9 minute read
Planning and politics are a challenge for town halls
from Booklaunch Issue 16
by Booklaunch
ENGLAND’S FUTURE
THE IMPACT OF POLITICS ON SHAPING THE ENVIRONMENT
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Nigel Moor
More than forty years ago, Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962) attempted to defend the art of politics from those who sought to denigrate it. Against the orthodoxies of the time—Fabian centralism and one-party Conservatism—he looked back to a much older tradition of political thinking, centred on active and participatory citizenship in a pluralistic political community. Councillors, at the local level, were very much a part of this political matrix.
Strong support for the positive role of councillors in spatial planning was given by Lord Nolan in his report on standards in public life (1997). Councillors were seen as exercising quite properly two roles in the planning system. They determine applications, arriving at a decision on granting or refusing permission by using planning criteria and by excluding non-planning considerations. They also act as representatives of public opinion in their communities.
There has always been some tension in this dual role, but it was minimised when public opinion was broadly in favour of, or at least neutral to, development. The tension has, however, become more acute as opposition to development projects from the public has grown. As politicians, local councillors must listen to and be responsive to the views of their constituents; as members of the planning committee, they must make a decision using only planning criteria. This may be a delicate balance to achieve.
Nolan noted that one approach to resolving this internal conflict might be to reduce the scope of councillor involvement in the planning process, but concluded that the result, however well intentioned, would create difficulties. One of these was the view that planning is a ‘quasi-judicial’ process. Nolan disagreed, and argued that if planning decisions by local authorities were to be regarded as quasi-legal, with councillors playing a similar role to that of inquiry inspectors or judges, there would be no point in involving councillors in such decisions; they might as well be taken by planning officers or inspectors. Another difficulty was the assumption that councillors cannot be trusted to arrive at a sound decision or, more insidiously, that they are more likely than officers to succumb to corruption or improper influence.
Nolan took a robust approach to these concerns. Planning, he said, was not an exact science; there will always be a balance between various criteria. There is therefore nothing intrinsically wrong if planning committees do not invariably follow the advice of officers. Planning officers exist to advise planning committees, which are entitled to reach their own decisions by attaching different weight to the various criteria that are relevant to an application. If a decision was thought to be perverse, a planning officer should so advise the committee, but still respect the decision. Providing elected members were fully and properly briefed, they were particularly well equipped to make planning decisions because of their representative role, not despite it. Finally, divorcing the political role of councillors from their planning function was unlikely to succeed. It was also undemocratic and impractical to try to prevent councillors from discussing applications with whomever they wanted.
Planning decisions, Nolan concluded, are not legal judgements. They are administrative decisions, taken within a framework of law and practice, and his view has been upheld by the courts. The effect of this is not that planning decisions are free from legal constraints, but that the constraints are different. Decisions must still be free from bias caused by personal interest, but they need not be taken judicially or based solely on a rational and impartial assessment of evidence. On the contrary, councillors must bring to planning decisions a sense of the community’s needs and interests. That is why they are there.
The Nolan Committee therefore accepted and understood the duty of elected members to listen to their constituents, together with an expectation that most members would behave properly if they had the support of best-practice guidelines and training, and effective external scrutiny if misconduct was suspected. A Code of Best Practice in Planning Procedures was recommended and subsequently adopted by the Standards Board for England.
The Nolan Report stimulated a strong debate on the role of councillors following its publication, and in 2001 Matthew Taylor, then director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), and Paul Wheeler, head of member development at the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), published a pamphlet entitled ‘In Defence of Councillors’. The analysis contained in their essay is still relevant and is an important guide to understanding the political influence on councillors.
READER’S COMMENT
Graham New (former member of the Law Society’s Planning Panel):
They asserted that successive governments have put considerable energy into minimising the capacity of councillors to make decisions or wield power. The government has on the one hand tied up local authorities in a web of central regulations, targets and inspections, while on the other hand it has removed local authority functions and set up new bodies to drive priorities, such as neighbourhood renewal and a variety of Action Zones. A ‘quango state’ has also emerged in which local decisions are made by executives and non-executives appointed by central government.
The managerialist critique of councillors tends to focus on two managerial attributes said to be lacking: namely, impartiality and expertise. It is argued that while the decisions made by councillors are clouded by political ambition, inflexible beliefs and internecine conflicts, conversely the judgements of managers are evidence-based, objective and disinterested. Councillors are seen as part-time amateurs, while managers are seen as full-time professionals.
There are two main expressions of the rise of managerialism. These are a consumerist approach to service delivery and the requirements of best-value targets, together with the greater use of external management consultants. There is clearly a case for managerialism, for councillors not to be taking detailed operational decisions or using irrelevant or inappropriate political criteria to determine the allocation of local resources. However, much of the business of local government is about the political reconciliation of competing interests and, here, political parties have a vital function in organising choices in elections and in ensuring that political accountability relates to the pursuit of broad values.
Taylor and Wheeler (2001) explained that although the social and cultural base of the political parties had been eroded, the control of these parties over the formal representative democratic process had, if anything, increased. Parties control who can be elected, and have first call on the accountability of politicians. This accountability is both downwards to the activists who campaign for and reselect the candidate, and upwards to the party hierarchy, whose patronage will determine the career prospects of the councillor.
Particularly in councils run by their own party, councillors will be powerfully constrained by the patronage of the executive, and ‘it will continue to be in party group meetings rather than public scrutiny sessions that the executive will be called to account by the majority group.’
Delivery and implementation
The means by which development, particularly in the field of housing, can be most efficiently and equably delivered has been a major issue between the parties. The Labour Party ushered in the ‘new towns’ by means of development corporations while the Conservatives used similar agencies to deliver the urban regeneration of the inner cities in the 1980s. Opposition in the shires prevented the use of the concept outside the cities.
New Labour, impatient at the lack of delivery of new housing, brought forward new-town-style development corporations in the growth areas, bypassing local planning authorities. Local authorities have often been regarded as inadequate for this task, particularly in areas of substantial growth, but there are difficulties as to the form, composition and political accountability of new agencies tasked with regeneration.
The Liberal Democrats have supported localism, and at varying times the Conservatives have championed local autonomy but Labour’s Tony Blair continued the micro-management of local government begun by Margaret Thatcher. In opposition, parties have championed local autonomy but centralisation remains a powerful force.
Local autonomy and local government
The autonomy that can be delegated to local planning authorities and to elected members by central government in the making of planning policy and planning decisions is a major difference between the parties.
Throughout the political history of spatial planning, the Conservatives have resisted moves for regional government. There has been a long-standing fear that if regional democratic bodies were based on existing (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)
The Book Guild, 3 October 2022, 624 pages, 9781915352170, RRP £19.95
Check our website for discount: www.booklaunch.london
EDITOR’S NOTE
It’s an oddity that while three nations of the United Kingdom now have their own legislative assemblies, the largest partner — England — does not. In the absence of a devolved legislature, Nigel Moor looks at how local politics in England has tackled the needs of voters in “left-behind towns” and how much the planning system is able to work with local politicians before being stifled by differences in ambition and approach.
Covering Brexit, the pandemic and the 2019 general election, his book includes case studies drawn from Greater London, Liverpool, Newcastle Upon Tyne and Plymouth and the smaller towns of Stamford, Grantham and Blyth Valley in Northumberland, one of the Red Wall constituencies that saw political allegiance flip.
Dr Moor was for nearly 20 years a planning correspondent for Building magazine and has written for a range of professional and industry journals. He has served as a councillor at town-, district- and county-council levels, as well mayor of an Oxfordshire market town.
