Uthwatt Committee. Considering the extensive government requisition of land and real property during the Second World War (as visible in the extensive records held by the National Archives21), state nationalisation of control, if not ownership, of land and property was rapidly established as the de facto norm. The Uthwatt Report furthermore follows a series of expert reports over land planning policy: the 1940 Barlow Report (on the ‘Distribution of the Industrial Population’) and the 1942 Scott Report (on ‘Land Utilisation in Rural Areas’). Barlow recommended that the state actively plan the location of industrial areas, away from urban areas and evenly distributed (along with their economic opportunity) throughout

19)

From the script of The Thick of It, Series 2, Episode 3.

20)

Broadberry and Howlett, 2002, p.13.

21)

The National Archives, Land and property requisitioned for war in the 20th century, (n.d.).

–8–

the country, necessarily though some Central Authority that can only be effective on a national level 22 . Scott examined the impact of development in the countryside and its balance with the need to preserve agricultural land; again finding that the national interest is best served through consciously planning the balance of land use between industrial or urban development with rural and agricultural preservation, and as such necessitated yet again a Central Authority with the legal and executive powers to implement these planning decisions23 . With these two reports presented to Parliament a year-and-a-half (Barlow) and a month (Scott) before the Uthwatt report, it is unsurprising that the recommendations of Uthwatt do not contradict the findings of this report24 , and instead fleshes out the details of the economic rationale and

The town of Hatfield is neatly bisected by the Great Northern rail

mechanisms needed to implement these decisions (to be discussed

line into two sides: its New Town on the west, and on the east,

in further detail later). This namely includes the operation of this

Old Hatfield, the town’s original settlement with claims dating as

proposed Central Planning Authority, the proposed nationalisation

far back as 970 AD1. Thanks to the rail line and the lopsided way

of development rights, strengthened compulsory purchase

Hatfield has grown around it, the town has become a highly-

powers, and the proposed gradual national consolidation of

legible palimpsest of English land and planning policy, reading

land ownership; it was entirely obvious to the Committee that

like a screenprint in neatly masked layers.

the nationalisation of rights and land assets would require also a national apparatus of administration. When considered in

The New Town development has shifted the entire centre of

its context, the Uthwatt Report clearly traces a direct lineage

gravity and Hatfield’s heft far into the west side of the tracks,

from the intellectual mood towards economic matters of the

with Old Hatfield feeling like a vestigial appendage on a much

war years, and more specifically, confirmed and reinforced the preceding expert discourse advising wartime governments of the time.

larger creature. Nevertheless, perhaps in a testament to its history, the station nevertheless still exits to the east, and this is how I enter the town. Upon exiting the station, any arrival to Hatfield is presented with elaborate wrought iron gates directly opposite, and an imposing statue that upon closer inspection turns out to be Robert

Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury) a Victorian-era prime minister. Behind the gates and his statue, is a viaduct2, and a short walk later, an axis leading to Hatfield House: the ancestral stately home of this prime minister and the other Earls and Marquesses of Salisbury. This grand, aptly-named ‘prodigy house’ of the Jacobean era is still the home of a Marquess of Salisbury (the seventh). It is surprising to think that this elevated domain of English aristocrats is

22)

Barlow, 1940.

23)

Scott, 1942.

1) Hatfield Local History Society, 2016.

2) Built by Lord Salisbury for the sole purpose of connecting Hatfield House to the then newly-built station.

24) Uthwatt, 1942, p.5.

–9–

even relevant to the rather plebeian matters of town planning policy (often more preoccupied with overcrowded inner-cities), but in fact it is especially so. Country houses are among the totemic examples of properties requisitioned by the state for the war effort, and Hatfield House was no exception: it was turned into a military hospital during WW2, and also the headquarters of the Civilian Resettlement Unit3 to help returning soldiers convalesce and readjust to civilian life in the sumptuous surroundings of the House and its gardens, while the vast grounds themselves were given over to arable farming and the training of the Home Guard4.

In

archives

there

are photos of hospital beds filling

up

various

Fig 2. The Long Gallery of Hat field House being used as a hospital ward.

Hatfield

grand

House’s

rooms

and

especially the cinegenic Long Gallery with its distinctive gilded ceiling. While Hatfield House survived its requisition largely intact, the story is not the same for other staterequisitioned country houses where neglect, vandalism and unsympathetic alterations were commonplace, leaving a legacy of irreversible damage5. In this context, it is not hard to imagine the paternalistic mindset of members of the Uthwatt Committee as they recommended the emboldening the powers of the state over land. War, being a great leveller, set a particularly farreaching precedent of the state’s relationship with the individual property owner, none less than the stately homes of aristocrats. After the war, what had been good enough for the Marquess of Salisbury would be good for the rest of us too.

3) Wellcome Library, Civil Resettlement Unit Archives, 2009 4) Lawrence, Hatfield at War: The story of life in a small town in 1939-45, 2016, p.27.

5) Robinson, 2014, p.155.

– 10 –

The expert report also occupies a unique position in the stages in which a political outlook or ideology becomes a policy idea, which becomes the government’s legislative proposal in the form of a green paper, then a white paper, and then finally a legislative Bill

presented to Parliament, who makes it law

by passing it in an Act of Parliament.

The expert report sits between

a policy idea and a green paper (which proposes policy suggestions for consultation to stimulate discussion with “no commitment to action”1), and unlike the green paper which is published by the relevant government department, it offers an added degree separation by using a ‘borrowed voice’ of notionally independent experts, even though as discussed previously they may be appointed based on what they are likely to recommend, and nudged by their terms of reference.

As such, the added benefit of the expert report is that it “offers the government the pleasure of rejecting its recommendations”2 , which proves politically expedient if the recommendations prove to be electorally unpopular. This would prove convenient for Churchill’s Coalition government, who in the subsequent white paper would agree with the analysis of the problem and the general principles of the proposals of Uthwatt, while the detailed proposals were not adopted “due to serious practical difficulties”3 .

Take the concept of ‘planning permission’ as an example: rather than a yes-no decision from the planning authority, i.e. a ‘license’ to develop the land in question (as subsequently implemented in the system England has today), the original version of planning permission proposed in Uthwatt 4 would have involved the Central Planning Authority (i.e. the state) compulsorily purchasing the

1)

The Guardian, 2009.

2) From a conversation of the author with Denis MacShane, a former Minister in the Labour Government from 20022005 3)

Ministry of Town and Country Planning, White Paper on Control of Land Use, 1944.

4)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.32, 55.

– 11 –

land in question, and leasing this back to the planning applicant who would become a leaseholder, with the approved proposal being enforced through covenants and the reserved right of the freeholder to re-enter the property5 , a well-established legal mechanism in English property law. However, in effect, with each planning permission granted, a piece of land would have been nationalised by the government, leading to the gradual consolidation of land ownership under the state as the single owner. This leaseback would also apply to any land that has been compulsorily purchased by the state or passed into public ownership being disposed6. Even with the esprit du temps wholly behind nationalisation, the gradual nationalisation of all land developed in the country would prove too radical for the Churchill Coalition government who would implement the

Town and Country Planning Act 1944,

and even the succeeding socialist Attlee government who promised in the 1945 Election Labour Manifesto “would ‘works towards’ land nationalisation”7 and be the government that would implement the

Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

Both Acts were highly influenced by, but would ultimately define the details of their policy against the Uthwatt report, implementing a permission-based system without the need to

EMERGENCY BRAKE: NATIONWIDE PLANNING RESOLUTION

nationalise every piece of land.

As I leave Hatfield House, I pass through the Old Palace, the Bishop of Ely’s palace now part of the grounds of Hatfield House, where famously Queen Elizabeth I was raised as a child and exiled during the reign of her Catholic sister Queen Mary I. An opportunity for a shortcut: the gateway in the porter’s lodge is open and I exit onto the historic core of Old it as “the perfect example street in a small Georgian

5)

Ibid., p.46.

6)

Ibid., p.62.

7)

Pearce, 2006, p.54.

Hatfield. Pevsner described of the self-respecting town” 1, and it is not difficult

to see why. Fore Street

is a charming row of well-

preserved mostly two

or three storey townhouses

– 12 –

Fore Street;

Fore Street;

1) Pevsner and

Cherry, 2002, p.171.

with restrained Georgian majority of the Old Hatfield’s refronted in brick from the

brick frontages — the townhouses were 18th century, (with the

rest of the house being

sometimes older)2.

However, brushing away

dignifying allure of

age, the street is not quite

as quintessentially

Georgian as it appears:

there is an addition of

a Victorian bay window

here and there3, a 17th

century house with a 19th

century sash windows4,

a Tudor-era timber-framed

inn with a 19th century

shop front5, an early 18th

century house with a

mock-Georgian bow

window added in the 20th

century6 (probably the

handiwork of connoisseur

of Georgian architecture

and Hatfield resident

during the 1910s to 1930s

F.W. Speaight who had a

penchant for restoring

in Old Hatfield houses

with Georgian features

that were authentic

but not original to the

house7). These substantial

modifications were

possible at the time

because, despite this

country’s reputation for

historic conservation,

the earlier incarnations

of its systems of

conservation, such as

Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882, or the cursory provisions into planning legislation Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act of 19098,

were fairly limited in planning’s perennial of individual property law, and the public powers were resisted

incorporated first with the

in their powers, again caught conflict between the right owners under common interest. These conservation by the owners of historic

2) Hutton, 2014a,

p.25.

3) Historic Eng-

land, 17, Fore Street, Hatfield - 1173271, 1983.

4) Historic England, 9, Fore

5) Historic England, 40 and

6) Historic England, 21,23 and

7) Hutton, 2014a, p.27.

8) Thomson, 2017.

– 13 –

Street, Hatfield - 1348127, 1983.

42, Fore Street, Hatfield - 1101015, 1980.

25, Fore Street, Hatfield - 1173276, 1983.

properties who risked seeing

their property rights

curtailed or see their property

interest become a

financial burden. The modern

listed building system

was first introduced in

the

Town and Country Planning Act 1947,

requiring the Minister

of Town and Country

Planning to compile “a list

of buildings of special

architectural or historic

interest [...] with a

view to the guidance

of local authorities

in the performance of

their functions”9. That

short walk from Hatfield

House down to the end

of Fore Street included

over 30 Grade II and II*

listed buildings, not even

including the Grade I listed

Hatfield House and grounds

and associated buildings

or the St Etheldreda’s writing in the early 1950s,

Church. What Pevsner, saw as the Georgian

essence of Fore Street

endures because unlike

previous conservation

legislation, the 1947 Act

had a far more powerful that traces back to an the Uthwatt Committee; “granted forthwith powers

means of enforcement interim recommendation in that the state should be of control over building and

all other developments

throughout the whole

country” 10, through

requiring planning

permission to build.

Despite previous planning legislation, it was not until as a direct result of the recommendation of the Uthwatt Interim Report that for the first time all land in the country was subject to planning control. From the to the then-most recent

Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 Town and Country Planning Act 1932,

planning controls only applied to land designated, or in the process of being designated, under ‘planning schemes’1, which were in practice incredibly time-consuming to draft and ratify

1)

Cullingworth and Nadin, 2006, p.17-18

9) Town and Country Planning Act 1947, s.30 10) Uthwatt, 1942, p.29.

– 14 –

in Parliament. Interim development control powers meant that specifically in areas where a planning scheme was being prepared, developers of land had to apply for planning permission to build; if the development did not have permission and did not comply with the finalised planning scheme, the planning authority could direct the owner to remove or alter the development2 .

This is in effect the direct antecedent to the concept of planning permission we have today. The precise moment in history where a new precedent was set by extending this requirement for permission nationwide was justified yet again by the exceptional circumstances of World War II, and although these were initially intended as interim measures, they would go on to be retained and adapted by subsequent legislation ever since. As mentioned previously, part of the Uthwatt Committee’s terms of reference was to urgently advise on “steps should be taken now or before the end of the war to prevent the work of reconstruction thereafter being prejudiced”3 . This concept of preventing prejudicial development played pivotal role in the decision to subject all land henceforth to planning control. Too often in the history of reconstruction in destruction’s wake has attempts at comprehensive replanning been foiled by the reassertion of individual property rights. An archetypal example is Sir Christopher Wren’s Baroque formal street plans of boulevards and piazzas for the redevelopment of the City of London after the Great Fire4 , which lay unrealised as soon as property owners ‘prejudiced development’ by rebuilding along the existing medieval ownership boundaries, with the state reluctant to fight legal disputes over common law protections of property rights5 .

The unparalleled scale and breadth of destruction during the Blitz and the subsequent V1 & V2 bombing was hitherto unseen by this country in modern times, and the opportunity for a planned approach to reconstruction for the long term was not be wasted

2) Ibid., p.18 3)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.1.

4) Wight, A Plan For Rebuilding The City Of London, After The Great Fire In 1666, But Unhappily Defeated By Faction, British Library, 2009.

5)

Forrest, 2016.

– 15 –

again. Hence, the Uthwatt Interim Report recommended as an ‘emergency brake’ on development for the government “to set up the Central Planning Authority [...with] the power of controlling building and all other developments throughout the whole country by reference to national planning considerations and with a view to preventing work being undertaken which might be prejudicial to reconstruction” 6. However, this extension of planning powers nationwide and the prevention of unauthorised development were temporary because the Uthwatt Committee always had an

Turning

eye to the longer-term aspect of their mandate: they recognised

off

“the necessity for considerable changes in the land system of this

Fore

country” and these interim measures in effect were buying the 7

Street,

Committee time before a long-term, root-and-branch solution

and

can be outlined in their final report. It also must be noted that

heading

for development of all land to be restricted indefinitely would

down

not be legally or politically acceptable. As such these interim

The

development controls were recommended to “continue for some

Broadway,

reasonable period after the end of hostilities while the broad lines

the post-war

of reconstruction are being worked out by or under the direction

character

of [the Central Planning] Authority”, and areas which may

of Hatfield

possibly be “considered for redevelopment as a whole” be subject

begins to

to such interim controls for a “further reasonable period after the

be visible. The

end of hostilities” so that detailed reconstructive schemes can be 8

Georgian buildings

devised. It is clear from the framing of these recommendations

begin to give way to more

that these national controls are not an end in and of themselves,

economical buildings of the

but with the precedent of a system of national control established it

1970s, or worse, the mock-

was far easier as a stepping stone towards a system of comprehensive

Georgian developments

national planning. These interim recommendations were duly

of the 1990s. The narrow

accepted by the government, and implemented through the

streets of the historic

centre also turn into

Town and Country Planning (Interim Development Act), 1943.

From this point, however, the Uthwatt Report’s final

wider roads, culminating

recommendations would begin to diverge from the way the

as the main traffic artery

mechanism of planning permission was actually legislated for the

A1000 Great North Road

long-term, and will be explored in the subsequent sections.

intersect with the also busy (but anachronistically named) French Horn Lane in

6) Uthwatt, 1942, p.15.

a large roundabout. Here, in

7) Ibid., p.2.

8) Uthwatt, 1942, p.2.

– 16 –

this car dominated landscape, the only way to cross to the west side of the train tracks is through a narrow pedestrian subway through the overgrown railway embankment. Emerging on the other side of the train tracks, I walk up Endymion Road, where Hatfield’s inferiority to its sister Welwyn Garden City becomes palpably visible, where the neighbourhood is a swathe of suburban sprawl without any sense of aim or formal direction like that of Welwyn. Here, the east side of the road is populated by a row of neat Edwardian semi-detached houses, while the west side is a row of prosaic semi-detached houses typical of the mass housebuilding the 1920-30s. However this pattern is interrupted at the end of the road, where there is a distinctive break in the grain and the architectural period of the buildings.

This is the site of where the V1 flying bomb hit Hatfield in the early morning of 10 October, 19441, and it not only severely

1) Prettyman, 2011.

– 17 –

damaged St Audrey’s Senior School, but also the nearby police headquarters, police living quarters, and a row of Victorian terraced houses called Primrose Cottages2, with nine deaths and many more injuries3. The school site of the bomb damage, like all others, was subject to interim development control (this ‘emergency brake’) and was not rebuilt and reopened until 26 July 1946 (as recommended by Uthwatt, after the ‘end NATIONALISING DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS

of hostilities’ in 1945). Although the rebuilt St Audrey’s School

(UNDEVELOPED LAND)

was one of the first permanent post-war school buildings in England4, there was adequate time to consider its long-

Although the interim development controls would have a

term, non-prejudicial reconstruction while schooling took

permanent influence on subsequent planning legislation,

place in temporary venues5, including taking into account

they were not intended to be or, as a legal basis,

the education system reforms in the Education Act 1944 and

appropriate as the long-term solution. It is here where

the corresponding design Standards for School Premises

the Uthwatt Report would propose one of the most

Regulations 1945, new Building Regulations for schools which came into force on 1 April 19456.

s ent m radical realignments gn ali e r l ica rad

The building that stands there today, though

of the relationship between the state and the

since been occupied

landowner: it would deconstruct the long-standing

by different schools

rights of land ownership, and propose to separate

(now Countess Anne

Church of England

the right to develop that land

from ownership itself,

Primary School), has

and “recommend the immediate vesting in the State

an air of post-war

of the rights of development in all land lying outside

austerity about it,

built-up areas [...] on payment of fair compensation” .

no doubt because

This would form a legal basis where the state can

of the materials and

1

enact “the imposition of a prohibition against

budget shortages of the time. Compared to a picture of

development otherwise than with the consent of the

the folksy Edwardian Arts and Crafts school building of its

State” .

previous incarnation, despite its limited means, it seems

2

nevertheless to embody the new, more progressive vision of education and modernity, of the time of its conception.

1)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.27.

2) Marris, 2016.

2)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.27.

3) Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, 2019.

4) O’Carroll, 2014.

5) Blanks and Gateshead Libraries, 2014.

6) Keath, 1983, p.26.

– 18 –

In effect, this nationalisation of development rights means that “the development value for all time will have been acquired, and paid for”3 . This measure deconstructed and proposed a completely reversed status quo of land ownership and its rights: from a position where the right to develop land was formerly free unless otherwise restricted by planning; henceforth there would be no right to develop land unless specifically permitted by the state, in a manner prescribed by the state. Furthermore from this point onwards, all developable land therefore can now be valued for state acquisition for redevelopment without its potential developable value inflating the total land value depending on its most feasible, profitable potential use. In terms of the Committee’s original remit, since the state becomes the owner of all development rights, it would no longer need to compensate the landowners for curbing development rights they no longer owned, this would crucially allow the state finally free reign to determine and restrict land use and development as it sees fit, without spiralling financial liabilities for compensation under the previous system.

In Uthwatt’s proposals, planning permission to develop would be a selective, one-off lease of a development right back to the owner.

Uthwatt Committee saw the nationalisation of development rights as a prerequisite for the state to effectively exercise national planning powers in a way compatible with common law.

In the 1947 Act, this key idea was extended to the development rights of land, not just undeveloped land; compensation was paid one-off once and for all, and henceforth underpinned the entire basis of the modern planning system.

Where there is a school, housing for families soon follows, and the area around the former St. Audrey’s is no different. As I head northwest up Stonecross Road, ribbons of pebbledashed, semi-detached sprawl unwind outwards, probably to the chagrin of planners. St. Audrey’s was first established on that site in 1904, and shortly after when it became a mixed school in 3)

Ibid., p.28.

– 19 –

19261, the housing was built en masse some time in the 1930s.

It’s incredibly easy to get lost here, and I do.

Repetitive roads with identical

hou

behind and between back gar de find myself in yet more of this

sp

se

ns

ra

,I

s,

li t

t le

wl

la ne ev sw en ea tu al vin ly g

, th orm df

. A fl app

in g p ie

ce o f

ated p

is time in t e r r ac e

lamin

PL

y eye. sm he tc TION ca ICA I O N, ”

ape r c ab l “NOT e-tie ICE U d on N DE to a R AR utili TICL ty E 15 po (4) O le FOR R( PLAN 5) A NI N P GP E

RM

ISS

it reads — a planning notice for “Erection of a front porch”2. I see that their neighbour has already replaced their original concrete canopies with To analyse how the Uthwatt Committee would come to such a radical solution, it is crucial to understand how the Uthwatt Report defined the premises of the problems of compensation and betterment, and the planning system of that time, and how this framing would go on to

a pair of whimsical, somewhat anachronistic porticos with pitched roofs, now the applicant, a ‘Mrs L Sopp’, is seeing if the local council will let her get away with even a bit more. Her plot of land had its development rights bought decades ago,

precisely in 1947 in fact,

legitimise its own recommendations: this is

and now she needs to ask for some back.

where the potency of Uthwatt expert report as a text, and a piece of bureaucracy can truly be understood.

The prevailing economic discourse of the role of the state is crucial: Uthwatt, being written between 1941-1942 was not only

1) Marris, 2016.

2) Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, Planning Application: 6/2019/2779/HOUSE, 2019.

– 20 –

during WW2, but also post-Great Depression. The confidence in the conventional wisdom of laissez-faire free markets was severely shaken after the Depression, and ushered a shift towards Keynesian economics as a new norm that encouraged governments through their public expenditure to have an active role in establishing full employment and increasing aggregate demand in an economy. This in turn was seen to require proactive, positive coordination by the government, that is, “involve Society in exercising directive intelligence through some appropriate organ of action over many of the inner intricacies of private business”1. This scepticism in laissezfaire free markets, or even state-regulated private enterprise in shaping town and country permeated the tone of the Uthwatt report’s characterisation of the problem. It recognised a desperate need for the country to be “replanned in the light of modern requirements,’’ including both parts of the country that had been “laid waste” and unbombed urban areas with their “reconstruction [...] long overdue”. However, it explicitly states that “this cannot be done in isolation”2 — the isolated effort initiated by private individuals or developers cannot provide the solution to the urgent problem of reconstruction and modernisation. The ideal of free markets in theory is that uncoordinated actions of individuals acting in their own interest, such as profit, “are led by an invisible hand [...] without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society”3 .

It is clear that Uthwatt sees this as incapable of resolving the issues of urbanism, and in fact, Uthwatt blames the incentive system of markets as part of the cause: the cities that are now overdue for modernisation were developed in a time “when unrestrained profit-seeking was the dominating impulse of the age”4 . Furthermore, the theory that markets are an efficient allocator of scarce resources, in this case, land, is challenged by the Uthwatt Committee. There is a repeated reference to the

1)

Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, 1926 in Keynes, 2013.

2)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.6.

3)

Smith, The Wealth of Nations: Book IV, 1970, p.540.

4)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.7.

– 21 –

“limited area of this country”5 throughout the report, echoing the Georgist rhetoric from Progress and Poverty6 . Furthermore, in the report’s Chapter II(2), the extensive discussion of “floating value” and “shifting value”7 of undeveloped land explains that the development potential of a piece of land distorts its valuation. Therefore, individual parcels seen in aggregate from the perspective of the nation will always result in overvaluation8 because the same development potential can ultimately only settle on one location but is in fact priced into many, and that planning restrictions do not destroy this potential but displace it9 . The idea of market valuation failure is crucial because the compensation and betterment provisions of the pre-Uthwatt planning legislation are pinned to market values.

Uthwatt’s portrayal of the two-fold failure of markets, first failing to incentivise private individuals to develop land in the public interest, and secondly the market’s inability to efficiently allocate the scarce resource of land, lays the groundwork for Uthwatt’s argument: there must be an

TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING (DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT PROCEDURE) (ENGLAND) ORDER 2015 NOTICE UNDER ARTICLE 15(4) OR (5) APPLICATION FOR PLANNING PERMISSION

Application Reference: 6/2019/2430/MAJ Proposed development at: 1 and 1A Town Centre and 3-9 Town Centre Hatfield AL10 0JZ I give notice that C/O Agent is applying to Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council for: Demolition of existing buildings and the erection 3 x buildings comprising of 71 x flats and 1,110 sqm of flexible commercial uses (use class: A1, A2, A3, A4, D1 & D2) (including a small office element (B1a)) and associated works to include car and bicycle parking, plant and refuse storage and public realm works Members of the public may inspect copies of: • The application • The plans • And other documents submitted within it via http://planning.welhat.gov.uk or at Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, The Campus, Welwyn Garden City, AL8 6AE during normal office hours.

Comments must be made in writing to Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council by 2 December 2019. Please ensure you quote the above reference number.

Please note that any representations received will be available for public inspection, copying and online viewing, which will show your name and address on the Council’s website.

In the event that an appeal is made against a decision of the Council to refuse to grant planning permission for the proposed development, and that appeal then proceeds by way of expedited procedures under the written representations procedure, any representations made to the Council about this application will be passed to the Secretary of State and there will be no opportunity to make further representations.

Colin Haigh (Head of Planning) On behalf of Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council Dated: 11 November 2019

“unreserved acceptance” of “properly balanced and co-ordinated planning of the whole” of the use of land10, and in order for that planning to function effectively, the market and the market-tied mechanisms of planning must be avoided as much as possible. The “unification of existing rights in land [...] within the same ownership”11, (i.e. the state) makes sense within this paradigm where the land market is portrayed

5)

Ibid., p.4, p.7, p.11, p.12.

6) George, 1879, Ch. 3.

7)

Ibid., p.14.

8)

Ibid., p.14.

9)

Ibid., p.15-16.

10) Ibid., p.7.

11) Ibid., p.23.

– 22 –

Fig 3. A planning notice for Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council

to be at the heart of the old planning system’s problems. Land that no longer has an intrinsic right to be developed can no longer have its price distorted by the market’s perception of its development potential value. In the words of Uthwatt itself, the root causes of the problem is that “land in private ownership is a marketable commodity” and “the fact that land is held by a large number of owners whose individual interest lie in putting their own [...] land to the most profitable use for which they can find a market, whereas the need of the state is to ensure the best use of all land of the country irrespective of financial return”12 . Instead of what they saw as a haphazard process where parties compete with supply

An o th er

and conflicting demands on land, the scarce resource of land development rights can be managed rationally when held by a monopoly of one party without conflicting interests but a singular

t arm acke d

li t t l e

lan

an d

an

et

n gardens, a n ee o th er a w rib tic h e r p la n b n n o e n d i i o f n ot g no Th t i c e e. catc hes my ey

resolve. Futheremore, risk of financial loss in case development

eb

value shifts from one piece of land to another is eliminated as their development rights are all under its ownership. In fairness, true to its nature as an expert advisory committee, Uthwatt was in part echoing and elaborating back to the government what was already the government’s “definite acceptance of the principle of national planning” generally13 , showing the extent of the consensus on the economics of land at the time. However, the nationalisation of development rights is a further step. By ruling out the market from the equation, it rebalances power in resource allocation away from private individuals who exercise them self-

lh ou s is es on a parallel street, tim e, a ‘Ms L Roos’ is asking

interestedly and concentrates it elsewhere: but the question is, where to?

for a “Certificate of lawfulness for the erection of a single storey rear extension” 1. It seems like the current or the previous owners of the house did not obtain planning permission for their extension, and now seek it retroactively, through a mechanism introduced in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

If the state, the owner of all development rights never

consented to this construction, I wonder, is this rear extension

12)

Ibid., p.23.

13)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.11.

1) Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council, Planning Application: 6/2019/2835/LAWP, 2019.

– 23 –

the spoils of theft against the state? A rather grandiose way of looking at an illicit garden extension, I thought; but when all rights to build are vested in the state, there is nothing too small for its purview.

Political scientist Jean Meynaud in his treatise Technocracy documents a wider trend in the post-war relationship between the technical expert and the elected politician, and specifically phenomenon of the regression of power of the former and the creeping influence of the latter in the process of government.

Meynaud defines technocracy as “a faith in efficiency so great that maximum results are obtained by minimum effort” based on a “firm confidence in the value of rational analysis of social problems”1. The arguments used by Uthwatt, or even the act of appointing this expert Committee, is entirely within this technocratic paradigm: given the post-Depression consensus against the seemingly inadequate passivity of laissez-faire approaches, it is only logical that the government plays a proactive role based on its privileged position of access to knowledge and expertise, and logical to let the trained expert deal with these complexities of this limited resource. In this lens, Meynaud’s definition of technocracy is mirrored almost exactly in Uthwatt’s straightforward logic: “the more complex the productive organisation of society, the more highly developed must be the control of land utilisation exercised by or on behalf of the community”2 and this conscious control will be used to ensure “economic efficiency for the community”3 . As Meynaud also acknowledged, the apparatuses of government are intrinsically linked with the effectiveness of communications technology, and the rapid improvement of communications decreases the “difficulties caused by distance”4 and increases the viability and natural tendency towards a centralisation where “central

1)

Meynaud, 1968, p.12-13.

2)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.11.

3)

Ibid., p.11.

4)

Meynaud, 1968, p.227.

– 24 –

governments could still get information and give orders from a distance without delay”5 . Again, this is echoed by Uthwatt where they cite “greatly increased and speedier means of communication”6 as a way the land and its use has become interdependent, and therefore justifies the interconnectivity of central planning as opposed to “confused development [...] in an isolated and regional manner”7. It is clear that the writers of Uthwatt were confident that the government will have the

Quite a bit more wandering later, I notice

technological means to create this instrument of planning, with

that the urban grain has changed, but only

a remit larger than ever before. The demands on the technical

slightly perceptibly. Semi-detached and

capability of this instrument was ever greater and attaining that

terraced houses gradually give way to some

capacity was vital to its success.

blocks of flats and surfaces of tarmac, swathes of open-air car parking. I check the map on my phone; apparently I have stumbled into the

(New) Town centre in Roe Green, but it does not feel like one. The cluster of buildings around the pedestrianised centre is like an island encircled by road, and is practically impregnable; as a pedestrian I am met with a blank wall of service entrances, backof-house yards, and loading bays as I try to find a way into the Town Centre high street. The road I find myself on is called The Commons, but I can see no such thing; it is a vestigial name for a lost bit of shared public space. In its place, a gargantuan 1980s shopping centre dominates the neighbourhood. It’s quite an apt microcosm for the story of privatisation, where the tyranny of metrics and commerce rides roughshod over the immeasurable pleasure of amenity. The closest thing to a common is perversely yet another swathe of outdoor car park.

It is here I find yet another planning notice. This time the control of the state is not exercised over something trivial like a front porch or

5)

Ibid., p.228.

6)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.7.

7)

Ibid., p.7.

– 25 –

rear extension,

but

a

major development for a four-storey car park. From what I can see so far, the town centre is more car park than anything else, and I find out later that surface parking takes up more than a third of the town centre1. This must be the council’s attempt to consolidate car parking and free up valuable land in the centre for more pleasant and productive uses. It would appear that planners of the New Town back in the 1950s in their optimistic pursuit of rational planning and technical wisdom did not foresee the unceremonious, hasty death of the motoring age. It has taken the long wait for an opportune wave of comprehensive redevelopment decades later for the government machinery to lurch slowly

Uthwatt’s argument against the market and in favour of planning

into corrective action.

is presented as a technocratic rather than an ideological one.

1) Flanagan, 2017.

Paradoxically, the fact that its solutions are technocratic means they are therefore also inherently ideological. Its argument was that central planning allows for control; not just any control, but conscious, rational management, through the application of research and analysis. Once development rights are vested in the state alone, the state has an unprecedented level of control, and a correspondingly unprecedented level of responsibility for good management. While previous legislation did nominally put the state in the role of a custodian of land use and development, Uthwatt frames the problem through the lens of the fragmentation of the technocratic apparatus: it was a “system of local planning, based on [...] financial resources of local bodies [...] responsible to local electorates”1. Similarly, when examining compensation and betterment mechanisms on which this fragmented technocratic

1)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.8.

– 26 –

instrument is based, the problem was also framed as one of fragmentation: when “land belongs to a number of owners, the aggregate of values [of compensation] claimable by individual owners when separately assessed [...] greatly exceeds the real loss of the claimants taken as a group”2 . When the problem is framed as fragmentation, only one solution is rationally obvious: centralisation, of both the technocratic apparatus, and of the ownership of the development rights which it requires to function.

National planning, in other words, finally allows bigger-picture technical expertise to properly shape town and country and protect the limited land of this country from the wasteful whims of self-interested individuals, a slippery and speculative land market, or local politicking.

The efficiency-centred logics of technocracy requires a measurable maximisation of an aim, with a minimisation of effort or means (in this case, the limited land of the country).

In this case, all of Uthwatt Report’s recommendations were the aim of maximising the ‘public interest’, ‘community interest’, or ‘national interest’, and it alternates inconsistently between all three of these phraseologies. However, in defining this nebulous concept which nevertheless is the ultimate aim of all planning, the Uthwatt Committee seems to want to have its cake and eat it. Uthwatt simultaneously broaches two contradictory lines of argument. On one hand, their proposed system of national planning is merely an “instrument”3 to secure the public interest and the Uthwatt Committee “is not concerned with the actual decisions of policy that may be taken”4 , which as an independent advisory committee, it is obliged and only proper that it is apolitical. Yet on the other hand, the Committee suggest simultaneously that the definition of the public interest itself should be defined through a technocratic process. Namely, public interest objectives “must be dictated largely by economic

2)

Ibid., p.17.

3)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.12.

4)

Ibid., p.7-8.

– 27 –

conditions”5 , and this in effect transfers it to the remit of technical experts, such as having a “highly qualified staff informed as to the economic conditions and needs of the country, competent to put forward proposals for national development”6. The apparatus of central planning “will base its action on organised research into the social and economic aspects of the use and development of land”7, and such a “balanced allocation [of land use] can only be made in the light of organised research into national requirements”8 so that the ultimate “improvement or rebuilding of cities is to be carried out on the basis of a scientifically prepared plan”9 . Planning, according to Meynaud, is the “principle method of reconciling efficiency with justice in the administration of limited resources”10. In this technocratic paradigm of research, economics, and science, it is not clear where the social

Fig 4. The old Hatfield common, now a carpark.

justice of democratic politics sits in such a system. In effect, the Uthwatt Committee argues that it is itself apolitical, but so should be the objectives of planning.

Once a question of policy, such as defining public interest, is transformed into a question of technical expertise, the remit of the ‘expert’ is thus expanded while democratic politics recedes. This ‘depoliticisation’, to which Meynaud regularly referred as a trope of technocracies, is used to mask the reality that the premises on which national planning

5)

Ibid., p.11.

6)

Ibid., p.157.

7)

Ibid., p.12.

8)

Ibid., p.13.

9)

Ibid., p.17.

10) Meynaud, 1968, p.15.

UCATIONAL USE ONLY.

Scale 1:1000

0

10

20

– 28 –

30

40

50

60

Projection: British National Grid

70

80

90

100 m

as a supposedly neutral instrument is proposed are themselves inherently political: the notion that the state is in the best position to own, control, and allocate development rights, the notion that research-driven national planning is the best way public interest is served, the idea that efficiency is the metric of success, the idea that a central authority can adequately account for national and local considerations, etc. In the Report, these inherently political positions can only be portrayed as logical and pragmatic deductions when the problem is framed such that previous policy failings are attributed to the cacophonous conflicts of individual and local authority interests, and inadequacies of the land market.

An independent advisory committee of experts recommending the nationalisation of all development rights of undeveloped land is an act highly tainted with politics of technocracy.

Uthwatt Report said rather grandiosely, “planning exists for the planned, not the planners”11, but it would appear that in its recommendations it sowed the seeds for precisely the contrary.

11) Uthwatt, 1942, p.24.

– 29 –

COMPULSORY PURCHASE POWERS AND COMPREHENSIVE DEVELOPMENT It was clear from the outset of the Uthwatt Committee that even the most well-oiled apparatus of nationally-coordinated planning was wholly inadequate in isolation: the most researched and scientifically prepared plans were of no good if they had no means of implementation. The Committee was sceptical of the market’s ability to incentivise isolated private effort to rebuild and modernise towns and cities. Not only that, the powers of the state as permitted by the 1932 Act were portrayed as “largely regulatory in character and do not [...] enable them to undertake positive development. [...] A planning scheme secures that if development takes place, it shall take place only in certain ways; it does not secure that [development] will in fact take place”1.

In the eyes of Uthwatt, this renewed planning apparatus must be strengthened with the means to effect a “central positive direction”2 , and granting back qualified rights to develop, in the form of planning permission, is not enough, even though now it would be able to do so more freely with less compensatory liability. Uthwatt’s recommendations therefore require not only the balance between state and landowner be redrawn (with the nationalisation of development rights), but so must the balance between the state and private developer: the previous model of state as regulator and developer as executor was no longer fit for purpose. It follows that the state must also have accelerated powers to consolidate and assemble the many disparate ownerships of land in urban centres, so that it can be redeveloped comprehensively according to its plans, and whether that development occurs by private developers or by the state itself, it must have means to proactively enforce it. This is where the Uthwatt Committee proposals for a new conception of compulsory powers of acquisition become essential, both in the broadening of circumstances it is exercised, and streamlining of its bureaucracy.

1)

Ibid., p.9.

2)

Ibid., p.10.

– 30 –

Compulsory purchase powers were by no means new, but the context of World War II provided a forceful and pressing impetus for Uthwatt to recommend the radical strengthening of such powers, “much wider and more simple in operation”3 .

In its characterisation of the existing problems of compulsory purchase powers, Uthwatt placed a persistent emphasis on both the slowness and inefficiency of the existing procedures and juxtaposes this with the “urgency”4 of the need for reconstruction.

Under the

Town and Country Planning Act 1932,

in order to enact a planning scheme before even any compulsory purchase orders can be made, the litany of consultations, public enquiries, numerous opportunities for objections, mechanisms to extend time limits, parliamentary approval are all portrayed as “slow and piecemeal”, an “elaborate and lengthy procedure” that treats planning “as a sin or luxurious pleasure, not a duty”5 .

Similarly, the compulsory purchase powers in the

Housing Act 1936,

which were intended to supplement and strengthen the powers of the 1932 Act, is qualified by so many conditions, such as its limit to paternalistically so-called “working-class houses”, and the burden of the state to prove a certain “proportion of houses [...] unfit for human habitation”6, requiring evidence for each house and thus opening it to judicial challenge. This is on top of the usual requirements for comprehensive notification, public enquiries into objections and ministerial scrutiny. Likewise, the Uthwatt Committee have deemed it as “leading to serious delay” and “not [...] a satisfactory basis for the urgent measures of reconstruction that it could be readily adapted”7 for the postwar era. Crucially, the Committee does acknowledge that all these measures are “designed to safeguard the rights of individual owners”8 but it is the portrayal of these safeguards as “inevitably result[ing] in serious delay”9 in the face of dire urgency that this

3)

Uthwatt, 1942, p. 60, 61.

4)

Ibid., p.61.

5)

Ibid., p.58.

6)

Ibid., p.60.

7)

Ibid.

8)

Ibid.

9)

Ibid.

– 31 –

apolitical Committee makes a political judgement: there are new circumstances in which the technocratic pursuit of efficiency and maximising public interest should now override the safeguards of the rights of individuals.

Based on the wide-ranging new powers Uthwatt would subsequently recommend, it would seem that the urgency of post-war reconstruction justifies a wholesale regression of protections for individuals. First and foremost, the fragmentation of ownership in urban areas is seen as an obstacle to the “urgent task of reconstructing war-damaged areas and [....] obsolete and unsatisfactory areas”10. It is obvious that the compulsory purchase powers for the “whole of such areas” is a prerequisite power to “cut through the tangle of separate ownerships and boundary lines [...] for comprehensive replanning as a single unit”11. But the extension of powers go further: “no legal right to preferential treatment should be conferred on dispossessed owners” in the selection of sites in the redevelopment to allow maximum “freedom to replan”12 . It is notable for a contemporary audience that both the power to redevelop areas into mass public housing, and the power to ‘decant’ and displace these residents for private development, can be traced to this moment of enlargement of the state’s compulsory purchase powers. Furthermore, Uthwatt recommends allowing compulsory acquisition of land that is likely to be required “before [planning] scheme is in operation”13 without needing time-consuming finalisation of the future plan14 , compulsory acquisition of land for rehousing displaced owners15 , compulsory acquisition of nearby land that may be likely to gain value due to public improvement16, and adjust ownership boundaries to suit the plan. In terms of the bureaucracy, broad procedural efficiencies are also recommended such as reducing

10) Uthwatt, 1942, p.61.

11) Ibid., p.61.

12) Ibid., p.62.

13) Ibid.

14) Ibid., p.63.

15) Ibid.

16) Ibid.

– 32 –

the lengthy burden of identifying and notifying all interested parties17, reducing the power of objections and need for public enquiries18, simplifying ministerial approval19 , stricter time limits for claiming compensation 20, strengthened powers of entry and eviction 21, no longer needing to attempt purchase by agreement before purchase compulsorily22 etc. These compulsory purchase powers would also be supported by a complex set of refinements of the rules over how much the state should compensate for compulsory acquisition of land, namely not accounting for “public demand”23 and a general price cap to pre-war land values on March 193924 , both as measures to stabilise values and reduce private market speculation on state efforts for reconstruction.

As Uthwatt itself predicted, this price cap’s “necessity [...] will disappear [...] when the development rights have been vested in the State”25 . While Uthwatt declined to recommend outright limiting compulsory purchase prices to only the existing use value26, these measures would shift the balance in that direction, and when the 1947 Act nationalised the development rights of all land, not just undeveloped land as recommended by Uthwatt, these more specific measures of limiting compulsory purchase prices would not be necessary, as in fact the 1947 Act would outright limit prices for compulsory purchase to existing use value, vastly reducing the financial burden for the state in reconstruction.

In general, all of Uthwatt’s measures ensure, in the pursuit of planning for the public interest, there are as few as possible limitations and obstructions, legal or financial, and potential sources of bureaucratic hindrances, while ultimately affording the state and its planning authorities unprecedented degree of freedom in drafting and implementing their plans in a timely

17)

Ibid., p.66.

18)

Ibid.

19)

Ibid., p.68.

20) Ibid., p.69.

21)

Ibid., p.70.

22)

Ibid., p.73.

23)

Ibid., p.77.

24)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.80.

25)

Ibid., p.81.

26)

Ibid., p.75.

– 33 –

manner; it is with this empowered apparatus whereby wholesale comprehensive redevelopment and development is possible, with winners, such as the ambitions of the

New Towns Act 1946,

and losers, such as displaced and affected individual homeowners and the high-profile suicide of one such owner, Edward Pilgrim 27.

It almost

takes

walking down the entire length of The Common and down Wellfield Road before I can actually get inside the pedestrianised New Town Centre at Roe Green.

Hatfield, incidentally, plays a starring role in the history

of

New

Towns,

first identified by Sir

of

opportunity London ,

London

to

Abercrombie

himself involved in of

Hatfield’s

New

Town plan2. Hatfield City were among the

first wave of New

Towns designated in

the 1946 Act, but they rely

on

Welwyn Howard’s

as a blueprint for the benefit of being these principles on empty Hertfordshire town

27)

Davis, 2008.

was

built

1) Town and Country Planning Association, 2009.

2) Hutton, 2014b, p.18-19.

– 34 –

as

was

the earlier versions

and Welwyn Garden

different.

Plan

expand as a satellite

and

1

been

Patrick Abercrombie

in his 1944 Greater an

having

could not be more Garden City could formal its

principles

expansion

and

able to lay down a tabula fields)

rasa (of

when

the

back in the 1920s.

However, Hatfield was very much more a product of compromise, and this is very evident still, walking around the town centre today.

In fact the site of the New Town centre on the west side of the train tracks was host to an even older ‘new town’ established when Great Northern Railway first connected Hatfield in the 1850s.

Far from Welwyn Garden City’s blank slate, Hatfield’s New Town area was already substantially built-up before its designation.

The most noticeable intervention from the 1950s is White Lion Squa re , w h ic out a surro h civic u n de c arve spac d b d cent e for y c ury t t h h e a w r c acte o an entre on t ristic d fo hree a u r l l y store s i de midfrom s, a y sh th e 1 n op b d p 9 u re-N 30s i l di n g th e on th ew s unifo T e o w o ther. n sh rm We o ps It i s lw y a far n c ce r mon y fro ntr umm e. enta som l i G t y arde ewh of n at C patc i t y F ’s r o hwo m it s own rk mute th e y d am i r regu ears bitio la r , it ns , bou n s h ap of m dari e o des es bee t int an d f e di s ob erve u v n p io u s tions wh i l e that over st u b p th e r e bo r n -war la n d ly s own till pow valu ers h ers o en d u e ip Uth f r e c , wat o mp d le g a e u t ’s s l pite sor y l pow reso acqu th e ers urce stab i o s i f s of t i c o i o n lisat mp u Hatfi . Af te t h es io n m ls o r y e pu el d a r all , reco i rcha g n p h d urch t hav mme it s d se p a n e e se a owe datio velo bee n nd rs fo pme n s , th addr r u nb nt co e es s e not u as fr rpora ridle d by nlimi d rep eely tion’s ted fi e l a x p n n e fra a 19 u b l ic nin g Turn a n ci rcise in g o al for m p u rs d as 60 g a f f th e e me o de r one am me pr s a n migh Town s nt ent it y w on t hav Ne alley Cent ere n of hop sh g e r o p e a w envis na wa t o Ne h ig h t in g To aged stree r ro y ma ppin he w w a . t o b an d w g T r rk onto ce ld n own cad n bu etw at ed e n e i e l it s e t d , s w b r n in g tra th e y In to er ar a te a t h ba s w e o g la u n th e e ic a an n d e n o , Ha n d m n d a : a ot l l y he ma r th tw tfi a i m n r r e k ork se a r et east ld’s s to r k t t et or ed w pu sq co bli er b squ ey ua rn c ar er re e l ib l o c k , of ra , a , ry nd .

– 35 –

Kennelwood, a mock-Tudor house from the 1920s (now a commercial property) refuses to budge.

Instead, it has been wrapped around in a single storey of retail frontage in the 1990s, as if in an attempt to disguise its incongruity with the rest of the Modernist town centre, while its half-timbered gable ends, brick chimneys and pitched tile roofs peek above, nevertheless still visible. For a ‘New Town’, it has its unexpected share of the accretions of history.

Fig 5. Kennelwood House with its modern frontages.

– 36 –

With the role of the minister, parliamentary oversight, and the citizen’s power of objection substantially reduced, the risk is again one where ‘depoliticisation’ in the name of speed and efficiency leads to a democratic deficit. In this crucial gestation period of our modern planning system, these measures shaped by post-war urgency would endure far beyond. It is noteworthy that Uthwatt did not preclude private developers from undertaking comprehensive development, and even supported compulsory purchase of “land held up from development [...] with a view to enabling developers to carry out the desired work”1, but as previously discussed, the leaseback of compulsorily purchased land would allow using covenants and freeholder powers to enforce planning permission. While these compulsory purchase powers and the concept of leaseback to private developers would be generally adopted by the

Town and Country Planning Act 1944 2 ,

the end of the war, a change of government, and a new

Town and Country Planning Act 1947

would mean these compulsory powers became stronger still, and the overwhelming history of post-war reconstruction and positive planning would be carried out by the state itself “without first offering it to private enterprise”3 , rather than as a secondary resort as recommended by Uthwatt when “private enterprise is unwilling to engage” and “only where this is essential to accelerate the carrying out of the planning scheme”4 . The notion of state as primary developer would reach its apotheosis with the

New Towns Act 1946

(with the same Lord Reith who appointed Uthwatt being instrumental in its conception), where public development

1)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.62.

2)

British Information Services, 1949, p. 20.

3)

British Information Services, 1949, p. 24.

4)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.63.

– 37 –

Fig 6. The ‘Silkingrad’ sign replacing the original sign in Stevenage train station in protest.

corporations would conjure entire new settlements from empty country fields with wide-ranging planning and land acquisition powers. Public opinion shaped by the experiences of the war was broadly behind a vastly empowered state in the urgent mission of rebuilding Britain from the rubble for a new age of modernity, with occasions of dissent sidelined at the time (famously the residents of Stevenage resisted their designation as the first New Town and repainted their signs as ‘Silkingrad’, in protest of then-minister of town and country planning, Lewis Silkin’s perceived totalitarianism5; they lost and Silkin won).

However, these powers and the erosion of safeguards for individuals endured beyond the immediate aftermath of urgency and fervour for efficiency, and this legacy of democratic deficit would come head to head with challenges, reaching key junctures, such as when the UK was incorporating the European Convention of Human Rights into domestic law via the

Human Rights Act 19986.

Key mechanisms of the apparatus of planning would be directly challenged under human rights provisions, such as

Article 6,

the right to an independent fair hearing (the planning system and its appeal procedure has the secretary of state as both judge and policymaker 7), and of course

Article 1 of Protocol 1,

the peaceful enjoyment of private property.

5)

Smith, 2016.

6)

Cullingworth and Nadin, 2006, p.32.

7)

Fairclough, 2001.

– 38 –

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INTEREST Leaving Hatfield New Town centre is a bit of an ordeal as a pedestrian. The pavement takes me up to Asda’s expansive car park on the site of the old common, and promptly disappears, as if the New Town’s planners could not envisage any other way of arriving and departing the town centre other than by car.

Making do, I weave through the car park, crossing the road, and make my way past Hatfield Swim Centre, a rather striking 1960s building with its cruciform plan and hyperbolic paraboloid

Walking u p

concrete

St Albans

shell roof. p a st more 19 carriagew 50s-1960 ay cutting s housing through th of the A1(M developm e town, ori ), built in 19 ent interlo g 8 in 3 a , cked with ll d y ir e th ctly unde e de Havilla li n e 1930s sub of the old rneath. Th nd Comet, urbs, I fina B a rn e A1001 is n et Bypass first made lly reach th ow named (A1001), an in Hatfield e twoComet Wa d now wit . This una h the thun y, named ssuming H dering tun after the fi ertfordsh n el rst ever c ire town h ommercia ad a starr ing role in l jetliner, th aviation h e istory in th e UK, if no t

lane dual

Road Wes t,

– 39 –

the world. This renamed road is a homage to the overwhelmingly dominant industry and employer1 in Hatfield, of national importance during WW2 and beyond: the de Havilland Aircraft Company and its operations at Hatfield Aerodrome and Factory. This legacy is still visible in what remains of the de Havilland site today. I cross Comet Way and walk further up to Hatfield Police Station. Its Lying at the core of all of the Uthwatt Committee’s analysis and

glamorous Art Deco symmetrical exterior

recommendations is a highly political, even moral debate on

with rounded corners and Crittall windows

where the balance between individual property rights and public

give it away as the original headquarters

interest should lie, a question that goes to the very foundation

and main administration building of the

of the legitimacy of the state’s role in planning. In the planning

de Havilland Aircraft Company; however

system of Uthwatt’s time, the refusal of permission came with

the large factory building behind has

a legal duty for the state to compensate landowners, because it

since been demolished for its

deprived the right bestowed by their ownership to “develop [their

redevelopment into the police

land] as they chose”1; in the context of this debate, the balance

station and magistrates

was tipped towards the individual owner. This therefore placed

court. Further into the former

a financial cost to exercising planning powers, and planning

de Havilland complex, down

schemes of the time were “little more than photographs of existing

Tamblin Way and then onto

users and existing lay-outs, which, to avoid the necessity of paying

Mosquito Way (named after a

compensation” . The Uthwatt Committee, rather than shying 2

de Havilland engineer and plane

away from such an ideological debate, addresses this debate head-

respectively), the Grade II* listed2 Flight

on in its aim to resolve this problem of compensation. Its position

Test Hangar and the Control Tower for the

is very clear: the ineffectiveness of the entire planning apparatus

airfield can still be seen, built in 1952-1954

is that “fundamentally the problem arises from the existing legal

for the testing and maintenance of the iconic

position with regard to the use of land, which attempts largely to

Comet planes which put the British aviation

preserve, in a highly developed economy, the purely individualistic

industry at the cutting edge of its postwar

approach to land ownership [...and that] it is no longer completely

boom. Its dramatic scale, sawtooth roof,

tenable in our present stage of development” . Ergo, the only

distinctive curved balconies, its concertina

solution to the problems of planning is a rebalancing of the law in

hangar doors that take up an entire facade,

3

favour of public interest.

now house an altogether more quotidian use: a David Lloyd leisure facility.

1)

British Information Services, 1949, p.1.

2)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.17-18.

3)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.12.

1) Hutton, 2014b, p.20.

2) Historic England, The Flight Test Hangar, Offices, Fire Station and Control Tower, British Aerospace - 1376561, 1998.

– 40 –

As previously discussed, the government appointing an expert committee often expects a particular outcome, and the types of expert appointed to the Uthwatt Committee suggests that this inevitable re-evaluation of legal basis of the state’s ability to interfere in private property was anticipated: Augustus Uthwatt, the Committee chairman was a judge, Raymond Evershed, a King’s Counsel, Mr James Wylie, a barrister. The other dimension, the valuation of such property ownership and its rights (for the purposes of compensation), would concern the other half of the Committee, who were James Barr, Vice-President of Chartered Surveyors’ Institution (now RICS), C. Gerald Eve a former President of the same institution. This Committee of lawyers and surveyors would come to define “five propositions”4 which would define the relationship between an individual owner and the state, and underpin newly broadened limits of reasonable behaviour (including nationalisation of development rights and wider compulsory purchase powers) for the state’s planning machinery: 1. Ownership of land does not carry with it an unqualified right of user.

2. Therefore restrictions based on the duties of neighbourliness may be imposed without involving the conception that the landowner is being deprived of any property or interest.

3. Therefore such restrictions can be imposed without liability to pay compensation.

4. But the point may be reached when the restrictions imposed extend beyond the obligations of neighbourliness.

5. At this stage the restrictions become equivalent to an expropriation of a proprietary right or interest and therefore (it will be claimed) should carry a right to compensation as such.

4)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.21-22.

– 41 –

In Uthwatt’s principles, the concept of neighbourliness is pivotal as it defines the threshold between no compensation and compensation. Property ownership rights in English common law are defined in the negative: ownership affords the owner enjoyment of their land (“to turn [land] to any use which happens to be most profitable to the owner”5) unless such enjoyment results in “other persons [being] injured in the legitimate enjoyment of their own rights”; in brief, the principle of “live and let live”6 or sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas7. These obligations of neighbourliness have been historically enforced by still active common law mechanisms such as nuisance tort law, both private nuisance and public nuisance. Uthwatt frames the evolution of planning regulations as merely preemptive prevention of nuisance, and lists in characteristically legalistic fashion the accretion of historical precedent in planning laws that “push that point [of neighbourliness] progressively further [...] beyond the field of health and safety to that of convenience and amenity”8 evolving with “the social standards of the day”9 . Ultimately, in English common law, while compensation must be paid if the State expropriates property (and its rights) for its own use10, restrictions in the name of neighbourliness does not entitle the owner to compensation as it does not deprive owners of their ownership, and the rights that are restricted are “not taken over by the state; they are destroyed on the grounds that their existence is contrary to the national interest”11. Any compensation in such circumstances is a recognition of the need to alleviate potential hardship caused, and not an entitlement12 .

5)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.21.

6)

Ibid.

7)

The legal principle of ‘use your own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another’.

8)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.20.

9)

Ibid., p.21.

10) A concept that can trace its lineage as far back as the Magna Carta.

11) Uthwatt, 1942, p.19.

12)

Ibid., p.22.

– 42 –

While the general logic of the principles is clearly defined by Uthwatt, it admits that “it will always be a matter of difficulty [...] to determine the point at which the accepted obligations of neighbourliness or citizenship are exceeded and an expropriation is suffered”13 . It is precisely in response to this difficulty in definition, that Uthwatt proposes that the nationalisation “of all rights over development and redevelopment would be one solution of the difficulties”14 as it would impose a default position of universal restriction, compensate once and for all, before selectively bestowing rights back. It is this principle which is ultimately implemented in the

Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

This unusually reflective chapter in Uthwatt, in a kind of ‘thinking aloud’, captures an emerging trend in the evolution of planning where the state takes it upon itself ever greater powers of control while remaining within the framework of common law through expanding the concept of ‘neighbourliness’. All restrictions in the name of neighbourliness are claimed to be “imposed in the public interest”15 which effectively equates the two: neighbourliness with public interest. In an ever interconnected nation, there is nothing to stop the extent of neighbourliness extending to the

Walking

whole nation, and it is this expansion of the concept which forms

around these remnants of the aircraft

the legitimacy for national planning.

industry is especially poignant. Ever since de Havilland outgrew its Stag Lane site in Edgware, it has dominated thoroughly the economic life of Hatfield, employing over 10,000 staff at its peak (more than a third of its population at the time)1. Hatfield’s appointment as a New Town was unusual as it was quite already established at the time, with a population of 20,000 during the war2, and its designation was largely in recognition of the national interest in supporting this crucial aircraft industry. Positive planning to support the industry would be “beyond the capacity of a Rural District Council”3 and would require the national apparatus of a New Town development corporation. The de Havil13)

Uthwatt, 1942, p.22

1) Osborn and Whittick, 1963, p.250.

14) Ibid.

2) Hutton, 2014b, p.17.

15)

3) Brett, Report of the Hatfield Development Corporation, 1957.

Ibid., p.20

– 43 –

land company’s central

role

in

the

New Town was so significant that of the “2131 houses which had been built since 1950, over half had been let to workers from the de Havilland factory”4. Despite in theory, New Towns aimed to have a variety of employment, “no attempt was made to explain or excuse a one-industry town, nor any provision made to mitigate possible distress arising from this situation in the future”5. The legacy of the prioritisation of the national interest at the expense of the long-term local interest of the town itself is especially clear now, after de Havilland (since merged into BAE Systems) had to close its Hatfield operations in 1993. Walking in the neighbourhood around the Flight Test Hangar, the identity crisis since of this New Town is visible all around. Since the 1990s, the de Havilland site was redeveloped into offices, business parks (including Ocado’s headquarters and robotic warehouse), and the University of Hertfordshire’s de Havilland Campus, all in a uncharacterful and cautious architecture, as the planning machinery desperately struggles in a rush to fill this vacuum left by the departure of the aircraft industry on which it had depended for its planning aims for the last few decades.

4) Cobern, Irving, and Martindale, 2010.

5) Hutton, 2014b, p.20.

– 44 –

– 45 –

Fig 7. ‘The Report of Uthwatt (After Edward Lear)’, a satirical poem in The Spectator, 1942

– 46 –

THE LEGACY AND THE FUTURE Shortly after the final Uthwatt Report’s publication on 10 September 19421, in the 20 November 1942 issue of the political and current affairs magazine, The Spectator, a satirical poem was published about the Uthwatt Report. Written in the style of Edward Lear, it is a series of couplets rhyming with the name ‘Uthwatt’, each relating to an interested party and how they might be affected by the report, from “Politicians (Left and Right)”, “Agriculture and Industry”, to even “Bungalovers and Caravanners”, “Speculative Builders” and finally “Public Opinion”2 . The poem humorously captures the sheer breadth of the consequences of this report’s recommendations, and the mere fact that this highly technical expert advisory report was deemed a worthy target of satire highlighted the everyday importance of planning and post-war reconstruction for not just the ruling class of lawmakers and bureaucrats, but for the whole populace, with both winners and losers.

In the esoteric, technical guise of improving the fiscal mechanisms of compensation and betterment in existing planning acts, the Uthwatt Report would be put forward a series of recommendations which would fundamentally realign the balance of power between individual property owners and the state as the self-appointed custodian of public, community, or national interest3 . Uthwatt proposed extending planning controls to all land in the country the first time under the Central Planning Authority, which was implemented by

Town and Country Planning (Interim Development) Act 1943

and has been the case ever since. Uthwatt proposed a fundamental deconstruction and reformulation of land ownership, where the right to develop the land one owns is no longer intrinsic to ownership itself. Uthwatt proposed accomplishing this by the nationalisation of all development

1) HC Deb (9 September 1942) vol. 383, col. 137-8.

2) F. J. O., The Report of Uthwatt, 1942.

3) The Uthwatt Report alternates between all three of these phraseologies.

– 47 –

rights of undeveloped land, and this was extended by the Attlee government’s

Town and Country Planning Act 1947

to all land, developed or otherwise, and forms the legitimacy of the modern planning system even today. Uthwatt proposed an overhaul of compulsory acquisition powers, allowing the state to exercise them in broader circumstances, with less bureaucracy and safeguards, and at prices that are less distorted by potential development value and land market speculation. These were implemented in one of the Churchill coalition government’s last acts in the

Town and Country Planning Act 1944,

and again strengthened in the

1947 Act,

and served as the basis on which the ambitions of wholesale, comprehensive (re)development were made feasible in the Attlee government’s

New Towns Act 1946.

Although some of the more dramatic measures, such as gradually nationalising each piece of land with every planning permission granted, were not implemented by the governments who had campaigned on policies such as land nationalisation, Uthwatt had a tremendous influence on the political discourse on post-war reconstruction and planning, for an expert committee report.

These exceptional proposals came at a very opportune moment where the unprecedented impact of bombing and destruction demand an unprecedented response. With the background of a growing scepticism of free markets post-Depression and an emerging norm of state nationalisation and economic planning, the radicalism of the Uthwatt Committee’s recommendations were framed and legitimised in the report as a rational response to the urgency of the need for post-war reconstruction, and the need for an efficient solution which the market and private development was failing to provide, and thus the state must step in. But once national control is exclusively vested in the state, the state must also have the means of managing it, and in the ratcheting logics of centralisation, the solution of more centralisation becomes clear. In Uthwatt’s argument, with the absence of a market-based solution, only a technocratic apparatus

– 48 –

using ‘scientific planning’ to maximise ‘public interest’4 using the minimum means of the limited land in the whole country can be the solution to the land system of this country, with technocratic expertise at the centre of its network of power relations. With a highly politicised set of premises and assumptions, a set deductive dominoes leads us to this seemingly inevitable, logical conclusion.

With the state and its technocratic apparatus still wielding the extensive control bestowed on it by Uthwatt, it is unsurprising that the expert committee still has a role to play in shaping the planning system’s evolution today, even as we enter the age where Britons “have had enough of experts”5 . A new expert committee, the

Building Better Building Beautiful Commission,

was commissioned by the Minister of Housing James Brokenshire, on 3 November 2018. Chaired by Sir Roger Scruton, the interim recommendations of the commission include measures to include ‘beauty’ (however it is defined) into the remit of the planning system. Even here, the legacy of Uthwatt can be felt: there is nothing to stop the apparatus of planning extending its control to nebulous and subjective criteria such as ‘beauty’, since the state, having nationalised all development rights, itself has the exclusive means of setting the terms on which permission is granted back.

Even now, the philosophy of aesthetics can be subsumed into the paradigm of a technocratic apparatus.

The Uthwatt report’s original remit was to set out solutions to the fiscal mechanisms of compensation and betterment of the old planning system, influenced by Georgist economics where land value rises caused by public action should benefit the public and not the private owner; in brief: land justice. While these land value tax measures were strengthened6 and implemented in the

1947 Act

as a ‘development charge’,

they were shortly abolished by the Churchill government which came into power in 1951 and passed the

Town and Country Planning Act 1954.

4) Also scientifically rather than democratically defined.

5) Said by Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Justice, in an interview on Sky News, on 3 June 2016 in the campaign leading up to the EU referendum.

6) Uthwatt suggested a periodic levy of 75% of the rise in land value, whereas the 1947 Act charged the full 100%.

– 49 –

While the economic redistributive aims of the planning system were entirely removed, the means of enforcing them remain even to this day: an entire land system where development only takes place with state permission. For every architect who may have encountered obstruction or difficulty in planning negotiations over the minutiae of facade detailing or landscaping surface materials, it is crucial to note how far the planning system has

On

evolved from its original grand economic aims of land justice, and

towards

the

train

how myopic it has become.

station,

signs

are

my

way

back

visible that this 1950s New Town built on top of an 1850s new town are undergoing yet another period of renewal. Walking back through the Town Centre, White Lion Square has been spruced up with the usual sprinkling of some new landscaping, street furniture and public art. At the end of the Town Centre high street, a vast demolition site signifies yet more new building to come; in this case a temporary car park then a town centre mixed-use development. Judging from the renders that are pinned up for consultation, another medley of brick blocks. From these pockets of renewal, I pass through again a patchwork of neighbourhoods 30s, 50s, 70s, and 90s. The train station, which also looks like it has had its fair share of smartening up, is just ahead now, and it is there I just manage to catch the train for London a minute before it departs. As the view of Hertfordshire fields get replaced by the gradually intensifying scenes of the capital, I can’t help but wonder, in a committee room somewhere in Whitehall, what that group of experts has in store next for Hatfield.

– 50 –

– 51 –

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1 – Hulton Archive (1941). The interior of the Houses of Parliament after a bombing raid. [online] Getty Images. Available at: https:// ‌

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