Issuu

town & country planning The Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association

March–April 2023

Volume 92

• Number 2

• Edward Shepherd on the return of the land question in planning • Hugh Ellis on climate change betrayal and the new generation ﬁghting back • John Sturzaker on the plan-less system

information and subscriptions

Town & Country Planning The Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association ISSN 0040-9960 Published bi-monthly March–April 2023 Volume 92 Number 2

•

Town & Country Planning is the Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), a Company Limited by Guarantee. Registered in England under No. 146309. Registered Charity No. 214348 Copyright © TCPA and the authors, 2023 The TCPA may not agree with opinions expressed in Town & Country Planning but encourages publication as a matter of interest and debate. Nothing printed may be construed as representative of TCPA policy or opinion unless so stated. Editorial and Subscriptions Office: Town and Country Planning Association 17 Carlton House Terrace London SW1Y 5AS t: +44 (0)20 7930 8903 Editorial: Nick.Matthews@tcpa.org.uk Subscriptions: tcpa@tcpa.org.uk Editor: Nick Matthews Contributions: Articles for consideration are welcome. Material should be submitted to the Editor, preferably by e-mail and in Word-readable form. Reproductionquality illustrations are welcome. Advertising: Rates (not including VAT): Full page £800. Inserts from £400 (weight-dependent). Half page £400. Quarter page £300. Ten per cent reduction for agents. Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

Subscriptions: £125 (UK); £152 (overseas). Subscription orders and inquiries should be addressed to: Subscriptions, TCPA, 17 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AS t: +44 (0)20 7930 8903 e: tcpa@tcpa.org.uk Payment with order. All cheques should be made payable on a UK bank. Payment may be made by transfer to: The Bank of Scotland (account number 00554249, sort code 12-11-03). Mastercard and Visa accepted. Town & Country Planning is also available through TCPA membership. See the TCPA website, at www.tcpa.org.uk, for membership rates, or e-mail membership@tcpa.org.uk for details. TCPA membership beneﬁts include: a subscription to Town & Country Planning; discounted fees for TCPA events and conferences; opportunities to become involved in policy-making; a monthly e-bulletin; access to the members’ area on the TCPA website.

• • • • •

Printed by RAP Spiderweb Ltd, Clowes Street, Oldham OL9 7LY Printed with vegetable-based inks on chlorine-free paper from sustainably managed sources.

contents Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

• Volume 92 • Number 2

regulars

features

On the Agenda Fiona Howie: Can we help make the Bill actually deliver levelling up? 77 Time & Tide Hugh Ellis: Betrayed ... 79 Talking Houses Georgie Revell: Is there space for a school of place? 82 Snakes & Ladders Sue Brownill: The need for an alternative infrastructure for participation 86 Off the Rails Robin Hickman: Manipulation and the A46 Newark Bypass 90 Off the Fence David Lock: Dark kitchens 134 Writeback 135 Going Local David Boyle: Alternatives to waiting patiently as supplicants 136 Earth Rights Martin Stott: Standing at the sky’s edge 138 New Leaves Danielle Sinnett: A helpful set of tools — now to see them put to use 141 Design Matters Matthew Carmona: Beautiful places — aspiration or edict?

Capturing value — the return of the land question in planning Edward Shepherd on renewed interest in land justice issues

The plan-less system — the dysfunctional approach to planning for housing in England John Sturzaker on what the current dysfunction in planning for housing says about whether England truly has a plan-led system

102 The challenge of delivering affordable housing in the South West Danielle Sinnett, Katie McClymont, Hannah Hickman, Zaky Fouad and Stephen Hall on a study of housing affordability in the South West of England 108 20 minutes to what? Florence Hewett and Caglar Koksal on a literature study on the diversity of approaches to the application of the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood 112 Frozen in aspic — planning and pragmatism in the siting of nuclear power stations in Britain Andrew Blowers on strategic siting and the stubbornly inﬂexible geography of nuclear power infrastructure in Britain 122 Privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups — should we be worried? Rotem Shevchenko on the emerging trend of privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups operating in the virtual and physical spheres 128 What progress in improving the natural environment in England? Peter Jones on the main elements in the 25 Year Environment Plan and the progress report issued by the Office for Environmental Protection Edward Shepherd on the return of the land question in planning, pages 92–97. Cover illustration by Clifford Harper. chcliffordharper@gmail.com Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

on the agenda TCPA Chief Executive Fiona Howie on key current issues in the policy landscape and the work of the TCPA

can we help make the bill actually deliver levelling up?

As readers of Town & Country Planning will be aware, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill is long and wide-ranging, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the detailed, clause-by-clause consideration of it at Committee Stage in the House of Lords is taking a little while. As Parliament rose for recess over Easter, there were two scheduled days left for the Committee Stage, with about 300 more amendments to get through! But in late March the clauses and amendments relating to planning reform were reached. These included amendments around the purpose of planning (which the TCPA has been promoting as part of the Better Planning Coalition) and the relationship between the proposed National Development Management Policies and Local Plans — as well as amendments tabled by Lord Crisp relating to the Association’s Healthy Homes Campaign and its wider work on planning and health. The convention is that amendments are not pushed to a vote at Committee Stage — that is left to Report Stage. But the tone and level of support in debates at Committee are an important indicator of what issues might be pushed again at the next stage. It was incredibly positive, therefore, that the Lords dedicated over two hours to a detailed and important debate focused on the role of planning and housing in relation to health and wellbeing.1 In his opening remarks, Lord Crisp highlighted that: ‘There is currently no provision for promoting health and well-being in planning legislation and guidance. Even in the key paragraph 20 of the National Planning Policy Framework, where the Government set down requirements on strategic policies in local plans, there is no mention of promoting health and well-being but simply a reference to the provision of healthcare facilities. This seems to be a very old-fashioned view of health which equates health with healthcare. 74

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

‘If nothing else, the pandemic has accelerated public understanding that health in the broadest sense, and well-being, are central to placemaking, communities and the levelling-up missions. Our homes and neighbourhoods deeply influence our health, for good and for bad, and this all influences our life chances. If we want to level up and create the circumstances in which people can flourish, health and well-being must have central roles in our planning system.’ I cannot aim to summarise the whole of the debate, and would instead encourage those with an interest to read the transcript of it, but those contributing included former Home Secretary Lord Blunkett, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, who was Chief Executive of NHS England until 2021, and Lord Lansley, a former Secretary of State for Health. There was also strong support from Baroness Hayman, Labour’s Shadow Spokesperson for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. A theme that has been raised in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords has been that, while the Bill sets out the levelling-up missions, it does not currently include ‘mechanisms’ that would help to achieve them. In the debate this point was raised eloquently by Lord Stevens, who noted that Lord Crisp’s and other amendments relating to healthy homes and environments would not in themselves ensure ‘triumph’, but would help to increase the probability that planning decisions would be better in the future. And that they would provide a mechanism ‘for bringing real-world improvements in health and the congeniality of living across [the] country’. In response to the debate Earl Howe, Deputy Leader of the House of Lords, argued that all of the issues were being tackled through other legislation, regulation, existing policy and guidance and proposed reforms to policy, despite this argument having been pre-empted by a number of speakers throughout the debate. In his final summing up, Lord Crisp said: ‘Planning is often seen as a negative, but all noble Lords described it as something that could enable the creation of the flourishing individuals, society and communities that we all want.’

on the agenda

And specifically in response to Earl Howe’s response: ‘I am not surprised, but I would like to think that there is some route for discussion. The big difference here is between guidance and what is required. In my comments, I have been trying to hammer in that we need to build houses that are fit for purpose. [….] I would be very happy to meet the Government if it were useful to discuss these things further. Maybe there is some useful discussion to be had around the NPPF. I am not sure whether there will be but, if not, I expect us to debate this again in this Chamber sometime after the Coronation.’ In relation to the proposed reforms to national planning policy, which were subject to a consultation published in late December, the TCPA’s response, unsurprisingly, raised the issue of health, as well as arguing that the changes proposed do not provide the priority or clarity necessary to enable the system to fulfil its potential in relation to tackling health inequalities and improving population health, urgently addressing the climate crisis, or delivering well designed affordable homes.2 If the government is prepared to amend the National Planning Policy Framework to better address health, that would be a welcome step, and we await the publication of the revised version with interest. But we are not holding our breath. Even if there are improvements, though, we will continue to argue that there is a need for legislative change. This is because, while we know that there are examples of important work at the local level that is happening now (as will be examined in the next issue of Town & Country Planning, a large part of which will focus on initiatives being carried out to deliver ’20-minute neighbourhoods’), we need this to shift to being the norm.

• Fiona Howie is Chief Executive of the TCPA. Notes 1 The transcript of this element of the debate is available in ‘Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill’. Hansard, Vol. 829, 27 Mar. 2023. https://hansard.parliament.uk/ lords/2023-03-27/debates/C271DFE5-FD43-4717-82ED10D4FF01D369/Levelling-UpAndRegenerationBill# contribution-6D2682BB-5930-4F2E-82E7F13C6F3CBF3A. The transcript of the full debate on 27 Mar. is available at https://hansard.parliament.uk/ lords/2023-03-27/debates/C271DFE5-FD43-4717-82ED10D4FF01D369/Levelling-UpAndRegenerationBill 2 Reforms to National Planning Policy: A Response from the TCPA. TCPA, Mar. 2023. https://tcpa.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FINAL-TCPA-response-toLURB-national-planning-policy-consultationMarch-2023.pdf

The TCPA’s vision is for homes, places and communities in which everyone can thrive. Its mission is to challenge, inspire and support people to create healthy, sustainable and resilient places that are fair for everyone. Informed by the Garden City Principles, the TCPA’s strategic priorities are to: Work to secure a good home for everyone in inclusive, resilient and prosperous communities, which support people to live healthier lives. Empower people to have real inﬂuence over decisions about their environments and to secure social justice within and between communities. Support new and transform existing places to be adaptable to current and future challenges, including the climate crisis.

TCPA membership The beneﬁts of TCPA membership include: a subscription to Town & Country Planning; discounted fees for TCPA events and conferences; opportunities to become involved in policy-making; a monthly e-bulletin; and access to the members’ area on the TCPA website.

• • • • •

Contact the Membership Officer, David White t: (0)20 7930 8903 e: membership@tcpa.org.uk w: www.tcpa.org.uk

TCPA policy and projects Follow the TCPA’s policy and project work on Twitter, @theTCPA and on the TCPA website, at www.tcpa.org.uk

• Affordable housing • Community participation in planning • Garden Cities and New Towns • Healthy Homes Act campaign • Healthy place-making • New Communities Group • Parks and green infrastructure • Planning reform • Planning for climate change Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

on the agenda

TCPA AGM 2023

Magda Hall

TCPA Annual General Meeting Wednesday 19 July 2023, 5.30 pm The meeting well be held virtually, on Zoom The Town and Country Planning Association will be holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Wednesday 19 July 2023 at 5.30 pm. To make the meeting as accessible to as many members as possible, we will again hold the AGM virtually, and all TCPA members are invited to attend. There are five vacancies on the TCPA Board of Trustees and 11 vacancies on the TCPA Policy Council for 2023. These places are for election by the membership of the TCPA, and any individual member of the TCPA or representative of a member organisation of the TCPA may stand for election. Existing elected members on both bodies who are due to retire have been informed and are eligible to stand for re-election.

Magda and Peter Hall

News has reached the TCPA of the death of Magda Hall, who was the wife of the late Professor Sir Peter Hall, the Association’s long-time, very active supporter since the 1950s, and in due course Chair and then President of the Association. It is often overlooked that most prominent and highly productive persons have needed support and encouragement to have made their life work possible. In his acknowledgements within his 1998 opus Cities in Civilization, Peter Hall wrote: ‘[...] and ﬁnally, and above all, as usual to Magda. Apart from playing her regular role as manager of the most impeccable domestic establishment in London, Magda was effectively the book’s co-author. For six years in Berkeley and in London, she acted as research assistant, co-reading much of the basic source material, and transcribing it to provide the quarry out of which the book was sculpted. I dedicated the result to her, but truly it is a joint labour of love.’ Without Magda as his counsellor and rock, his supporter and his protector, Peter’s extraordinary life achievements would not have been possible. Magda is remembered for her great contribution towards progress in the ﬁelds of geography, urban and regional planning, and urban design. 76

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

In line with our Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Strategy, we are keen to broaden the diversity of perspectives on our Board, for example in terms of age, background, ethnicity, and experience. We work with a wide range of people and sectors across the UK, and our governance needs to better reﬂect this. Further information on the respective roles of the Board and the Policy Council is set out in the TCPA Articles of Association and in the TCPA Handbook, which are available (from mid-April) from the TCPA website, under the AGM section — as are the nomination forms. All applicants require the nominating signature of another member of the Association . This can be done electronically. If you do not know another member of the Association, please do not let that put you off. Staff and existing Trustees can facilitate introductions. Completed nomination forms will need to be submitted by email by Tuesday 30 May 2023. The email address to send them to is given in the forms. The results of the Trustee and Policy Council elections will be announced at the 2023 TCPA AGM on Wednesday 19 July. We hope that you can join us.

time & tide The government is abandoning places and people to climate devastation, but a new generation is beginning to challenge back, says Hugh Ellis

betrayed ... the one most locked into the climate system. Radical reductions in carbon emissions might give humanity the chance of survival, but we will be living in a different kind of world in which many of our coastal communities will ultimately be unviable. The problem for the young people from places like Skegness is it that they cannot match up these overall impacts of 1.9 metres of sea level rise, plus the increasing frequency of North Sea storm surges In late March, a group of young people from Hull, (which can already add 5.6 metres to sea levels in a Skegness and other places whose future hangs storm event), with the actions being taken on the in the climate change balance came to their ground to secure their future. That is simply because Parliament to put the case for radical action. the current actions are woefully inadequate and Opposition and backbench government MPs and driven, not by science, but by the limited amounts Peers were generous with their time and listened of funding to meet the national emergency of climate to a set of outstanding presentations from these adaptation. This new generation is far too bright to young people. Suggestions about moving to be fobbed off with talk of ‘adaptive pathways’, which property-level resilience measures were met by the is principally a way of dressing up incremental Youth Mayor of Hull asking: ‘Isn’t that privatising stop-gap flood solutions as a coherent programme how we act on flood resilience? How are people of change. with no money meant to make their homes resilient?’ To some extent, the obvious hypocrisy which Good questions, to which there were no ready dominates the English debate on climate change answers. was outed by the Committee on Climate Change’s The mood of many of the participants in this event recent progress report to Parliament.2 Published at the end of March, it highlighted how critically was particularly resonant for the contemporary unprepared we are to deal with our climate future. climate debate. It was clear that these young It identified planning as a particular problem, but, people feel real anger that Westminster does not while the report was damning overall, it still overcare about them and their places in any practical estimated our preparedness for coastal change. way. The problem is not simply a chronic lack of the The basis of this anger has its foundations in a classic piece of English cognitive dissonance, which necessary resources in local government and the contributes to our deep-seated national characteristic Environment Agency, but also institutional failures, of rank hypocrisy. We know that this young generation including the absence of the strategic planning that is vital to our collective future. will be alive, hopefully, in 2100, and we know from The almost comic failures of our existing voluntary the government’s own climate change flood risk allowances1 that sea levels will be 1.9 metres higher approach are illustrated by the Humber 2100+ project. at that time. We know too that there are uncertainties Vital in determining the future of that sub-region’s in this figure, but that these uncertainties have the resilience, it has been delayed for more than two effect of under- rather than over-estimating the years because of disagreements among constituent impacts. This is simply because where the science local authorities. It beggars belief that the measures is uncertain about the impacts of the loss of, for necessary to save communities including Doncaster, example, the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, it does Goole and Hull rest upon petty disagreements. not include them in the current estimates of sea If ever there was any doubt about why strategic level rise. This is scientifically prudent if practically planning needs to be on a statutory footing, the dangerous to anyone considering how to plan for Humber 2100+ project provides the overwhelming climate change. evidence. And, of course, we know that, of all the devastating If our approach to adaptation is clearly inadequate, climate impacts that we will suffer, sea level rise is then our approach to meeting our net-zero targets Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

time & tide

has reached new levels of farce. The publication of the long-awaited strategy to deliver on our net-zero commitments3 was not driven by political commitment but by the requirements of the High Court. With the government having been forced at legal ‘gun point’ to say something, the result is bizarre. Perhaps nothing more needs to be said about the government’s announcement on achieving net zero than to point to the front cover of the document — which appears to feature an oil rig. It is not useful to repeat here the many layers of criticism already laid against the strategy, of which the most obvious is that it will not achieve the net-zero targets vital to our survival. Consenting more fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea is unbelievably irresponsible, as is any reliance on unproven technologies such as large-scale carbon capture, usage and storage. The strategy is an unscientiﬁc, politically expedient national suicide note — a set of policies which fail to seize the opportunity of green growth while condemning future generations to the worst impacts of climate change. Never has there been such a political failure, on such a grand scale.

‘The feelings of anger and

looking at the evidence after 13 crucial and wasted years on climate change, it is clear that this feeling is justified. Government has failed in its first and most overwhelmingly important responsibility, which is to provide security for communities in the United Kingdom. Its failure to act will fatally damage all aspects of our society in ways which were completely avoidable. The feelings of anger and betrayal may be a rational reaction, but they are only the starting point for change. If this new generation is to have hope, it needs to start organising a different future from the one imposed upon it by Westminster’s failures. Emma Hardy MP — whose tireless attempts to amend the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to strengthen our approach to flood risk have all been rejected by Secretary of State Michael Gove — suggested to the young people that they begin to write their own plans for Hull. This germ of an idea is the beginning of a new journey in which, far from simply giving in to sullen anger, the communities most affected seize the opportunity to write their own plans. Having worked out what radical measures are necessary for a resilient future, they might just be politically unstoppable. Why? Because on the one hand they have nothing to lose, and on the other they can harness that almost unbeatable energy that comes when people and places with their backs to the wall begin to fight for their survival.

betrayal may be a rational reaction, but they are only the starting point for change. If this • Dr Hugh Ellis is Policy Director at the TCPA. The views new generation is to have hope, expressed are personal. Notes it needs to start organising 1 Flood Risk Assessments: Climate Change Allowances. a different future from the Guidance. Environment Agency, Feb. 2016 (updated May 2022). www.gov.uk/guidance/ﬂood-riskone imposed upon it by assessments-climate-change-allowances 2 Progress in Adapting to Climate Change: 2023 Report Westminster’s failures’ It is true that, in the policy vacuum created by the government, real change is nevertheless beginning to happen, driven by, among others, institutional investors whose power will ultimately tip the balance in favour of radical climate action. But it will come too late for many places whose future could have been secured by the long-term investment in their resilience. Places like Skegness have been left to fend for themselves, hoping for the best and that the next North Sea storm surge does not hit at high tide. The anger displayed by the young people on their parliamentary visit is not static: it is evolving into a powerful feeling of betrayal. In standing back and 78

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

to Parliament. Climate Change Committee, Mar. 2023. www.theccc.org.uk/2023/03/29/climate-change-hasarrived-yet-the-country-is-still-strikingly-unprepared/ 3 Powering Up Britain. Policy Paper. HM Government, Mar. 2023. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ ﬁle/1147340/powering-up-britain-joint-overview.pdf

talking houses Policy Exchange’s proposals for a ‘School of Place’ — in itself a worthy aim — miss the key target, says Georgie Revell

is there space for a school of place?

At the end of last year, the think-tank Policy Exchange released a paper calling for a new ‘School of Place’ with an aim to ‘revitalise Britain’s built environment’.1 This new school of architecture and urban design would be dedicated to place-making and would be encouraged, promoted, or even established by the government. The paper has a foreword by Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove and is directly linked to both the levelling-up agenda and the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. The aim of the new school would be to create ‘beautiful places’ which will muster public support for developments. The approach would be to ‘wholeheartedly revive traditional architecture’, although the paper concedes that other methods might be available. The paper predicted the cynical response it has received from the architectural press, although this is not because of the ‘perceived political bias towards traditionalism’ as suggested. The backlash has been from an industry of professionals who understand that architectural style is a result of input from many stakeholders and who realise that design intent alone cannot guarantee the success of a scheme (if only it could). The paper fails to address the wider issues systemic within the world of development. Putting the debate of style to one side, it is interesting to address whether there is a need for a School of Place and, if so, what and whom should it teach. This article centres on housing as it is the focus of the paper and homes make up the signiﬁcant majority of ‘places’. Successful place-making is both an idea and an approach to creating or improving an area. It facilitates creative use, promotes physical, cultural, and social identities, and supports evolution. The result of effective place-making is enduring, high-quality public spaces which

contribute to people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing, and which grow over time.2 Placemaking is therefore about collaboration, integration, and long-term vision. This starts with landowners and developers. Currently, private developers rarely have a continuing interest in a scheme. Land investment speculation and place-making do not really go hand-in-hand, and, while there may be an understanding that ‘high-quality’ schemes could generate more proﬁt, it is not often considered worth the extra hassle or time. Affordable housing providers often want to take a longer-term view, but they are forced to look at a scheme’s viability through the same ﬁnancial assessments that provide no way to value lasting quality.

‘There are many passionate and able people in the profession, but often there is little to no space for designers’ Next is town planners. Their role is to evaluate all schemes against a wider vision and ensure that any proposed development is suitable for the context and community. Sadly, this crucial role has been undervalued and underfunded for years. Teams have unmanageable workloads, resulting in a high turnover of staff, which brings with it a lack of continuity and loss of long-term vision. Frustratingly, this is an area that the government already has more control over. Then there are communities, who must be ‘consulted’ for all developments. Although changes to communications post-Covid have unlocked the ability to contact more people than before, in the most part this important part of the process is treated with scepticism and cynicism on both sides. When engagement is poorly managed, the ‘us versus them’ rhetoric is set and collaboration is written off. And ﬁnally, the design team. When faced with impenetrable viability calculations, planners who are relegated to ticking boxes and a community of people who feel unwelcomed and ignored, there is Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

Tim Crocker — The photographer CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68896191

talking houses

little wriggle room. There are many passionate and able people in the profession, but often there is little to no space for design. In fact, in the majority of developments built by volume housebuilders, architects, landscape architects and urban designers have barely had a look in. To prevent more developments following the same depressing route, there may be space for a School of Place to teach all stakeholders about collaboration, understanding, and appreciation — to ﬁnd a shared vision which is relatable, workable, and sustainable. First, it should teach history. In addition to the bold civic statements of the past, the last century has seen a great range of urban and suburban utopian experiments, from ‘streets in the sky’ to the Garden City movement. The school should teach the successes and failures of all these concepts, including the social history that surrounds them. The school also needs to teach sustainability in every form. This isn’t just maximising on sunlight and orientation (the Egyptians could do that) — it’s about buildings and spaces that are comfortable now and grow and adapt to remain relevant and usable; to sustain communities. The students need to listen to colleagues, scientists, investors, builders, historians, community champions, old people, young people, and everyone in between. They must learn how to communicate with each other and how to promote their ideas to appeal to all. Most critically, the school should ﬁnd a way to bring all stakeholders together to develop a shared, unique and deliverable ‘placemaking’ vision. All stakeholders should be taught to see each other as enablers rather than as barriers.

There are no prizes for guessing the best recent example of this. Accordia in Cambridge is a housing development of 378 homes set among a well considered series of streets and public and communal spaces. It was the ﬁrst housing scheme to win the Stirling Prize in 2008, and it was thrilling to see modern housing that was relevant, exciting, and so well liked. In 2019 a second housing scheme, Goldsmith Street in Norwich, won the Stirling Prize. Although on a smaller scale, this demonstrated (unlike much of Accordia) that good design is not limited to high-value private housing, and a sustainable agenda need not deﬁne a scheme.

‘The school should ﬁnd a way to bring all stakeholders together to develop a shared, unique and deliverable ’place-making’ vision. All stakeholders should be taught to see each other as enablers rather than as barriers’ When Accordia won the Stirling Prize it was hailed as an ‘exhilarating project that adhered to the tenets of modernism [and] reinstated values that were lost from housing in the latter part of the 20th century’.3 It proved that volume housebuilders can deliver highquality architecture and public realm while bolstering their proﬁts. It was celebrated for achieving successful relationships; between the design team, public and private space, and inside and outside. It was further commended for the imagination of the team and

Accordia in Cambridge — a Sterling Prize-winning, well liked housing scheme founded on a place-making vision

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

Tim Crocker — The photographer

talking houses

Part of the Sterling Prize-winning Goldsmith Street development in Norwich

those who enabled it. Surely these people should be writing the manifesto for a School of Place. This debate on education is timely. First, as recognised by Policy Exchange, the 2021 National Model Design Code4 needs a well rounded skillset to develop and monitor this required new guidance. Secondly, the Architects Registration Board is intending to remodel architectural education to make the profession more inclusive.5 It could do worse than look to those professions that architects work with which are more widely attractive and accessible. Perhaps teaching all aspiring ‘place-making professionals’ together initially before specialising is a way to widen the net and promote broader thinking.

‘Bad development is not due to a lack of design knowledge or skill; it’s the result of a lack of shared vision within the development team’ There are lots of reasons why a School of Place is a great idea, but Policy Exchange has really missed the target in terms of whom and what it should teach. Bad development is not due to a lack of design knowledge or skill; it’s the result of a lack of shared

vision within the development team. Development is expensive and the stakes are high, but ultimately there is a single shared responsibility to build sustainable ‘beautiful places’ that foster health, happiness, and wellbeing. If a School of Place can help to teach collaboration to ﬁnd a formula for this, then sign me up. Georgie Revell is an Architect and Associate at Levitt •Bernstein, a practice of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers. She works in the specialist housing studio on a range of housing-led, mixed-use and regeneration schemes. She also specialises in housing standards and guidance. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 A School of Place: How a New School of Architecture Can Revitalise Britain’s Built Environment. Policy Exchange, Dec. 2022. https://policyexchange.org.uk/ publication/a-school-of-place/ 2 See Project for Public Spaces’ ‘What is placemaking?’ webpage, at www.pps.org/article/what-is-placemaking 3 See the RIBA Stirling Prize’s ‘Accordia’ webpage, at www.architecture.com/awards-and-competitions-landingpage/awards/riba-stirling-prize/accordia-cambridge 4 National Model Design Code. Part 1: The Coding Process, and Part 2: Guidance Notes. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Jun. 2021. www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-modeldesign-code 5 See the Architects Registration Board website, at https://arb.org.uk/tomorrows-architects/ Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

snakes & ladders Sue Brownill on why we need a supporting infrastructure not just for participation but for alternatives

the need for an alternative infrastructure for participation of this alternative infrastructure back on the agenda, the impact of the government’s aim of ‘putting communities at heart of planning’ will be limited. But this goes beyond a narrow idea of participation; it is also about supporting communities of all kinds and from all areas not just to engage in formal planning exercises, but to both challenge them and undertake planning beyond the formal planning I was at a dialogue event a few weeks ago that system. Without a supporting ‘infrastructure’, brought together activists involved in community the ‘alternative’ to the current status quo will be planning in the SE1 area of London (discussed in a limited — and planning will be all the poorer for it. previous edition of this column in Town & Country So, we need an infrastructure for alternatives as Planning1) with those involved in current initiatives much as we need it for participation. in order to talk about similarities, differences, and In effect, what I am thinking about is support for lessons from their experiences. that wider space for any community to oppose I was struck by a phrase that a speaker from the developments, draw up their own plans and Four Corners film and photography project used proposals, appear at inquiries, engage in consultation about the context in the 1970s and 1980s. She exercises, and engage in a place-making agenda talked about the ‘alternative infrastructure’ that wider than formal land use planning. This is not existed then, including funding (usually public) for a just about ‘engagement’; it is about enriching range of planning, community and arts organisations, planning policy and practice through community-led cheap housing and premises, supportive local alternatives and debates. It is this space that has authorities, and networks and umbrella groups. been eroded — but luckily not entirely erased — over She reflected on the importance of this infrastructure the years, and which needs now to be put back on in supporting and enabling a not just a wide range the agenda. of local groups to engage in planning and placeIf we think back to the time of the 1970s and 1980s making activities and but also groups of volunteers which the event speakers and the SE1 exhibition or workers on relatively low salaries to live in local were referring to, there was a much denser areas. And she reflected that this kind of support is infrastructure of support for groups, engagement harder to find, different or even absent today: ‘these and alternatives, both nationally and, crucially, spaces are not here now’. locally. For example, there was a national network The discussion got me thinking about how, in of Urban Studies Centres and Technical Aid the current discussion of the future of planning, Centres — some supported by the TCPA, others there an absence of wider debate about this vital by local authorities, and others by government alternative infrastructure for participation and regeneration policy in the form of the Urban community-led planning. In England, mention of Programme. Those same sources of funding participation is prominent in the still-unresolved supported community development groups, local planning reforms,2 mainly in terms of Neighbourhood arts projects, and local action groups. Development Plans (NDPs), shorter times for In turn this led to community-led alternatives consultation on Local Plans, and the shift to digital such as Coin Street and the People’s Plan for the consultation (the latter two factors are linked, I Royal Docks. The TCPA’s built environment education would argue). But support for it, beyond property unit worked with young people to raise awareness tech and funding for neighbourhood planning groups, of planning issues and shared ideas and good practice is not. though a newsletter (the Bulletin of Environmental In Wales and Scotland, the situation is different — Education) and events. but not dramatically so. While Place Plans figure Such ideas were not always supported. The highly in both nations, there is wider support Skeffington Committee’s recommendations in 1969 available (see below). Unless we put the provision for funded community development workers to 82

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

snakes & ladders

support engagement in planning were kicked into the long grass even before the ink was dry on the Skeffington Report, and didn’t make it into the subsequent circulars. Nor is it useful to suggest that there was a ‘golden age’ of participation and alternatives; experience showed that there were issues of professionalisation and who was in control. But initiatives such as People’s Plan and Coin Street, the support provided through technical aid and the opportunities for alliances between the community and other sectors all acted to widen the scope of planning, as well as supporting local groups. This level of support from regeneration programmes and local authorities has now shrunk, and with it has come a loss in seed-corn funding for experimentation and alternatives. Neighbourhood planning focus

Fast forward then to the New Labour planning reforms in 2004–10 and statements of intent on participation (Statements of Community Involvement), accompanied by funding for Planning Aid to work with under-represented groups to help them to engage in planning. This enabled regional hubs to be set up and outreach work to be undertaken with a range of groups and organisations. Planning Aid England is now not supported by central government, although Planning Aid for London gets support from Trust for London and is linked to the TCPA. As discussed below, most government support in England is channelled towards neighbourhood planning and the groups engaged in it, rather than towards a wider engagement agenda. In both Scotland and Wales, Planning Aid is supported by national governments, thus providing more of this vital infrastructure and indicating the increasing divergence in the planning systems of the nations of the UK. Although such funding inevitably brings with it questions of autonomy and independence, support is, nevertheless, not linked to a sole agenda or restricted to groups that are engaged with it. England needs to take a leaf out of the other nations’ books. It is an irony that a shift to localism from 2010 onwards, which might be thought of as enabling alternative infrastructures, has at best produced some contradictory results, and at worst accelerated the closing down of alternative spaces. For example, in England currently the largest area of funding for engagement is linked to NDP preparation. Thus support has not gone away, but has crucially been redirected towards a particular initiative. The current funding round of £45 million over ﬁve years (scheduled to end March 2023, but indications are that it will continue in its current form at least for one more

year) is not an insignificant amount of money. But there are four issues with it. First, it is widely recognised that the take-up of NDPs and therefore the flow of money for enabling participation is skewed to particular areas — largely better-off rural areas in the South and West. Extra funding is available for ‘deprived’ areas, but there is much more work needed to support forums in these areas to get to the stage of applying for the funding in the first place.

‘It is an irony that a shift to localism from 2010 onwards, which might be thought of as enabling alternative infrastructures, has at best produced some contradictory results, and at worst accelerated the closing down of alternative spaces’ Secondly, part of this money (and I am unable to ﬁnd out how much) goes directly to AECOM, a private consultancy with a contract to provide bespoke support packages for various parts of the NDP process, such as housing needs assessments. Thirdly, as we all know, NDPs have to be ‘in conformity’ with existing Local Plans. While this does not completely close down opportunities to present alternatives (see plans such as that for Frome and others which did not get implemented, such as that for Somers Town), it does limit the space for the role that participation and communityled planning has to stretch the purposes of planning and develop alternatives. And, ﬁnally, what about groups who don’t want to draw up an NDP but do want to engage with planning and plan their own areas? In some areas there is Planning Aid, and there may be help from an enlightened local authority or (for those who can chase them) other charitable funds — but support is limited, and you have to know where to look. Alternative spaces

On top of this, it is widely recognised that funding cuts in local planning authorities and the everincreasing requirements to speed up the planning process have limited the spaces for participation. Increasingly, engagement is undertaken by Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

Jaime Lopes on Unsplash

snakes & ladders

‘Community-led planning outside the State has always played an important role in widening the imagination of what planning can do and who should be doing it’

specialist consultancies,3 sometimes working for developers, and quite often financed by the NDP funds mentioned above. They use a range of techniques and tools, some very similar to the Planning for Real approach pioneered by Tony Gibson. Doing consultation well is important, and this is not to question the expertise that some of these practices show. But it is the parameters within which such exercises take place that is the issue. Agendas are often tight and, again, alternatives are not necessarily on the agenda. The process also gets increasingly professionalised, and, according to Raco et al.,3 depoliticised. The contrast with the dense network of grass-roots organisations, the spread of funding and the political (with a small ‘p’) challenge that existed previously is stark. But it is not just a case of reflecting on where infrastructures from the past have gone. As contexts change, then so too will the space for alternative infrastructure. When we look for evidence of alternative infrastructure within the context of the present day, the picture is not entirely bleak. Some, such as Planning Aid, didn’t go away entirely. National networks such as the Community Planning Alliance4 have come about, providing different forms of support, information-sharing, and education. Planning Democracy in Scotland is seeking to widen debate about fair, inclusive, locally accountable and just outcomes, including a recent legal challenge over public rights to challenge planning decisions.5 The dialogue event referred to at the start of this piece was held at the University College London’s Urban Lab at the Olympic Park. This and other ‘urban rooms’ set up by universities — in Sheffield, for example — are, in part, a way of filling some of 84

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

the gaps in support and spaces for local dialogue, even though they may be driven by the impact agenda of universities. In London, Just Space6 is a community-run alliance ‘formed to act as a voice for Londoners at grassroots level during the formulation of London’s major planning strategy’. Such diverse spaces, while they may be limited, underfunded and fragmented, and may depend on the energy and commitment of a few people, do indicate that there is something to build on. Some aspects of the agenda have arguably seen an increase in infrastructure, particularly around community assets. In England, for example, the collaborative/community housing hubs have provided support for community-led housing, even though this support has been insufficient and the long-term funding of the hubs precarious. NGOs such as Locality and the Plunkett Foundation provide support for groups wanting to take over assets such as shops and pubs. The different legislation in Scotland around community ownership of land and assets has also led to the emergence of groups such as Community Land Scotland7 and the Development Trusts Association Scotland.8 New forms of action are emerging around pressing planning issues such as the climate emergency and the need to shift to alternative growth models and inclusive growth. In Birmingham, Civic Square9 is promoting sustainable and inclusive growth through the application at the local level of new models such as ‘doughnut economics’.10 Linked to this, ideas around community wealth-building are opening up the possibility of new forms of alliance between local authorities, community groups, and, potentially, the private sector. The Preston model, for example, looks to anchor institutions to recirculate

snakes & ladders

wealth throughout a local economy and support local employment and the inclusive use of land.11 Interestingly, the Scottish Community Alliance is calling for community anchor institutions to be established as a part of this agenda.12 So there is evidence of the scaffolding for these alternative infrastructures. But currently it is fragmented, not consistent across localities or groups, and often ties groups into particular agendas or activities (such as assets or NDPs), thereby closing down debate and discussion. What is needed to develop it further and rekindle this alternative infrastructure for our current day? First, this means uncoupling funding from ‘outputs’ or particular initiatives and supporting the environment in which ideas and alternatives can ﬂourish. Within the discussion of planning reforms there need to be calls for general support and funding for communities, particularly for those areas and groups less engaged in planning. Frontloading and continuous participation are often seen as the Holy Grail of participation, but they cannot happen without the necessary environment ﬁrst being created; and this takes time and costs money. Third-party rights and community rights to challenge planning decisions would also strengthen this environment. Alongside this, there is a need to widen the parameters of what is debated. Even a recent government-sponsored report on NDPs recognised the need ‘to actively promote creative participation and place-making beyond land use planning matters’.13 Participation has always played a role in challenging and widening the purposes of planning. Independent funding for this ‘grass-roots’ model, more geared to sustainable and equitable outcomes, is needed.14 There is scope to support new forms of alliance at the local level, as made possible through agendas such as community wealth-building and inclusive growth. Local centres and community hubs could be part of this, providing environmental and planning education, space for discussion, and the bringing together of academia, the public and private sectors, and the community. But these would be community-led. The internet undoubtedly presents many opportunities for new links and information-sharing to develop, but there is also a role for ‘anchoring’ this in particular spaces. These are just a few thoughts. I am sure that there are many more initiatives and ideas out there about which it would be good to hear. Bringing these together and supporting them to develop this alternative infrastructure for the current day is a challenge, but one well worth addressing.

Enrichment through alternatives

Without such an infrastructure, opportunity to widen access, deepen understanding and promote dialogue over planning and local places is limited. Over time, community-led planning outside the State has always played an important role in widening the imagination of what planning can do and who should be doing it. If we put planning into straitjackets, as is arguably happening now, we lose this potential. We need the infrastructure for these alternatives to develop and enrich not just planning, but also our communities and neighbourhoods. Professor Sue Brownill is with the School of the Built •Environment at Oxford Brookes University. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 S Brownill: ‘Learning from SE1 stories’. Town & Country Planning, 2022, Vol. 91, Mar.–Apr., 78–81 2 See, for example, S Brownill, M Raco and F Brill: ‘Governance and participation in planning — lessons from London’. Town & Country Planning, 2022, Vol. 91, Nov.–Dec., 370–73 3 M Raco, E Street and S Freire-Trigo: ‘The new localism, anti-political development machines, and the role of planning consultants: lessons from London’s South Bank.’ Territory, Politics, Governance, 2016, Vol. 4 (2), 216–40 4 See the Community Planning Alliance website, at www.communityplanningalliance.org 5 See the Planning Democracy in Scotland website, at www.planningdemocracy.org.uk 6 See the Just Space website, at https://justspace.org.uk 7 See the Community Land Scotland website, at https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/about-us/ 8 See the Development Trusts Association Scotland website, at https://dtascot.org.uk 9 See the Civic Square website, at https://civicsquare.cc 10 K Raworth: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Random House, 2017 11 See Community Wealth Building through Anchor Institutions. CLES (Centre for Local Economic Strategies), Feb. 2017. https://cles.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2017/02/Community-Wealth-Building-throughAnchor-Institutions_01_02_17.pdf 12 See ‘Community anchor organisations’. Webpage. Scottish Community Alliance. https://scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/about/ anchor-orgs/ 13 G Parker, M Wargent, K Salter, et al.: The Impacts of Neighbourhood Planning in England. University of Reading, for the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, May 2020. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ﬁle/929422/ Impacts_of_Neighbourhood_Planning_in_England.pdf 14 Y Rydin: The Purposes of Planning: Creating Sustainable Towns and Cities. Policy Press, 2011 Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

off the rails Robin Hickman examines the consultation on the proposed A46 Newark Bypass, and whether the project and participation process are helping to develop sustainable mobility behaviours

manipulation and the A46 newark bypass

You may have missed the statutory consultation on the A46 Newark Bypass. The consultation closed late last year, in December 2022. The proposed scheme is one of many highway enhancement projects being implemented as part of National Highway’s investment in the strategic road network over 2020–25, amounting to a huge £27.4 billion.1 The A46 Newark Bypass has an estimated cost of £400–500 million and involves the widening of 6.5 kilometres of existing single carriageway to dual carriageway, providing two lanes in each direction between the Farndon and Winthorpe roundabouts, near Newark-on-Trent, in Nottinghamshire. The project involves new bridges over the A1 highway and East Coast Main Line railway, a viaduct over the River Trent, enlarged roundabouts, new slip roads, flood mitigation measures, and some traffic signalisation changes to ‘improve traffic flow’. The planned start date for building is 2024–25, one of the last projects to be developed under Road Investment Strategy 2 (RIS2). This is not a particularly special project, involving fairly marginal highway upgrades, but still entailing a large project cost. It is fairly representative of the slew of projects in RIS2; around 50 RIS2 highway investment projects are expected to start by 2025,1 in addition to those already under construction under RIS1. There are further projects being planned for RIS3. As with many of these highway improvement projects, the background literature is very promotional in style and the process of participation is very limited. The material and process illustrate the conflicted nature of public policy, with central government professing to be interested in climate change and environmental issues, indeed in social equity and ‘levelling up’, and possibly even participatory governance, while at the same time investing heavily in the highway network across the UK, facilitated by a very superficial participatory process. 86

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

When I run through some of the excerpts from the material from National Highways, I would like you to compare them to Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation, published over 50 years ago but remaining very relevant today (see Fig. 1).2 You can assess which rung of the ladder you think National Highways operates on. The A46 was originally built in 1923, providing a cross-country route between Bath, Cheltenham, Stratford-upon-Avon, Coventry, Leicester, Newark and Lincoln, partly following the old Roman Fosse Way. It has been widened and realigned since the 1970s, including the original Newark Bypass, which was built in the 1990s. There is no mention in the consultation material that this is a subsequent widening of an old bypass project, presumably to avoid highlighting that the increased road capacity has already been filled as traffic levels have risen in the subsequent 30 years. The purpose of the current consultation on the A46 is stated as ‘to understand your views on our proposals for the scheme [ … ] including identified environmental effects’.3 Note the use of ‘your views’ and ‘our proposals’ and the rather oddly worded ‘identified environmental effects’, which is discussed later here. The consultation material begins: ‘In this brochure we explain the improvements being proposed as part of the A46 Newark Bypass [ … ] We explain how our plans would improve journeys, how the local environment may be affected and how we propose to mitigate the effects of the proposed improvements.’ 3 A preferred route was announced in February 2022, following an earlier consultation period. This examined two route options, with the same widened highway, but slightly different junction access arrangements. The project is described throughout as a highway improvement — indeed, ‘improve’ (including inflections such as ‘improves’ or ‘improved’; or synonyms, such as ‘better’ or ‘advancement’) is used 33 times in the material.3 There is no consultation on the need for highway widening and increased highway capacity; instead, views are requested on the narrowly-bounded option given — the interaction through the consultation is very tightly managed.

off the rails

8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Citizen control Delegated power

Degrees of citizen power

Partnership Placation Consultation

Degrees of tokenism

Informing Therapy

Nonparticipation

Manipulation 1

There is much use of modality to help express certainty and position views on validity; there is an active voice and prejudgement in associating positive adjectives with highway building. The need for the scheme is developed as: ‘the government’s second Road Investment Strategy included a commitment for National Highways to improve the A46 ‘Trans-Midlands Trade Corridor’ between the M5 and the Humber Ports, to create a continuous dual carriageway from Lincoln to Warwick. The A46 around Newark-on-Trent is the only remaining single carriageway section of this key strategic trunk road. We propose to ﬁll in this gap, eliminating the regular traffic jams and creating improved journey time reliability [ … ] Congestion on the single carriageway section of the A46 means that journeys are unreliable and take longer than they should. This will only get worse as more people are expected to use the road in the future.’ 3

The narrative is to improve journey times, remove ‘gaps’ in the network and reduce unreliability, reﬂecting the Department for Transport’s transport The project objectives are given as improving appraisal objectives, which are sadly inconsistent safety, congestion (journey times and reliability), with wider environmental and social public policy connectivity (to accommodate economic growth in goals. Views are presented as factual truths, with Newark-on-Trent and the wider area by improving undue certainty given to uncertain positive impacts, its strategic and local connectivity), environmental and adverse impacts are overlooked. improvement (delivering better environmental For example, safety is put forward as the primary outcomes by achieving a net gain in biodiversity and objective for the project: improved noise levels at ‘Noise Important Areas’ ‘safety is our top priority, we’re committed to along the A46), and even improving relations with reducing the number of incidents on our road the customer (to build an inclusive scheme which network. From January 2015 to December 2019, improves facilities for cyclists, walkers and other incidents on this section of the A46 resulted in vulnerable road users where existing routes are 208 casualties. Our improvements would make affected). the A46 safer for road users as well as reduce Cyclist and pedestrian routes are only to be closures, congestion and delays.’ 3 improved if there are existing routes; there are no As is common practice, traffic crashes are suggestions of new routes or facilities for active framed as ‘incidents’, as if incidental, rather than a travel. Do not ask whether more road capacity is predictable result of increased traffic volumes. needed, what the adverse impacts of increased Safety is understood as safety for road users, rather motorisation might be, or indeed what £500 million might do for cycling in Newark-on-Trent — this is not than pedestrians or cyclists. There is no discussion of reduced traffic volumes being much better for within the framing of the consultation. safety; nor of the decline in active travel in NewarkThe project information is subtitled as ‘Investing on-Trent and the subsequent problematic health in your roads’ and continues with: impacts, such as the increase in non-communicable ‘At National Highways we believe in a connected country and our network makes these connections diseases. Car ownership in Newark and Sherwood is already happen. We strive to improve our major roads and much higher than the high national average, at 1.3 motorways. We want to make sure all our major cars per household in 2011, and rising by 57% in 20 roads are more dependable, durable and most importantly, safe. That’s why we’re delivering [ … ] years. The proportion of residents travelling to work by bicycle has dropped from 6% in 2001 to 4% in the largest investment in a generation, which is 2011, and half of all the children in the area are great news for the local and regional economy.’ 3 Fig. 1 Eight rungs on a ladder of citizen participation Source: S Arnstein: ‘A ladder of citizen participation’2

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

off the rails

Fig. 2 Forecast traffic ﬂow differences after the opening of the A46 scheme Source: A46 Newark Bypass Public Consultation 3

driven to school — with the major reason given as perceived danger of traffic.4 These travel trends are ignored — and the transport strategy is simply producing more traffic, despite all the associated environmental, social and health problems. The project design has been developed using: ‘the current traffic modelling data and projections available [ … ] This has helped inform the design of the proposed scheme, such as the number of lanes and changes to junctions required [and] our economic assessment of the proposed scheme’s value for money by weighing up the costs against the beneﬁts.’ 3 The key impacts of the scheme in relation to traffic ﬂows and network performance, it is suggested, are to increase long-distance traffic on the A46, reduce journey times on the improved section of the A46, and reduce traffic on local roads in Newark88

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

on-Trent as traffic redistributes onto the bypass. The question of, or potential for, induced traffic is not raised, yet presumably the bypass will be full and congested in only a few years’ time. There are no signiﬁcant traffic management measures proposed in Newark-on-Trent, or new public transport services, or cycling or pedestrian provision. Indeed, new housing development is planned to disperse the town further, with direct access onto the highway network, including a proposed southern link road; hence car-based travel is only likely to increase. The game is really given away by the forecast traffic differences (see Fig. 2) — there is much forecast traffic growth on the improved road and also across the town. The environmental effects are given in a PEI (Preliminary Environmental Information) report, extending to 568 pages. The ‘effects’ are on air quality (dust arising from construction), cultural heritage,

off the rails

landscape character and visual amenity, biodiversity, geology and soils, material assets and waste, surface water, and noise and vibration. There is no assessment of increased carbon dioxide emissions, although surely this is the largest likely environmental impact. The initial consultation stage5 inadvertently raised the problem, stating that ‘once opened for traffic, the two options would result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions generated by vehicles in use’. However, it went on to say that: ‘Government policy is helping change the ﬂeet mix to improve those emissions, such as no petrol/ diesel cars sold after 2030. So, we would expect the impact to reduce over time in line with the UK’s ambition to be Net Zero Carbon by 2030.’ The current consultation is not so blatant, stating, in Orwellian terms, that: ‘The climate of the study area has already changed from its natural state, as a result of climate change, and will change over the lifetime of the project. Measures to mitigate the operational impacts of climate change on the scheme include development of a scheme design which accommodates the predicted changes in regional climate.’ 3 The objective with the environmental evidence is to obfuscate, so that the public, even if they engage with the consultation process, give up reading and assume that there are no environmental problems associated with increased traffic capacity and traffic volumes, particularly if the vehicle ﬂeet is assumed to be cleaner. In the end, most of these highway improvements go largely unnoticed and are implemented. There is a blind commitment to increasing traffic mobility, achieving spurious travel time savings, and an assumption that they are directly linked to improved local and regional economies. The postulations on traffic safety and the environment are further nonsense. There is no substantive evidence on all of these issues; it is simply the practice of transport planning and appraisal to ensure that more highways are built — this is the discursive formation we are presented with. National Highways is in existence to produce increased traffic mobility — and has ruined the street environments in places in the vast majority of urban areas across the country. The consultants producing the project consultation brochures and analysis, traffic modelling and economic environmental appraisals are all complicit, as they get paid handsomely for their extensive work. The public are confused by the consultation or not interested — just 1,500 responses were made to

the A46 Newark Bypass consultation in 2020; it is not known yet how many there were in 2022, but probably fewer still. The public mostly support the road-widening projects as there is little debate over the substantive issues associated with road widening — they are all overlooked in the reports. This is non-participation and manipulation, in the guise of statutory consultation, and it will not lead to sustainable mobility behaviours; only increased traffic volumes and, consequently, all the associated signiﬁcant adverse environmental and social impacts. We need a much more authentic and collaborative process for transport planning, through which projects are built only where they are consistent with environmental and wider public policy goals. In effect, this would mean no more highway investment projects, as all are inconsistent with climate change and social equity goals. Next in line are the A27 Arundel Bypass and the Lower Thames Crossing. Then there will be the M1 Leeds Eastern Gateway, A1 Doncaster to Darrington, the A27 Chichester Bypass, and so on. And so on. Robin Hickman is Professor at the Bartlett School of •Planning, University College London. He is Director of the MSc in Transport & City Planning. e: r.hickman@ucl.ac.uk The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 Road Investment Strategy 2: 2020–2025. Department for Transport, Mar. 2020. www.gov.uk/government/ publications/road-investment-strategy-2-ris2-2020to-2025 2 S R Arnstein: ‘A ladder of citizen participation’. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 1969, Vol. 35 (4), 216–24 3 A46 Newark Bypass Public Consultation. Share Your Views. 26 October to 12 December 2022. National Highways, Oct. 2022. See National Highways’ ‘A46 Newark Bypass’ statutory consultation (2022) webpage, at https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/ east-midlands/a46-newark-bypass 4 Newark & Sherwood Local Development Framework. Residential Cycle and Car Parking Standards & Design Guide. Supplementary Planning Document. Topic Paper. Newark and Sherwood District Council, Jun. 2021. www.newark-sherwooddc.gov.uk/media/newark-andsherwood/images-and-ﬁles/planning-policy/pdfs/ supplementary-planning-documents/ParkingStandards-Topic-Paper.pdf 5 A46 Newark Bypass Public Consultation. Share Your Views. 9 December 2020 to 2 February 2021. National Highways, Dec. 2020. See National Highways’ ‘A46 Newark Bypass’ statutory consultation (2020) webpage, at https://highwaysengland.citizenspace. com/he/a46-newark-bypass/

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

off the fence David Lock looks at the emergence of ‘dark kitchens’ within the fast-food home delivery market

dark kitchens

There is a debate in the world of planning about the current enthusiasm for 15- or 20-minute cities / neighbourhoods, with the explanation of each being nuanced by the advocate’s special interest. The most complete explanation, summarising how to apply such a planning policy at various scales, and the difficulties that might arise, is the TCPA’s own guide, 20-Minute Neighbourhoods: Creating Healthier, Active, Prosperous Communities.1 The concept is essentially that places should be made or remade such that we can satisfy our needs for things that matter — essential shopping, education, health, leisure and recreation, and maybe more — within easy reach of our home on foot, by bicycle, or by public transport. The debate — which is not the primary subject here — involves those who regard the wholesome concept as being warped by metropolitan voices (where the historic agglomeration of facilities and public transport already exists); those who think it impractical (in the UK various layers of health care planning, school academies setting their own entrance criteria, the investment plans of ﬁnancial institutions generally, and privatised public transport, for example, tend to pull the other way); and those who see the wolf of oppression hidden under the concept’s sheep’s clothing. Rather, in these pages we look at a phenomenon that touches on the whole subject area: that of dark kitchens, also known as cloud kitchens, ghost kitchens, or (more boringly) delivery-only restaurants. Dark kitchens sell exclusively through delivery. They have no seats for diners, or walk-in customers, and prepare food once an order comes in through a delivery app or an online ordering system.2 The trend started decades ago with the ability easily to order a takeaway by phone to be delivered to your home. In the early days this was typically an initiative of enterprising local restaurants not far away, but anxious to ﬁnd customers unwilling or 90

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

unable to go the trouble of visiting. It still goes on, and in Covid lockdowns it saved many restaurants and pubs. Then came smartphones and tablets and the huge infrastructure of Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo, and other delivery services who had agreements with the restaurants and, predominantly, with the big chains, such as ‘MacDonald's, MacDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a Pizza Hut’ (to use the line from the hit of 2003). Almost imperceptibly since the Covid lockdowns, the delivery people have been given their own line at the counter and are usually served ﬁrst, leaving the rest of us queuing. If you are lucky enough to live in Milton Keynes, and perhaps elsewhere, the delivery can be by robot. Little machines, the size and shape of a small tumble drier, wait patiently outside popular outlets. Counter staff and the robot company receive the order, staff walk out to load the robot, and it trundles along the pavement, ‘politely’ stopping when pedestrians get in the way and at road junctions. The robot will pull up outside the customer’s house and broadcast rather loudly ‘Your pizza is here’, to the irritation of neighbours. Dark kitchens take the business logic to the next step. Instead of delaying customers in the actual restaurants, and having delivery traffic mixed up with scarce parking spaces, congested pavements and roads, the delivery-only business might grow strongly enough to move into a unit in a dark kitchen. These are typically warehouse-type buildings on industrial estates, where there is no restriction of hours of opening, or of delivery traffic volumes and parking, and where business rates and rents are very much cheaper than in shopping streets.3 Many different companies can operate their own dark kitchen unit within the same building, and the wise landlord can tailor lease lengths and terms to keep as many occupiers on the premises as possible. Orders from multiple delivery systems can be aggregated so that numerous tablets aren’t buzzing at staff all the time. Note that a unit in a dark kitchen is usually taken by fast-food chains in addition to their street outlets, but that is not always the case. There will probably be a dark kitchen not far from you unless you are in a sparsely populated area.

David Lock

off the fence

Delivery robots waiting in Stony Stratford High Street, Milton Keynes

This has happened because the skills and technology of the logistics industry have been applied to the fast-food sector. It is awesome but awful all at once. And so back to where we started. There are planning policy efforts being made to embed in us the obligation to create 15- or 20-minute neighbourhoods, because it might get more people moving about, engaging with their friends and neighbours, and thus being happier and more healthy. The Covid lockdowns no doubt accelerated radical change in efficiency and delivery-only business in the restaurant and café industries. It is not entirely unsustainable, although the argument here is a bit thin.4 But is the ability to order a coffee and a range of different fast-foods online to come from a remote shared dark kitchen, to be delivered in a timely manner to your front door, office, or workshop, a step forward? If not, what do you expect to be done about it? The ship has sailed. David Lock CBE is Strategic Planning Adviser at David Lock •Associates. He is a Vice-President and former Chair of the TCPA. He lives in Milton Keynes, which was designed in 1967 to ensure that each neighbourhood would have access to a primary school, local shopping and a pub with several bus

stops within 15-20 minutes’ walk, and where no home or workplace was to be more than the same sort of distance from a bus stop. It was designed for cars too, but unfortunately the bus services were privatised at a critical moment, and for much of the city there is an inadequate bus service or none. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 20-Minute Neighbourhoods — Creating Healthier, Active, Prosperous Communities: An Introduction for Council Planners in England. TCPA, Mar. 2021. https://tcpa.org.uk/resources/the-20-minuteneighbourhood/ 2 See ‘What is a dark kitchen?’. Webpage. Deliverect. www.deliverect.com/en-gb/blog/dark-kitchens/ what-is-a-dark-kitchen — where market leaders Deliverect describe the concept and set out their pitch to potential tenants. We learn that they have operations in Ghent (HQ), London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Dubai, Toronto, Mexico, Amersfoort, Sydney, and Copenhagen 3 The American Institute of Culinary Education notes the pioneering ghost kitchens of the USA, and its Dean, Rick Camac, blogs some ﬁnancial information about the advantages to restaurant businesses, in dollars — see www.ice.edu/blog/ghost-kitchens 4 See ‘Dark kitchens and sustainability: what’s the story?’. Webpage. GridDuck. www.gridduck.com/blog/ dark-kitchens-sustainability Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

capturing value — the return of the land question in planning The recent protests against the High Court decision on rights to wild-camp in Dartmoor National Park have spurred renewed interest in land justice issues — and this connects not just with access but also with wider questions of ownership and development land values, says Edward Shepherd The political spotlight is once again on the land question in England. This was recently demonstrated by the January 2023 protest that brought over 3,000 people to Dartmoor. They came to express their displeasure at the High Court case brought by Alexander Darwall, hedge-fund manager and owner of part of the moor, that resulted in the end of the right to wild-camp across the whole of the National Park. That this was one of the largest land actions in British history1 brings home the strength of feeling that was provoked by the injustice of one millionaire using his resources to extinguish the right for us all to spend a night under the stars in a National Park,2 albeit one which is extensively privately owned.3 There followed a permissive agreement with some Dartmoor landowners that now enables people to camp on parts of their land, but in return for a fee paid from public funds by the Dartmoor National Park Authority.4 So, wild-camping on Dartmoor is no longer possible with the sense of freedom that comes with not having to ask permission or engage in the kind of transactional relationship that characterises so much of life away from wild places. The severance is a deeply symbolic and keenly felt loss for many people.

(housing, health, rural, design, conservation, land) that converged via a common concern with the social, environmental and economic impacts of the combination of private landownership, limits on land access, and uncontrolled development. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, landowners, particularly speculative ones, were often cast as parasites who beneﬁted unjustly from their monopoly power as rentier owners of a limited resource. Classical economist David Ricardo famously claimed that ‘the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community’, a view that guided the land campaigns of liberals and Fabians alike. However, while there was pressure from some quarters for a fundamental transformation of landownership via land nationalisation, there was ultimately more mainstream political support for a more moderate approach that targeted the rents of landowners via taxation, rather than their fundamental ownership of land. Of course, these debates crystallised in the planning system via what we now refer to as ‘land value capture’. Although there had been limited provisions in earlier planning legislation, the 1947 planning system addressed the land value issue comprehensively. It included a development charge, The land question in early planning equating to 100% of development value,5 that The National Parks were, of course, established in would be payable to the State by the developer 1949 in the crucible that birthed the modern town following the granting of planning permission. and country planning system. Indeed, the land Further, compulsory purchase would be at existingquestion is at the heart of planning. As readers use value (EUV), rather than at a price that included will know, there is a long pre-history to the ‘1947 development value. system’ of planning in England. This is a story of the Together, these measures would mean that the entanglement of different campaigns and agendas State (acting on behalf of the community) would 92

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

‘The contradiction

Edward Shepherd, using Midjourney

between State control of development and private ownership of development land that had been introduced by the planning system was not overcome’ collect all of the land value created by new development, which was, in the terminology of classical economics, a form of rent. These measures were accompanied by a ‘once and for all’ £300 million fund to compensate landowners in cases of hardship caused by the transition to the new system. Therefore, the 1947 system as originally enacted nationalised both development rights and development land values, while leaving the underlying system of landownership otherwise largely undisturbed (compulsory purchase aside). The combination of a development charge at 100% of development value and a compulsory purchase system based on EUV was of fundamental importance, because it meant that, in theory, a landowner would be no worse or better off if their land was acquired via a private transaction or via compulsory purchase. In effect, the financial provisions of the 1947 system were intended to abolish the market in development values by seeking to ensure that all land would be transacted at EUV. This, it was hoped, would bring private and public interests into closer alignment with regard to land development, because (in theory) landowners would no longer chase the gains of development value but would instead make their land available for the most socially beneficial use (as determined by the planning system) rather than the most profitable. Monopoly power of landowners

The problem was that with the right to develop and to development value thus alienated from other rights of landownership, and a private market in

land maintained, landowners retained much of their power over land supply and their power to demand rents in return for making their land available for development. Many continued to demand prices that included some development value, and many opted to withhold land from development until such time as the development charge would be repealed and they would, once again, be able to command full development value. Therefore, despite the attempt to abolish the market in development values, they continued to be traded and priced in the land market. The contradiction between State control of development and private ownership of development land that had been introduced by the planning system was not overcome. Indeed, the development charge was abolished by the incoming Conservative government in 1953. However, because the basis for compulsory purchase remained at below market value, this introduced a dual-price system for development land, widely perceived as unfair because a landowner would be worse off if their land was compulsorily acquired by the State rather than by private transaction. Market value was later introduced as the basis for compulsory compensation by a Conservative government via the Town and Country Planning Act 1959. Struggles over the distribution of land rent

The subsequent history of development taxation/ land value capture is the story of a restless search for an approach that would enable the State to collect some development value while also providing a sufficient supply of development land to meet Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

government objectives.6 At risk of over-simplification, the post-war history of this policy area until the 1980s broadly constituted attempts by Labour governments to bring more development land into public ownership along with a proportion of development value, and attempts by Conservative governments to leave private ownership of development land largely undisturbed but to tax development gains and increase the supply of development land via the planning system. There was therefore general consensus regarding the need for the State to collect (or retain)7 a proportion of development value. There was less agreement regarding the proper method and how much development land and its value should be owned by private landowners. A consistent feature in how these debates were framed was the figure of the speculative landowner. As with 19th century debates, the rent-capturing behaviour and monopoly power of speculative landowners was considered an appropriate and politically acceptable target for the taxation of development gains. This was particularly acute in inflationary periods that were characterised by rapidly increasing land and property prices, such as those that pertained in the early 1960s and 1970s and which prompted Conservative governments to introduce a limited and largely symbolic speculative gains tax in 1962 and to propose a development gains tax that was ultimately introduced via the Finance Act 1974. The technical containment of land rent debates

The English land value capture regime since the 1980s has been based on a system of locally negotiated planning obligations which have been combined, since 2010, with the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) in local authorities that have chosen to adopt it. These instruments have been relatively successful in displacing and containing fundamental political questions about the pattern of private landownership and concentrations in ownership of land value. This is because they are predicated on an ideological acceptance of the commodification of land and, specifically, land rent as development value which is now haggled over between public and private interests. Rather than the kind of high-profile national measures and debates targeting development gains and private ownership of development land that characterised the decades following 1947, such questions started to be worked out by professional experts in local plan-making and on a site-by-site basis via the planning application viability process. The politics of rent at the heart of the land question came to be contained in the technical calculations of development viability consultants and reduced to transactional negotiations between local authorities and developers and landowners to 94

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

agree how development value should be apportioned. Political pressure regarding the land question was also arguably reduced as a result of the expansion of home-ownership, which produced a coalition of small landowners who had an interest in increasing house prices.8 However, by entangling land value capture policy so closely with housing supply via what we now call Section 106 agreements, the seeds were sown for a new political rupture around the land question. The re-politicisation of land rent

Once again it has been inflationary conditions that have brought the land question back out into the open in English planning. First, it was the housing affordability crisis in London and the South East of England that prompted action. In the years following the rediscovery of housing supply as a policy problem in the early 2000s,9 there came to be overwhelming evidence that some landowners were retaining a larger and larger proportion of development value at the expense of affordable housing. This was due to the market norms that were reinforced by how professionals were using the residual method of valuation in their viability assessments, which are subject to significant uncertainties due to their being based on contestable predictions of future costs and values.10 This created political pressure to make the viability process more transparent to the public and to standardise the approach to development viability in planning to more closely control assumptions regarding developer profit and returns to landowners, which led to the 2018 adjustments to the national planning viability guidance in England.11 These sought to ensure that developers would properly factor in the anticipated cost of policycompliant developer contributions in the price paid for land, thereby in theory reducing inflationary pressure on land prices and redistributing a higher proportion of development land value for public benefit. However, an opportunity was missed to clearly specify what constituted a ‘reasonable’ return to the landowner in viability terms.12 Proliferation of land value capture tools in search of a political fix

Since then, the land value capture debate has rumbled on. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill contains provisions for the introduction of a new Infrastructure Levy that is intended to replace CIL and largely replace Section 106, which will be retained for restricted purposes. This is the most high-proﬁle proposed change to the land value capture regime and is intended to reduce delays and increase responsiveness to market movements by basing contributions on achieved, rather than predicted, prices.13 However, there are other proposals in the pipeline that in different ways seem to target development value either directly or

Clifford Harper

‘We are living through a political moment that is once again being shaped by the convergence of various pressures concerning housing, landownership, the environment, and the distribution of economic rent in land’

indirectly. These include proposed community land auctions, the Building Safety Levy, biodiversity net gain, and adjustments to the compulsory purchase process which appear to be intended, in part, to more closely control how development value is calculated via Certiﬁcates of Appropriate Alternative Development. The government even consulted in June 2022 on a proposal to ensure that land compulsorily acquired for some public purposes is purchased at an amount less than market value,14 and a version of this idea has since found its way into a Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill amendment via the House of Lords. This was predictably met with some consternation by professionals concerned about the perceived attack on the ‘equivalence principle’ that would result in the return of a dual market in land.15 However, little thought appears to have been given by policy-makers to the interaction of these various measures and how they may work in practice (including any potential ‘upside’ value impacts, such as may be possible through biodiversity net gain), beyond a vague pledge to ensure that at least as

much affordable housing is secured as under the present regime. The impression is one of a government casting about for ideas on how to manage the political risk arising from the interaction of England’s system of private landownership, severe inequalities of wealth held in land, and the supply of genuinely affordable housing. Pressure has mounted to the extent that the government felt it needed to act, yet the current proposals are unclear, more recent ones (such as community land auctions) seem rushed, and the 2018 planning guidance change fudged the issue of what constitutes a reasonable return to a landowner. There seems to be a lot of political bluster but little in the way of political will for a real transformation of the development land market of the kind that may be required to ﬁx a dysfunctional system that has demonstrably poor distributional effects, particularly concerning access to housing that is affordable. Fundamentally, policy-makers are constrained by the ongoing system of private landownership, the commodiﬁcation of development land value, and Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

the monopoly power of landowners to withhold the supply of development land in market or policy environments that do not favour them, combined with the current requirement to pay market value for land compulsorily acquired. The return of the rentier archetype

Of course, some parts of the development lobby would argue that it is the planning system that is behind poor distributional outcomes as it limits the supply of development land,16 thereby limiting the supply of housing and prompting more intense and dense development of sites (which may also be encouraged by some local authorities keen to increase the size of the planning gain pie17 ). However, there has been increasing acknowledgement of the role of landowners in the land supply issue. In particular, the spotlight has shone on larger housebuilders and their development land-banks. Housebuilders argue that they need a large landbank that includes both strategic and ‘oven-ready’ sites to mitigate planning uncertainty and the complexity of development.18 Others argue that housebuilders benefit from the value of their land assets increasing over time, and are incentivised to bring sites forward at a moderate pace so as to maximise profitability (or rent-extraction) over supply.19 Whatever side you are on, the land-banking question has arguably taken some of the focus away from the planning system as being the main cause of housing supply issues. Indeed, housebuilders are not merely seen by policy-makers and politicians as the suppliers of new homes that need land as an input into the manufacturing process, but also as land businesses or, more accurately, rentier land speculators.20 This recurrent role in the politicisation of the land question is now largely played by the volume housebuilders, whose political fortunes are on the wane following the post-global financial crisis boom years of Help to Buy (although they still wield significant power owing to their dominance of new housing supply). Indeed, the Home Builders Federation has produced a paper that sets out what it sees as the numerous new regulatory requirements that are increasing housebuilders’ costs and are, for them, symptomatic of a change in their political circumstances.21 The land justice movement

However, until Mr Darwall’s recent strategic misstep, because the focus in England has been so strongly on land issues as ﬁltered through the lens of the housing crisis and housebuilding, little mainstream political attention has been paid towards the wider issues and inequalities of landownership and access to land.22 Since the Dartmoor High Court decision, there has been renewed mainstream political interest in broader land justice issues. The Labour Party has now pledged to pass a Right to 96

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

Roam Act in England and restore the right to wild-camp on Dartmoor.23 The Dartmoor National Park Authority has also confirmed that it will seek to appeal the High Court decision. Whatever the ultimate judgement regarding the interpretation of the law, now that permission to appeal has been granted,24 the process of fighting the case will attract further media and political attention and will maintain mainstream political pressure on land justice issues. We are living through a political moment that is once again being shaped by the convergence of various pressures concerning housing, landownership, the environment, and the distribution of economic rent in land. While many of those who participated in the January 2023 land action on Dartmoor may not have heard of land value capture, these debates cut to very similar sets of concerns. Whereas the Dartmoor protest was about the loss of the right to wild-camp in a National Park, it was also an expression of disgust at the wealth and power inequalities that come with large concentrations of landownership. Land value capture is about the social redistribution of this wealth. Some may argue that this wealth should be redistributed because it is fundamentally unjust that private landowners should benefit from all of the value uplift created by development that is valuable, in part, because of public effort and investment. Others may accept that some redistribution of this wealth is needed for pragmatic reasons to do with funding public infrastructure on which new development has an impact. Some may take the view that, because current forms of land value capture are based on the ideological naturalisation of land as a commodity and legitimise the idea of development value as a gain to private landowners, they merely facilitate the rent-based financialisation of land25 and compound and reinforce the structural inequalities that are built into our current system of landownership. Whatever one’s view of land value capture, it is clear that the land question, and the version of it contained in land value capture debates, is not going away any time soon. Edward Shepherd is Senior Lecturer in Planning and •Development at Cardiff University and is currently working on an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project called ‘Ideology, housing and land value capture: uncovering the politics of development land value’ (grant reference ES/W001675/1). No new data was created for this article. The views expressed are personal. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising. Notes 1 See S Bradley: ‘Dartmoor protests: inside the battle over the right to roam. Reclaim the land’. Huck, 26 Jan. 2023. www.huckmag.com/perspectives/dartmoor-protestsinside-the-battle-over-the-right-to-roam/

2 Mr Darwall has claimed that he was seeking to clarify the law and that he wanted greater control over camping on his land owing to the environmental impact of irresponsible campers which increased during the Covid-19 period 3 See the ‘Who owns Dartmoor?’ webpage of the Who Owns England? website, at https://whoownsengland. org/2021/03/22/who-owns-dartmoor/ 4 See C Marshall: ‘Dartmoor wild camping agreement reached’. BBC News, 19 Jan. 2023. www.bbc.co.uk/ news/science-environment-64333066 5 Development value is here deﬁned as the difference between the value of the land in its existing use and the value of the land with a prospect of more valuable development. Usually, development value will increase as the prospect of development becomes more certain. The language of ‘value’ here is rooted in the discourse of the valuation profession. In more critical discourse, development value would be understood as a form of rent 6 For a brief history see C A Jones, J Morgan and M Stephens: An Assessment of Historic Attempts to Capture Land Value Uplift in the UK. Heriot-Watt University, for the Scottish Land Commission, Apr. 2018. https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/publications/ an-assessment-of-historic-attempts-to-capture-landvalue-uplift-i 7 The language of ‘land value capture’ is, of course, problematic because it is based on the ideologically settled assumption that development value, by right, belongs to the private landowner and is ‘captured’ by the State on behalf of the community. Of course, another way of thinking about this is that development value, by right, belongs to the community and so it is the landowner that is ‘capturing’ it through their monopoly power 8 See Dr Chris Foye’s UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence blog post, ‘Why land dropped off the political agenda (and why it’s coming back again)’, for a summary of this argument, at https://housingevidence. ac.uk/why-land-dropped-off-the-political-agenda-andwhy-its-coming-back-again/ 9 G Bramley: ‘The sudden rediscovery of housing supply as a key policy challenge’. Housing Studies, 2007, Vol. 22 (2), 221–41 10 S Sayce, N Crosby, P Garside, et al.: Viability and the Planning System: The Relationship between Economic Viability Testing, Land Values and Affordable Housing in London. Kingston University London/Ramidus Consulting/Royal Agricultural University/University of Reading, for London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, et al., Jan. 2017. https://research.reading. ac.uk/research-blog/delivery-of-affordable-housingnegatively-impacted-by-planning-policy/ 11 See O Salisbury: ‘NPPF 2.0 and viability: problem solved?’. The Planner, 18 Jan. 2019 (updated 26 Aug. 2022). www.theplanner.co.uk/2019/01/18/nppf-20-andviability-problem-solved 12 A lot of the research regarding the problematic uses of the residual method in viability assessments for planning has been carried out by my former colleagues at the University of Reading, including Professor Neil Crosby, Professor Pat McAllister, and Professor Pete Wyatt. For an insight into some of the issues, listen to Professor Crosby’s appearance on the ‘Have We Got Planning News for You’ podcast (Apr. 2021), at https://havewegotplanningnewsforyou.com/episode10-with-professor-neil-crosby-lead-author-of-ricsassessing-viability-in-planning-under-the-nppf-2019/

13 How the Infrastructure Levy will work in practice is still uncertain. However, in March 2023 the government launched a technical consultation on the levy which includes detail regarding how it might operate — see www.gov.uk/government/consultations/technicalconsultation-on-the-infrastructure-levy/technicalconsultation-on-the-infrastructure-levy 14 Compulsory Purchase: Compensation Reforms. Consultation. Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Jun. 2022. www.gov.uk/ government/consultations/compulsory-purchasecompensation-reforms-consultation/compulsorypurchase-compensation-reforms-consultation 15 See R Gupta: LURB in the Lords — No Hope. Town Legal, Mar. 2023. www.townlegal.com/wp-content/ uploads/Compulsory-Reading-LURB-in-the-Lords%E2%80%93-No-Hope.pdf 16 See A Breach: Capital Cities: How the Planning System Creates Housing Shortages and Drives Wealth Inequality. Centre for Cities, Jun. 2019. www.centreforcities.org/publication/capital-cities/ 17 J Robinson and K Attuyer: ‘Extracting value, London style: Revisiting the role of the state in urban development’. International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, 2021, Vol. 45 (2), 303–31 18 See ‘Feeding the pipeline’. Webpage. Lichfields, Nov. 2021. https://lichfields.uk/content/insights/ feeding-the-pipeline 19 Q Bradley: ‘Artificial scarcity in housebuilding and the impact on affordability: the return of absolute rent’. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2023. Available at https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/ eprint/9213/7/ArtificialScarcityInHousebuildingAndThe ImpactOnAffordabilityTheReturnOfAbsoluteRent PV-BRADLEY.pdf 20 E Shepherd: ‘Housing development, land and the decentred state: Traditions and dilemmas in House of Commons planning debates’. Journal of Legislative Studies, 2023 (forthcoming) 21 Building Homes in a Changing Business Environment: An Assessment of New and Forthcoming Additional Costs of Housing Delivery. Home Builders Federation, Oct. 2022. www.hbf.co.uk/news/hbf-report-buildinghomes-changing-business-environment/ 22 There have, of course, long been grass-roots land justice movements in England despite the recent lack of mainstream political attention. Some organisations are listed on the Land Justice UK website, at www.landjustice.uk/ 23 See H Horton: ‘Labour government would pass right to roam act and reverse Dartmoor ban’. The Guardian, 27 Jan. 2023. www.theguardian.com/ environment/2023/jan/27/labour-government-wouldpass-right-to-roam-act-and-reverse-dartmoor-ban 24 See H Horton: ‘Dartmoor wild camping hopes rise as park wins right to appeal against ban’. The Guardian, 5 Apr. 2023. www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/ apr/05/hope-for-wild-camping-on-dartmoor-as-nationalpark-wins-right-to-appeal-ban 25 See T F Purcell and C Ward: ‘The political economy of land value capture in the UK: Rent and viability in Salford’s new municipalist turn’. Environment & Planning A: Economy & Space, 2022, 0 (0), 1–18 (published online 19 Oct. 2022). https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X221131322

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

the plan-less system — the dysfunctional approach to planning for housing in england John Sturzaker reﬂects on whether the current dysfunction in planning for housing, at every level, has led to the effective abandonment of the plan-led system in England — and on what this means for people and places Since 1990 the planning system in England has been, by law, ‘plan-led’. Barry Cullingworth and Vincent Nadin, in the 14th Edition of their landmark Town and Country Planning in the UK, published back in 2006, observed that such a system requires ‘a comprehensive and up-to-date hierarchy of national policy, regional strategies and local development plans’.1 In some parts of England we now have none of these. The staggering situation whereby we have had six Planning Ministers within a year (and 15 since 2010) is indicative of the general failure of the Westminster government to grapple with planning at the national scale.2 Catriona Riddell, writing in this journal,3 has examined the latest round of reforms to planning in England emerging through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill and concluded that they will not be effective in improving the delivery of new homes, now commonly agreed to be the government’s overriding priority for the system.4 She concludes, as do many others, that the reintroduction of effective, statutory, strategic planning is essential. The lack of such planning in England at the ‘abovelocal’ scale, whether county, city-regional, regional or supra-regional, is a major problem. In this article, however, I focus on the local level, which across nearly all of England is the only level 98

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

at which statutory planning is being undertaken. I suggest that the policy prescriptions in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), along with other factors including the hollowing-out of local planning authorities, have led to a situation whereby, in the places that it is most needed, there is effectively a ‘plan-less’ as opposed to ‘plan-led’ system. One consequence of this is that (housing) development is taking place in locations, and to a quality, that actively militates against sound principles of place-making and priorities around climate change. A plan-led system?

Readers of this journal presumably require little persuading that planning, and plans, are important, but occasionally it is worth reminding ourselves, and others, of the importance of plans. This is particularly so in the context of the UK or USA, where neoliberal ideologues can argue that a world without State intervention, including planning, would be a better one. It has been argued that Covid-19 illustrated the fallacy of this argument, and hence the ‘importance and power of the state’,5 and the crucial role of planning as one tool in making our societies more resilient to future pandemics. Planning law in England speciﬁes that, when determining planning applications, local planning

Table 1

Local Plan status and housing land supply in local planning authorities across Hertfordshire Local planning authority

Local Plan adopted

New/revised plan status

Broxbourne Borough Council

July 2020

Dacorum Borough Council

2004

East Herts District Council

2018

Hertsmere Borough Council

2013–2016

North Herts District Council

November 2022

St Albans City & District Council

1994

Stevenage Borough Council

2019

Three Rivers District Council

2014

Watford Borough Council

October 2022

Welwyn Hatﬁeld Borough Council

2005

Housing land supply, years 5.17

Consultation 2020/2021, plan submission pushed back to October 2024

3.2

6.4 Consultation draft abandoned in April 2022

2.3 1.47

Two draft plans abandoned, now proposing a plan by December 2024

2.4

5.46 Consultation in November 2021, additional consultation in January 2023

1.9

5.21 Examination in progress for ﬁve years; consultation on ‘main modiﬁcations’ in early 2023

2.58

a Figures at March 2022, as per Planning Resource’s ‘Housing Land Supply Index’— see www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1751251/housing-land-supply-index-every-english-councils-published-position-plus-document-links

authorities ‘shall have regard to’ the development plan,6 and that, when they do, decisions ‘must be made in accordance with the plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise’.7 How much priority must be given to the plan in decision-making is the subject of a large amount of complex case law. A recent summary of the situation set out by legal scholars at UCL (University College London) is that case law ‘emphasises the continued statutory ‘primacy’ of the local plan’, subject to planning judgement.8 This primacy is, however, undermined by the NPPF, speciﬁcally paragraph 11 — ‘The presumption in favour of sustainable development’.9 This presumption is that, in the absence of relevant policies, or where such policies are out of date, planning permission should be granted for development. In this context, being out of date includes situations in which local planning authorities ‘cannot demonstrate a ﬁve year supply of deliverable housing sites’.9 This has led to a resurgence in the trend of ‘planning by appeal’, something which led to the introduction of the plan-led system in 1990, and perhaps a newer

phenomenon of ‘planning by surrender’, whereby, to avoid appeals and challenges to their ﬁve-year supply of housing land, local planning authorities grant planning permission for more housing land than is needed, even if it does not accord with planning policy.4 To illustrate what this means for places and people, this article moves from the general to the speciﬁc, and examines a case study. Hertfordshire — the plan-less system in practice?

Table 1 shows when the local planning authorities in Hertfordshire adopted their Local Plans, their progress with new Local Plans, and their current housing land supply. Several of the local planning authorities have abandoned work on Local Plans, St Albans City & District having done so twice. Welwyn Hatﬁeld Borough’s Local Plan has been under examination for ﬁve years, the council in July 2022 refusing to accept a planning inspector’s recommendation that the plan must accommodate more homes.10 The intention here is not to criticise these local authorities, particularly the hard-working planning Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

100 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

John Sturzaker

officers employed by them. It takes time and resources, the latter in short supply, to produce Local Plans, and decisions to abandon them are made by elected politicians — and we know that planning for housing can be a powerful local electoral issue. Nevertheless, it is important to reflect on the outcomes of these sorts of decisions for the places and people of Hertfordshire. The image on the right shows an imaginatively worded protest sign put up in opposition to a housing development proposed in North Hertfordshire. Two planning applications for the site were refused by the local planning authority, and on those occasions the land promoter in question chose not to appeal, with a local protest group proclaiming that the development had been ‘defeated’.11 Regardless of the outcome, or indeed the specifics in planning terms, this case demonstrates an adversarial approach to planning that is sadly all too common (I have a growing collection of photographs of protest signs from around the country) and which surely reflects a disconnect, and lack of trust, between people and planning. In another case, very close to where I work, at the University of Hertfordshire, a different outcome transpired. The site in question straddles the A sign opposing a residential development in Royston, boundary between the Welwyn Hatfield Borough North Hertfordshire Council (WHBC) and St Albans City & District Council (SADC) areas, so dual planning applications to the two local planning authorities were submitted 2.58 years and SADC at 2.4 years, the position in August 2020. WHBC refused their planning is a bleak one and the shortfall in both local application, and SADC had resolved to refuse theirs, authorities is considerable and significant.’ but the applicant submitted an appeal against non-determination of the application before they The inspector further states: had done so. The reasons for those refusals are ‘The Councils argued that the site is not a suitable summarised in the appeal decisions (issued in June location for housing as it does not form part of 2021) as ‘the suitability of the location, character the emerging policy context for either SADC or and appearance, highways, ecology, archaeology, WHBC. Whilst I acknowledge this to be the case, impacts on local infrastructure and services, Green this in itself is not a reason that the appeals Belt and heritage matters’.12 The only issue of those should fail. In neither SADC nor WHBC is there an I will reflect on here is the penultimate one, the emerging policy position to which any significant Green Belt. The appeal decision notes that: weight can be attached. The SADC Local Plan ‘The [National Planning Policy] Framework and in Review was adopted in 1994, some 27 years particular paragraph 133 makes it clear that the ago. [ … ] Turning to consider the position at Government attaches great importance to the WHBC, the adopted plan dates from 2005, some Green Belt and the protection of its essential 16 years ago.’ characteristics. It was common ground between the parties that the proposals represent Taking this, and other evidence, into account, the inappropriate development as identified by the inspector allowed the appeal, concluding ‘that the Framework.’ proposals would comply with both the [National Planning Policy] Framework and the development It is not hard to see why this might perplex an plans taken as a whole’. ordinary person, such as those who might erect The purpose of summarising this decision — and a protest sign — if all involved agree that a of course I have reported only parts of it here — is development is inappropriate, surely it should not not, by any means, to criticise the inspector. Rather, be approved? However, the inspector goes on to it is to suggest that a planning system which can observe that: endorse the building of homes on this site, which is ‘neither SADC or WHBC can demonstrate a five in the Green Belt, recognised by all participants in year supply of deliverable homes [ … ] Even the appeal as inappropriate and hence, according to taking the Councils’ supply positions of WHBC the NPPF, ‘by definition, harmful’ — and which in

WHBC’s and SADC’s view is a singularly unsustainable location, being some distance from shops or services — is not a system which is working well, and certainly not one which is plan-led. The plan-less system

While the watering down of the Westminster government’s position on the weight to be placed on local planning authorities’ ‘objectively assessed housing need’ figures in late 202213 might mean that the Green Belt receives more protection in future planning decisions, it will do very little to restore a plan-led system. Local planning authorities will still need to balance delivery of housing against often intense local opposition, and it seems likely that Catriona Riddell is right when she says that proposed changes to the planning system ‘will inevitably result in a significant reduction in the number of new homes we plan for’.3 So, what are the broader implications of this at the local level? First, I believe we will continue to see development happening in locations that are inappropriate and not consistent with the principles of sound planmaking. This is not new, and indeed was predicted by Peter Hall and Colin Ward 25 years ago — they argued: ‘if [local political leaders] fail to take bold and resolute action to provide building land on the scale that is needed [ … ] they may well face a worst-case outcome, in which constant drip-feed pressure for development causes the outcome they most fear: tens of thousands of pennypacket developments on ill-conceived sites, won on appeal after long and grinding battles.’ 14 Secondly, and in turn, this will reinforce the loss of faith in the planning system evidenced by the vehement opposition to new housing which characterises many parts of the country, particularly those where the demand and need for such housing is highest. Thirdly, and often forgotten, the vitally important aspects of Local Plans which are not related to the numbers of new homes to be built will not be updated. This has implications for a range of policy areas, but perhaps most urgently for climate change and sustainability.15 Colleagues and I at the University of Hertfordshire have recently been working with the team preparing the South West Hertfordshire Joint Strategic Plan, during which time we have interviewed planning and sustainability/climate change officers across the five local authorities comprising South West Hertfordshire. In nearly every instance, we found frustration that policies requiring stricter standards on energy and water use, energy efficiency, renewable energy, car parking, etc. were being delayed as a consequence of Local Plans being abandoned or delayed owing to arguments over housing numbers.

It hardly needs stating that there is no time to waste in taking action to address climate change, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation. Yet homes, and other forms of development, are being built across Hertfordshire and the rest of England to standards set out in policies from perhaps 30 years ago. If for no other reason, we need to return to a plan-led system, and we need to do so quickly. Professor John Sturzaker is Ebenezer Howard Chair of •Planning at the University of Hertfordshire. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 B Cullingworth and V Nadin: Town and Country Planning in the UK. Routledge, 2006, 14th Edition 2 O Sykes and J Sturzaker: Planning in a Failing State: Reforming Spatial Governance in England. Policy Press, 2023 (in press) 3 C Riddell: ‘More reform, but little chance of better delivery’. Town & Country Planning, 2023, Vol. 92, Jan.–Feb., 10–16 4 Q Bradley: ‘The ﬁnancialisation of housing land supply in England’. Urban Studies, 2021, Vol. 58 (2), 389–404. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/0042098020907278 5 I Wray and L Natarajan: ‘The power of plans’. Built Environment, 2022, Vol. 48 (4), 477–92. www.alexandrinepress.co.uk/built-environment/ power-plans-0 6 Town and Country Planning Act 1990, Section 70 (2) 7 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, Section 38 (6) 8 M Lee and C Abbot (Eds): Taking English Planning Law Scholarship Seriously. UCL Press, 2022 9 National Planning Policy Framework. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Jul. 2021. www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationalplanning-policy-framework--2 10 D Blackman: ‘The 19 authorities that have withdrawn or delayed local plans in the past year’. Planning Resource, 2 Sept. 2022. www.planningresource.co.uk/ article/1797828/19-authorities-withdrawn-delayed-localplans-past-year 11 See the Royston Says NO to Gladman website, at www.roystonsaysnotogladman.co.uk/ 12 Planning Inspectorate Appeal Decisions APP/B1930/W/20/3265925 and APP/C1950/W/20/3265926. The appeal decisions and other paperwork related to the appeal can be found at www.stalbans.gov.uk/ roundhouse-farmbullens-green-lane-inquiry 13 As set out in Update on the Levelling Up Bill. HCWS415. Written Statement by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 6 Dec. 2022. https://questionsstatements.parliament.uk/written-statements/ detail/2022-12-06/hcws415 14 P Hall and C Ward: Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard. John Wiley & Sons, 1998 15 H Ellis and C Davis: ‘Western promise’. Town & Country Planning, 2023, Vol. 92, Jan.–Feb., 8–9

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

101

the challenge of delivering affordable housing in the south west

Andrew Sykes/Curo Group

Danielle Sinnett, Katie McClymont, Hannah Hickman, Zaky Fouad and Stephen Hall outline the ﬁndings of a study of housing affordability in the South West of England, suggesting that it is unlikely that current housing need assessments will deliver enough affordable homes to address a shortfall and meet new demand

New housing association homes in the South West

The South West of England is one of the least new affordable homes need to be provided per year affordable regions for housing in the country. Previous in the region, 35% of the housing requirement for assessments have estimated that around 15,000 the region,1 and that the closer that places are to 102 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

London and the South East (for example Bristol, Bath, and Bournemouth) the less affordable they are in comparison with other parts of the region.2 One would also expect that the high landscape quality (two National Parks and 13 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and the coastal and rural settings of much of the South West would also affect housing affordability. A team at UWE Bristol (the University of the West of England) was commissioned by Homes for the South West3 to examine the factors affecting housing affordability in the region and provide an estimate of future housing needs. The speciﬁc research questions were: • What factors impact housing affordability in the South West? • What is the impact of the Right to Buy on the availability of affordable housing? • Which national and local policies have impacted on affordable housing? • How many people in the region will need affordable housing in the coming years? • How does all this compare with local authority assessments on housing need and demand planning?

How affordable is housing in the South West?

14 12

South West England

London 8

South East East

West Midlands East Midlands

North West 2 0

Yorkshire & the Humber North East 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

Affordability ratio (median house price / workplace-based annual earnings)

Our approach was to use affordability ratios — of house prices to earnings — to examine trends and patterns in affordability across the region. This choice was based on the availability of data at a fine spatial resolution over a long period of time (since 1997). The dataset includes median, bottom-decile and low-quartile house prices and individual earnings data based on workplace and residence alongside the resultant affordability ratios at regional and local authority levels for every year from 1997 to 2021, as well as house price data for Middle Super Output Areas (around 6,000 people) and Lower Super Output Areas (around 1,500 people). There is very little difference between workplace-based and residence-based earnings, and we elected to use workplace-based earnings as they are more appropriate when considering local demand. We found that the South West faces acute problems of housing affordability. The region is conspicuously less affordable than England as a whole, and the North and Midlands in particular. In 2021, median house prices were approximately ten times greater than the median earnings. These inter-regional disparities are also becoming progressively more pronounced; in 1997 house prices were around four To answer these questions, we drew on government times greater than earnings (see Fig.1, below). data, a survey of local authorities, interviews with The lack of affordability is widespread across the housing associations, local authorities and private region. Three-quarters (22 out of 29) of local authority developers, and a review of planning policies in areas have affordability ratios higher than that the region. The full report of our findings, Housing for England as a whole, and all have affordability Affordability in the South West of England, is ratios higher than those for the North of England. now available.4 In this article we first explore the Affordability ratios vary from 7.3 in Plymouth (which extent of the affordability challenges in the region. is still higher than those in the Northern regions) A follow-up article will explore the impact of the to 15.8 in the Cotswolds District area (see Fig. 2, on policies and experiences of regional stakeholders. the next page). In all local authority areas, detached

Year Fig. 1 Affordability ratios 1997–2021, based on median house price and median workplace-based annual earnings Data source: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Ratio of median house price to median gross annual workplace-based earnings by region, 1997–2021, as obtained from Table 1c in House Price to Workplace-based Earnings Ratio. Dataset. Office for National Statistics, Mar. 2023. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ ratioofhousepricetoworkplacebasedearningslowerquartileandmedian

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

103

Affordability ratios, 2021 0–4 4–6 6–8 8–10 10–12 >12

Fig. 2 Affordability ratios in 2021 across South West local authorities Data source: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government License v.3.0. Ratio of median house price to median gross annual workplace-based earnings by local authority, 1997–2021, as obtained from Table 5c in House Price to Workplace-based Earnings Ratio. Dataset. Office for National Statistics, Mar. 2023. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ ratioofhousepricetoworkplacebasedearningslowerquartileandmedian Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2022. © OpenStreetMap

homes cost more than ten times median earnings, and only in Gloucester are terraced houses priced at less than six times individual earnings. This means that for many families, especially those without two incomes, owning a ‘traditional’ family home (more likely with a garden) is not affordable. Even medianpriced ﬂats cost more than four times earnings, and in Bath and North East Somerset, South Hams and Cotswolds they cost more than eight times earnings. There is also substantial diversity in affordability ratios within local authority areas. The ten leastaffordable neighbourhoods5 in the South West have median house prices more than 28.3 times median earnings. Even in the most affordable neighbourhoods of Plymouth and Gloucester, median house prices are still more than three times median earnings. This variation within local authority areas is likely to be particularly important in larger, rural authority areas where it might be more challenging to commute to work or education and to access amenities.

of these data reveals that property prices in the South West are markedly higher than in England as a whole, and have risen nearly fourfold — faster than the national average rate of increase — in the past 25 years. In 2021, the median house price in the South West was £290,000, and 16 out of 29 local authority areas had median property prices higher than the England median (see Table 1 on the next page). In all local authority areas, house prices have increased by more than 300% since 1997, and in some (for example Bristol) the increase has surpassed 500%. However, the housing affordability crisis in the South West is also driven by lower than average earnings typical of sub-regional labour markets characterised by seasonal, low-paid work in agriculture or tourism. Median individual earnings in the region are lower than in England as a whole, and only three local authority areas — South Gloucestershire, Bristol, and Tewkesbury — have median individual earnings higher than the England average (see Table 1). Factors that impact housing affordability A particularly stark example is Cotswold district, We also explored the factors that impact on housing which had the highest median house price in the affordability. Affordability ratios are calculated from South West in 2021, but is ranked 23rd in the region house price and earnings data, and an examination for median individual earnings. A similar disparity is 104 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

Table 1

Ranking of 2021 affordability ratios, median house prices and median earnings in local authorities in the South West Local authority

Cotswold London South Hams Dorset Bath and North East Somerset West Devon Teignbridge Mendip Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole South East Cornwall East Devon Forest of Dean North Somerset Cheltenham East North Devon Torridge Wiltshire Stroud South West Bristol Mid Devon Exeter Somerset West and Taunton Tewkesbury England Sedgemoor Torbay South Gloucestershire South Somerset East Midlands Swindon West Midlands Gloucester Plymouth North West Yorkshire & the Humber North East

Affordability ratio

15.75 12.97 12.56 12.22 12.15 11.96 11.40 11.22 11.17 11.12 10.99 10.88 10.62 10.58 10.55 10.53 10.46 10.34 10.32 10.27 9.97 9.70 9.29 9.22 9.16 9.15 9.05 9.00 8.90 8.82 8.80 7.78 7.69 7.50 7.34 7.27 6.43 6.42 5.45

House price

Annual earnings

Rank

408,000 515,000 352,998 330,000 368,000 290,000 280,000 298,500 325,000 365,000 275,000 317,500 275,000 300,000 310,000 325,000 280,000 265,000 300,000 315,000 290,000 315,000 270,750 275,000 260,000 301,000 285,000 243,000 230,000 300,000 259,600 221,000 241,950 225,000 223,000 195,000 190,000 185,000 150,000

25,910 39,716 28,096 26,999 30,296 24,247 24,558 26,612 29,095 32,810 25,013 29,176 25,883 28,353 29,371 30,867 26,766 25,629 29,069 30,680 29,080 32,470 29,144 29,827 28,384 32,896 31,480 26,987 25,854 34,010 29,516 28,416 31,471 30,000 30,389 26,820 29,529 28,808 27,515

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

3 4 2 15 16 14 5 18 6 18 11 9 16 22 11 7 7 21 18 23 10 25 27 11 24 26 28 29

17 18 7 29 28 22 13 27 11 24 16 10 21 26 14 5 3 12 8 15 2 19 25 1 9 4 6 20

Data source: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0) Affordability ratios calculated from two datasets: Median house price, by local authorities, for detached houses, semi-detached houses, terraced houses and ﬂats or maisonettes, as obtained from Tables 2b–2e in Median House Prices for Administrative Geographies. HPSSA Dataset 9. Office for National Statistics, Mar. 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ housing/datasets/medianhousepricefornationalandsubnationalgeographiesquarterlyrollingyearhpssadataset09 ; and median workplace-based earnings, as obtained from Table 5b in House Price to Workplace-based Earnings Ratio. Dataset. Office for National Statistics, Mar. 2023. www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/ ratioofhousepricetoworkplacebasedearningslowerquartileandmedian

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

105

observed for other local authority areas, including Cornwall, South Hams, and Dorset. In contrast to property prices, earnings across the region have grown by only 83.6% since 1997. In short, wage growth is not keeping up with house price increases, and this has significant implications for local people, especially younger households or first-time buyers. Unsurprisingly, house prices are often higher in places with a high environmental quality and good access to local amenities and services. The region has an abundance of designated landscapes, including Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), National Parks, and the coastline. However, many areas are disconnected from jobs and services. We joined spatial data — including proximity to the coastline, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Parks, broadband connectivity, journey times to train stations and areas of employment, deprivation, and rural-urban classifications — to the affordability ratios in a Geographical Information System. This provided a complete dataset of these spatial characteristics and affordability ratios for each Lower Super Output Area in the region. We used regression modelling to test whether there is a statistically significant difference in the affordability ratios between these places, and to explore the extent to which these spatial factors explain the variation in affordability ratios. Our model found that, within a local authority area, neighbourhoods closer to the coastline are less affordable, as are those in AONBs. In general, more rural places are less affordable than towns and cities, but, within these rural areas, those with better transport and broadband connectivity were even less affordable. Further, the high-quality protected natural environment in the South West is such that developable land is scarce and subject to market premium prices, impacting the viability of affordable housing. These locations are also popular retirement and tourist destinations. There is a paucity of comprehensive and consistent data on the impact of second homes and holiday lets. However, the data that are available suggest that local authority areas with a greater proportion of second homes are also less affordable. The South West is also the only English region in which in-migration is dominated by arrivals from elsewhere in the UK (as opposed to international migration). This suggests, perhaps, the existence of a distinctive residential ‘offer’ in the region — one that attracts retirees, people working from home, and those commuting to London and the South East, further increasing demand for new homes. Finally, we looked at the supply of new homes compared with projected household formation since 1997. Over this period the supply of new homes has not kept pace with demand. It is estimated that some 496,768 new households formed in the region between 1997 and 2021. In contrast, only 106 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

396,790 new homes were completed — a deﬁcit of 99,978 homes. This shortfall does not account for units ‘lost’ to holiday lets or second homes, so the actual ﬁgure is likely to be much greater; and we found that the largest concentrations of second homes are, typically, found in local authority areas with the highest shortfalls in housing delivery — for example Cornwall and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. When this shortfall is adjusted by the annual affordability ratio, as per the government’s ‘standard method’, it increases to around 200,000 homes across the region. The impact of the Right to Buy

Housing providers in the South West report that the Right to Buy has had a detrimental impact on housing affordability in the region, particularly in respect of its role in the depletion of the overall stock of affordable housing. Across the region 144,000 local-authority-owned properties have been sold since 1980. Since 1997, some 33,220 localauthority-owned homes were sold through the Right to Buy, whereas local authorities in the South West delivered only 2,320 new homes. The impact of the Right to Buy is particularly acute in small rural communities, where a handful of sales locally might equate to a high proportion of the total stock, and may be difficult to replace given the higher unit costs of construction on small rural sites. In addition, development viability and funding challenges make it difficult for local authorities to replace social housing on a one-to-one basis in these locations. Assessing future affordable housing need

To assess future housing need, we projected house price and annual earnings data for each local authority area in the South West, to create median and lower-quartile projected affordability ratios. These projections used data from 1997 to 2021 to predict lower-quartile and median house prices and annual earnings to 2039. We then used these ﬁgures to calculate predicted affordability ratios. We calculated the annual housing requirement using the affordability adjustments in government’s ‘standard method’,6 based on the future predicted affordability ratios. We then used the resulting housing requirements from 2022 to calculate the number of new homes that are needed in each local authority area between 2022 and 2039. We estimated the future household incomes for each decile, by local authority, from the predicted individual earnings between 2022 and 2043. Using the projected house prices, household formations and these estimated future household incomes, we calculated the proportion of new households in each decile of income that would need to spend more than 40% of their monthly income on mortgage repayments, assuming a 10% deposit, a 25-year term, and the 2021 interest rate. We did

this for both median- and lower-quartile-priced homes. This allowed us to estimate the proportion of new households, at each income decile, that would experience an affordability problem, and therefore the proportion of new homes that would need to be affordable at these two price brackets in each local authority area for each year. We estimated that around 28,337 homes need to be delivered in the region each year between 2022 and 2039. This assumes that new homes are purchased by these resident households and not as second homes or holiday lets. On average an estimated 17,282 of these new homes would need to be affordable for those on median incomes across the region — around 60% of the total need. For those with household incomes in the lowest quartile, an estimated 11,069 affordable homes would be required — around 40% of the total. These proportions are far greater than the thresholds in many planning policies. Given the difficulties in delivering affordable homes, especially those for social rent, achieving these requirements will be challenging.

‘In most local authority areas the assessments of housing need using the government’s ’standard method’ or the local authority housing requirements in Local Plans will not address the shortfall in housing delivery between 1997 and 2021 within ten years’ Comparison with local authority assessments

We compared the housing required based on our estimates with the government’s ‘standard method’, which caps the number of new homes required but provides an uplift in the urban areas of Bristol and Plymouth. We found that to clear the shortfall of homes and maintain the required supply would take between one (Cotswold) and 126 (West Devon) years. In most local authority areas the assessments of housing need using the government’s ‘standard method’ or the local authority housing requirements in Local Plans will not address the shortfall in housing delivery between 1997 and 2021 within ten years. In half of the local authority areas, using the standard method would fail to deliver enough housing to clear the shortfall of homes by 2039. Again, this does not take into account homes purchased as second homes or holiday lets. To clear the shortfall in ﬁve years and keep up with new demand, an estimated 70,000 homes need to be built in the region each year for the next ﬁve years.

Substantial and continuing shortfall in one of the least-affordable regions

The Housing Affordability in the South West of England study has demonstrated that, across all types of housing, the South West is one of the least-affordable regions in England. This lack of affordability is driven by both high house prices and low earnings. There is substantial variation across the region, with urban locations (particularly those closer to the South East and London) and tourist destinations being the least affordable. There is a substantial shortfall in housing delivery compared with demand: the supply of new homes has failed to keep pace with household formation and internal migration. It is unlikely that current housing need assessments will deliver enough homes to address this historic shortfall and keep up with new demand, particularly in light of these additional demand-side pressures. The number of affordable homes required will be challenging to achieve given the current constraints on the delivery of affordable housing highlighted by stakeholders in the region, including the viability of development, especially on smaller, rural sites, a lack of resources and specialist skills in local authorities, and shortages in the construction industry.

•

Danielle Sinnett is Professor in Sustainable Built Environments and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments, Dr Katie McClymont is Associate Professor in Urban Planning, Hannah Hickman is Associate Professor — Planning Practice, Dr Zaky Fouad is Lecturer in Architecture and Sustainability, and Dr Stephen Hall is Associate Professor, all at the University of the West of England, Bristol. The report on which this article draws is available at https://homesforthesouthwest.co.uk/home/ affordability-report/. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 G Bramley: Housing Supply Requirements across Great Britain: For Low-Income Households and Homeless People. Crisis, Dec. 2018, Table 1.3. www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessnessknowledge-hub/housing-models-and-access/housingsupply-requirements-across-great-britain-2018/ 2 G Bramley, J Morgan, S Ballantyne Way, et al.: The Delivery and Affordability of Housing in the South West of England. Royal Town Planning Institute, Oct. 2017. www.rtpi.org.uk/research/2017/february/deliverability-andaffordability-of-housing-in-the-south-west-of-england/ 3 A consortium of housing associations — see the Homes for the South West website, at https://homesforthesouthwest.co.uk/ 4 D Sinnett, Z Fouad, K McClymont, et al.: Housing Affordability in the South West of England. University of the West of England, for Homes for the South West, Mar. 203. https://homesforthesouthwest.co.uk/home/ affordability-report/ 5 These are in the Bath and North East Somerset, Cotswolds, Cornwall, and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole districts 6 Housing and Economic Needs Assessment. Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Mar. 2015 (updated Dec. 2020). www.gov.uk/guidance/housingand-economic-development-needs-assessments Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

107

20 minutes to what? Florence Hewett and Caglar Koksal outline the diversity of approaches to the application of the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood revealed by a literature search — highlighting the need for further research to bring about the clarity required to underpin a measurable and actionable good practice framework The 20-minute neighbourhood (20MN) concept has recently garnered significant interest. That people can access key services and amenities on foot or by cycling or wheeling without the need for a car speaks directly to the fundamentals of planning, which aims to create liveable, healthy, green and growing neighbourhoods. Despite this interest, there is no comprehensive or widely agreed definition of what a 20MN really is. It has been defined through many attributes — compact; complete; connected — but measures of these features are uncertain: compact in comparison with what; complete for whom; and connected to what? Largely owing to difficulties in definition, particularly in identifying which services require accessibility, there has also been little agreement on the nature and extent of the concept’s impact. Identifying how the 20MN agenda affects planning practice and theory, urban governance and democracy and the wider sustainability agenda remains a challenge. The concept of sustainability itself has encountered similar problems of definition, scope, and measurement. The ‘constructive ambiguity’ of the term has long been part of its global appeal, subduing potential dissenting voices over detailed meaning and implications for achievement. As a result, the term remains globally popular at all levels of governments and organisations. The popularity of the 20MN may be viewed similarly. However, striving for consensus has made the concept and practice of sustainable development malleable, and at the mercy of powerful actors with vested interests. Sustainable development has become harder to implement and operationalise, both as a means to an end and as an end-goal, as its meaning varies widely, depending on who is setting the narrative. This makes it difficult to break sustainability down into individual steps or concrete strategies, or to measure results. The same risks around implementation and evaluation will apply to the 20MN if the concept 108 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

remains ambiguous. Variations in measures, demography and services also make the topic a ‘slippery ideal’.1 In the study reported here, we aimed to investigate the extant literature addressing the 20MN and associated concepts, with a view to providing a rich picture of the ﬁeld, but also in order to highlight the current diversity of approaches. The literature study

We searched for literature using Google Scholar in the first instance, with further research found through online research repositories, including Web of Science. After a review of existing papers, the following overlapping concepts were included in the study: the 20-minute neighbourhood; the 20-minute city; the 15-minute city; the 15-minute neighbourhood; and the 15-minute community-life circle. Literature which addressed the concept of 15- or 20-minute travel times to access services, but which did not use one of these phrases, was also included. As the primary purpose of the research was comparison between authors’ application of the concept, literature which focused on the theory and origins of the idea was not included in the main study. However, a non-exhaustive list of this theoretical literature was produced for completeness. Twenty-six papers, including conference papers and presentations, were found for the main study, and a further five studies were included on the theoretical literature record.2 The 26 studies came from a wide range of locations, such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Italy, Colombia, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Papers were predominantly very recent, with 92% dating from 2018 or later. This highlights the rapid and recent growth of the 20MN concept. The majority of literature addressed a specific urban location in evaluating data, and some undertook comparative studies using two or more locations. A wide range of cities were chosen for

Micaël Dessin — https://micaeldessin.com/Paris-en-commun

Ville du quart d’heure, or city of 15 minutes

study, with 18 different cities analysed. The Melbourne region was the most frequently chosen location for study, with ﬁve different papers focusing on areas within Greater Melbourne. Studies were not consistent on the travel time involved, or on how this should be measured. The various permutations of travel time and / or distance, and travel means, where speciﬁed, were: 1 mile; 1 kilometre; 800 metres; a 1-2.5-mile cycle ride (for a 20-minute round trip); a 1.5-kilometre walk; 0.5 miles; 0.25 miles; a 400-metre walk; a 5-minute walk; a 5-minute walk + 50%; a 10-minute walk; a 15-minute bicycle ride (3 miles); 15 minutes’ walk or cycle; 20 minutes’ travel time, considering walking, cycling and public transport; a 15-minute walk (variously 1 kilometre, 1,200 metres, 0.75 miles, 900 metres, or using walk speeds of 3.16 kilometres per hour or 72 metres per minute); a 5-minute bicycle ride; a 600-metre walk; an 800-metre walk; and walking buffers of 300, 600 and 900 metres (for 5, 10 and 15 minutes’ walking). Notably, the literature is not clear on whether a 20MN involves a 20-minute round trip, i.e. 10 minutes to a destination and 10 minutes to return, or whether services may be located within a 20-minute travel time from home. In this regard the 15-minute city appears subject to better consensus, with services placed within 15 minutes’ travel from people’s homes.

• education; • green space; • transport; • recreation and entertainment; • community and religious facilities; • elderly care; and • retail, commercial and ﬁnancial services;

Some literature also addressed services overall and was counted within a ‘general’ category. The themes most frequently covered were retail (addressed in 19 papers), food, and education (both 18). Services specifically for elderly people were the least popular, with only three studies considering these to fall within 20MN requirements. Transport was covered by 14 of the 26 papers. This points to a lack of consensus in the field regarding whether access to a wider area via accessible transport stops, or access points onto a network such as bicycle lanes, forms part of a 20MN. The services and amenities covered in each theme, and the frequency with each service and amenity is mentioned, are shown in Table 1, on the next page. A large number of papers focused on access to general centres of retail and employment premises. Of the more specific destinations, the services and amenities found most essential for a 20-minute neighbourhood or 15-minute city were small Themes — and services and amenities — covered grocery stores, a local hot-food establishment in the literature (whether a café, restaurant, or takeaway), sports Nine specific themes (i.e. broad categories of facilities, primary schools, and bus stops. services and amenities) were covered by the literature: Questions about the scope of the 20MN concept are raised by the inclusion by some studies of • food (sometimes specified as healthy food); ‘higher-order’ service provision, such as hospitals, • health; Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

109

Table 1

The frequency with which individual services and amenities, arranged by theme, are mentioned in the literature examined Small supermarket Restaurant or café Grocer General food or catering Large supermarket

Food

Primary care Pharmacy Hospital Maternal and child health Dentist Hospice

Health

9 3 3 16 10 6 3 2 1 11

Primary school Nursery Secondary or high school Schools general

Education

Green space

18 12

9 7 6 6 6

Neighbourhood park Larger parks Playground Recreational space / sports ﬁeld Nature / wildlife reserve

Transport

Bus stop Train station Tram stop Access to cycle lane/network Airport / port Cycle hub / parking EV charging / parking Regional and inter-city transit

4 4 4 11 7 9 5 2 3 1 1

Recreational and entertainment

Fitness / sports facilities Bars / cinemas / general entertainment General cultural venue or recreation

Community and religious facilities

Civic centre / community hall Library Place of worship Religious organisation

Nursing home General ‘aged care’ Sheltered housing School for older adults Recreation centre

1 1 1 1

Elderly care

Retail, commercial and ﬁnancial services

General retail / commercial services Banks Post offices Local services/shops

110 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

11 4 4 8 7 5

17 8 7 2

universities, and airports/ports. Although it may be impractical, and to some degree undesirable, to include these services (generally associated with regional-level provision) within every 20MN, their inclusion within the debate serves to highlight that these services should also be accessible from a 20MN in a sustainable manner — for example through public transport. The inclusion of services and amenities speciﬁcally for older residents by several authors is notable. It points to an area of increasing importance when planning for sustainable neighbourhoods and tackling health inequities, particularly in ageing societies. Interest in the elderly and the design of the built environment appears to be increasing,3 and the provision of specialised services within an accessible radius is of relevance to this topic. Discussion and recommendations

The constructive ambiguity of the 20MN concept can be an advantage in its promotion. However, this ambiguity also creates difficulties in its operationalisation, similar to the difficulties around sustainability. The concept has a wide range of different meanings, depending on viewpoints and who is setting the narrative. This will create difficulties in setting policy targets, in producing concrete strategies, or taking incremental steps towards a goal. Factors affecting the deﬁnition of the 20MN include which local services to include; the mode of travel (foot, bicycle, or public transport); the unit of journey length (distance or travel time, and which barriers to movement are accounted for); and whether to incorporate quality and cost / affordability of services and amenities into evaluation. The wide variation of opinion on these factors means that evaluation against a common standard is likely to remain difficult. The inherently local and heterogenous nature of neighbourhoods also means that locally effective solutions may not all obviously meet the 20MN model. These issues highlight a need for clarity based on further research, to move towards a measurable and actionable framework for the 20MN. This framework and / or operationalisation should be based on robust empirical analysis and case studies of contextualised planning practices and should aim to develop contingent prescriptions for good practice usable in that context. The hyperlocal scale

Spatial data analysis and temporal data such as walk times are important for accessibility analysis. However, of equal importance is hyperlocal knowledge and data collection. Communication and engagement with residents to ascertain local requirements is vital to ensure true accessibility at the local and hyperlocal scale. So is hyperlocal data that are not amalgamated at the local authority level, but instead provide accurate and up-to-date

information on travel behaviours and infrastructure at the neighbourhood level. This may ensure tailored plans for 20-minute neighbourhoods, developed with local stakeholders.4 The limits of the concept

It will be important to test the limits of the 20MN concept, both theoretically and methodologically. The inclusion within the model, or otherwise, of public transport as a means of accessing services, or ‘higher-order’ services such as hospitals, highlights the uncertainty surrounding the limits of the 20MN. The quality and cost / affordability of services and amenities that are accessible also need to be incorporated into the analysis. Delivery

The creation of neighbourhoods with accessible services and amenities requires more than the actions of planners. Delivery of the 20MN concept on the ground will require working within multiactor coalitions to achieve the spatial, economic, infrastructural and environmental interventions necessary to form truly accessible, walkable neighbourhoods. Places for living

In taking the 20MN concept forward, the overall purpose and intention of the idea must not be lost: to create communities within which residents can lead high-quality daily lives. Too great a focus on which, how many, or what types of services and amenities can be accessed within a 20-minute radius may result in losing sight of the goal of building neighbourhoods where people live dignified lives. In embedding 20MN principles into policy and guidance, a balance must therefore be achieved between setting measurable walk time or distance guides for key services and allowing for a holistic approach that accounts for local characteristics and sets resident wellbeing as the priority. Florence Hewett is an urban planner and freelance •researcher with specific interest in built heritage. Dr Caglar Koksal is a Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Manchester. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 A Duany and R Steuteville: ‘Defining the 15-minute city’. Public Square, 8 Feb. 2021. www.cnu.org/ publicsquare/2021/02/08/defining-15-minute-city 2 The full list of papers reviewed can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7297058 3 P Zang, C Q L Xue, Y Lu and K Tu: ‘Neighbourhood adaptability for Hong Kong’s ageing population’. Urban Design International, 2019, Vol. 24, 187–205 4 S O’Gorman and R Dillon-Robinson: 20 Minute Neighbourhoods in a Scottish Context. ClimateXChange, Mar. 2021. https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/37524

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

111

frozen in aspic — planning and pragmatism in the siting of nuclear power stations in britain Despite efforts at strategic siting and the problems posed by changing circumstances — especially the challenges arising out of climate change — the geography of nuclear power infrastructure is stubbornly inflexible, and has barely changed since it was first established over half a century ago, as Andrew Blowers explains The geography of nuclear power in Britain was more or less settled by the 1970s and has endured remarkably since then. Speed was of the essence in the early years, a so-called age of ‘innocent expectation’ or, perhaps more realistically, one of ‘trust in technology’. This was ‘nuclear’s moment’,1 lasting less than three decades, during which time the infrastructure of nuclear development was established around Britain, predominantly at coastal sites. By the 1980s the moment was over, and a state of geographical inertia had set in. A combination of land availability and infrastructural development (transport, access to the super-grid, the availability of skilled workers) exerted a pull, while resistance from non-nuclear communities projected a push preventing the nuclear industry from breaking out of its redoubts and colonising new sites in greenfield locations. In the early years of this century a ‘nuclear renaissance’ was proclaimed: a strategic siting programme consisting of new nuclear power stations built on existing sites and deployed by 2025. In the event only one, Hinkley Point C, is under construction. Far from being ready to cook Christmas turkeys in 2017 as initially claimed by developer EDF, the power station will not be generating electricity until 2027, a decade later. In the 2020s a further attempt is being made to revitalise the civil nuclear programme as an integral part of the energy mix in order to help meet the 112 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

aims of the government’s net-zero carbon strategy by 2050. Once again, the focus remains on the existing sites, some of which are vulnerable to the long-term consequences of climate change. But there is now a serious disjunction between a geography of nuclear power established more than half a century ago and the realities of site suitability in an age of climate change. Throughout the history of the siting of nuclear power plants, the role of planning has been reactive rather than strategic. In the early phase, planning was site specific, with development control typically exercised through local planning inquiries. As opposition to nuclear power grew, so the scope of inquiries, notably at Torness and Sizewell B, gradually broadened to incorporate issues such as energy policy, economics, safety, and public trust. During the present century, a strategic siting process was adopted, with individual sites identified through a National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation. In practice, siting remains a specific process, a matter primarily of economic and historical determinism, with a few projects seeking to attract investment to a handful of existing sites. Setting the stage

Nuclear energy’s origins lie in the development of the nuclear arsenal. This required sites for various processes, including uranium enrichment, fuel processing, and bomb assembly. The heart of the industry was the reactors and processing plant

Ian Clarke

The decommissioned Bradwell A nuclear power station

required for manufacturing plutonium-239 and uranium-235. Choosing a site for such a secret enterprise required remoteness, ample water supplies, and substantial electricity. In the UK, the post-war search for a suitable location for the UK’s plutonium factory was soon settled in 1947, at Sellafield on the West Cumbrian coast, remote from large population centres and the site of a wartime ordnance factory. The first nuclear sites, selected under the aegis of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and connected to the military programme and research, including Winfrith Heath, Aldermaston, Capenhurst and Dounreay, were developed in secrecy and haste without any in-depth environmental surveys and absent of planning controls. They were a random collection of high-hazard locations, wartime airfields, and sites in friendly ownership, including the UKAEA itself (at Calder Hall). Apart from some concern about unknown radioactivity risks, there was no sense of coherence about these early siting decisions. As Openshaw wryly remarks: ‘Perhaps miraculously, post hoc and retrospective evaluations seem to have generally validated these siting decisions.’ 2 Windscale (which later reverted to its former name, Sellafield), with Calder Hall across the Scottish border, were the first-generation dual-use nuclear reactors supplying the grid as well as making plutonium. By 1955, a White Paper, A Programme of Nuclear Power, was the first public commitment to a 10-year, 12-site nuclear plan based on Magnox

reactor technology. The siting process was rigorous, especially in taking engineering considerations (cooling water, foundation conditions, access to the grid, etc.) into account. There was more flexibility in concern for safety, although remote locations were still favoured. Impacts on environment and local communities were treated as flexible rather than absolute constraints. Locations were chosen individually rather than as components in an overall siting strategy, and each was subject to planning procedures. The resulting sites of these firstgeneration Magnox power stations were profoundly significant in that they basically committed the future geography of nuclear power in Great Britain. The selection of Bradwell (in Essex), one of the first Magnox stations, illustrates the process of site selection. Bradwell is fairly remote, set in the marshlands of Essex, but only 50 or so miles from London. Like all the Magnox stations (except Trawsfynydd in Snowdonia), it is on a coastal site, with adequate cooling water, situated on a wartime airfield which was a base for sorties into Europe and a safe haven for those aircraft that returned. The public inquiry, the first held for a nuclear power station, lasted five days in 1956 and was dominated by expert submissions perversely defending remoteness while also claiming that nuclear power was perfectly safe. The inquiry attracted considerable opposition, which, although concerned about safety, focused on environmental (oysters and marine life) and amenity issues, which were regarded as Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

113

emotional.3 In a contest between scientific rationality and local protest there could only be, at that time, one winner: ‘At the national level the unassailable position of the nuclear enterprise remained inviolate.’4 Within a matter of five years, during the second half of the 1950s, all nine of the Magnox stations (plus the earlier dual-purpose Windscale and Chapel Cross) had been approved, and, in the following decade, most of them came online, the last and largest at Wylfa on Anglesey, in 1971.The search for sites had yielded a collection around the coast, with three in the South West (Berkeley, Hinkley Point, and Oldbury), two in Wales (Wylfa and Trawsfynydd), one in Scotland (Hunterston) and three in the South East (Bradwell, Dungeness, and Sizewell). All bar one of the sites were coastal or on estuaries for cooling water, and relatively remote from large populations, allegedly for safety reasons. Most were contested, some of them, like Hunterston, Bradwell and Dungeness, by groups not necessarily anti-nuclear but opposed on amenity and environmental grounds. But the contests were limited, and the need for nuclear energy and technological and economic imperatives quickly overcame the largely unorganised and sometimes febrile opposition. By 1959 the first stage in creating the geography of nuclear power stations was accomplished.

The stage is set

The next stage, the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) programme, proved more controversial, but the relentless drive of the government-backed Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) ensured its progress. One problem was the debate about technology and reactor design, with the AGR design eventually chosen for all the reactors in the programme. The first to be permitted, at Dungeness B in 1965, proved the longest to complete, eventually opening in 1984 — it provided an early example of the tendency to long delays, missed deadlines and increasing costs that has become commonplace with nuclear projects. Dungeness B was located at a coastal site already occupied by a Magnox station, as subsequently the case with Hinkley Point B and Hunterston B. The other three sites in the AGR programme extended the fleet into new territory. As the remote siting criteria were relaxed it became, at least for a time, acceptable to site nuclear power stations close to urban centres, Heysham A and B and Hartlepool reflecting this new flexibility. Indeed, Hartlepool was not only close to a major conurbation but also neighboured a petrochemical works and was not far from the Durham coalfield, thereby symbolising nuclear’s advance at the expense of the waning coal industry. (In passing, it should be

GLASGOW

•

Hunterston

Chapel Cross

•

Calder Hall

•

NORTHERN IRELAND

Wylfa

•

Magnox Reactors

•

Sizewell

•

MANCHESTER

Trawsfyndd

•

BIRMINGHAM

ENGLAND

WALES

••

John Hunt at mapperou.com

Berkeley Oldbury

LONDON

•

Hinkley Point

0 0

114 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

•

Bradwell

Dungeness

Miles Kilometres

50 100

Locations of ﬁrstgeneration Magnox nuclear power stations

GLASGOW

••

Torness Hunterston B

•

• ••

Magnox Reactors Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors Pressurised Water Reactor

•

NORTHERN IRELAND

• Heysham A and B

• •• MANCHESTER

• •

BIRMINGHAM

ENGLAND

WALES

••

John Hunt at mapperou.com

Hartlepool

••

PWR Sizewell B

LONDON

Hinkley Point B

••

Bringing down the curtain

Torness marked the apogee of nuclear’s moment in Britain and the genesis of localised anti-nuclear movements, focused on sites, that would ﬂourish in subsequent decades. After 1980, the nuclear industry went into retreat as the decline in coal was

• Dungeness B

noted that a later proposal for a nuclear power station in a coal-mining area further up the coast at Druridge Bay in Northumberland was resisted during the 1980s.) There were some proposals inland that did not proceed, for example at Stourport near Kidderminster, which was successfully opposed, and at sites near Chester and Chepstow. The last of the AGRs, at Torness on the east coast of Scotland, became the focus of the ﬁrst full-blown anti-nuclear protest in 1978 and 1979, attracting 5,000 people to the familiar features of fairs, symbols, stalls, camps, speeches, leaﬂets, workshops, non-violent action, political and media attention, stand-offs with police, and site occupations. The protest halted progress but was eventually cleared. Its target was not just Torness power station but the nuclear industry itself, and the connections between civil and military nuclear power were clearly in evidence. With Torness, the geography of nuclear power in Britain was complete.

••

Miles Kilometres

50 100

Locations of AGRs (and Sizewell PWR)

supplanted by the rapid development of North Sea oil and gas. Concerns about nuclear safety were made palpable by the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. And the problem of managing a growing burden of nuclear waste was fanning protests over the siting of repositories, which took over from the conflicts over siting nuclear power stations. The management of nuclear waste, which had hardly featured as an issue in the early siting decisions for power stations, had, by the 1980s, achieved considerable prominence. The period towards the end of the century was dominated by long-running conflicts over the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield and the siting of repositories for nuclear wastes in Eastern England, culminating in the inquiry into a Rock Characterisation Facility (RCF) for high-level wastes in a deep repository in West Cumbria, the heart of the nuclear industry. The biggest inquiry of them all was over the proposal for a new Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) nuclear power station at Sizewell. It ran for 340 days (from January 1983 to March 1985) and proved wide-ranging and discursive, straying into peripheral issues at the heart of government policy. Among those opposing the project was Jennifer Armstrong, on behalf of the TCPA.5 The inquiry covered the full Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

115

panoply of issues of need, economics, safety and local environmental considerations to the extent that ‘there were virtually no holds barred’.6 Ultimately, the Sizewell B inquiry distilled all the complex, conﬂicting, practical and moral issues into a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a PWR at Sizewell. Although Sizewell B, which began operating in 1995, did not increase the geographical footprint of nuclear power in Britain, it did extend its timescale, with decommissioning unlikely to begin until around the middle of this century. This, the ﬁrst PWR and, to date, the largest and last nuclear power station, was widely thought to have brought down the curtain on nuclear power in Britain.

(IROPI), whereby the public interest in the need for nuclear power could trump the adverse impacts on the integrity of sites designated under the European Habitats and Wild Birds Directives where no acceptable alternative site could be found. Altogether, around 270 sites were screened but, ultimately, only 11 reduced to eight were listed ‘as potentially suitable for the deployment of new nuclear power stations in England and Wales by the end of 2025’.9 Three alternative sites, considered as worthy of consideration, were deemed unsuitable after public consultation and not credible for deployment by 2025. These were non-nuclear locations at Druridge Bay in Northumberland, Kingsnorth in Kent, and Owston Ferry on the River A new revival Trent in Lincolnshire, the only inland site. Dungeness, But rumours of the death of nuclear power proved on the original list, was also dropped on the grounds to be greatly exaggerated. Early this century, of the adverse harm that would be inflicted on a Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed a ‘nuclear site of international significance, including impacts renaissance’, with nuclear power having ‘a role to of coastal erosion on the unique shingle beach and play in the future UK generating mix alongside other habitats. low carbon generating options’.7 Nuclear was seen Following consultation and brief but vigorous as an essential component in both energy and opposition, two other listed sites were withdrawn environmental security. Accordingly, a new nuclear from the final list, at Braystones and Kirksanton in programme was projected in the UK ‘to contribute West Cumbria. Clearly, these two sites were as much as possible’ — with around 16 gigwatts of surrogates for Sellafield, which was also listed and, capacity needed to sustain nuclear’s contribution as given its location next to the nuclear complex, was the existing fleet was retired. presumed ‘unlikely to be excessively detrimental’ The new nuclear power stations were to be built to the Lake District.10 The eight sites that survived were put forward in by private investors, British and foreign. A timescale the National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power and locations for the plants would be needed. Generation as potentially suitable sites — Bradwell, For the first time there would be an overall siting Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Oldbury, strategy, in contrast to the incremental, individual Sizewell, Sellafield, and Wylfa. All were on the coast and evolutionary approach that had resulted in the or large estuaries, and all were on available land in existing sites. The government embarked on a nuclear-friendly ownership and adjacent to existing strategic siting assessment process, identifying nuclear infrastructures — operating or redundant strategic siting criteria and inviting developers to nominate sites for new nuclear power stations that nuclear power stations and reprocessing works. All were apparently capable of being in operation by could be deployed by 2025. The criteria included 2025. Thus an elaborate exercise in rational strategic environmental and resource issues such as flood planning had merely reaffirmed and reinforced the risk, water resources, coastal change, biodiversity, existing geography of nuclear power. landscapes and visual impacts; socio-economic aspects; and impacts on health and wellbeing; as well as specifically local considerations of transport, A faltering finale In order to ensure swift delivery of the new transmission, hazards, and emergency planning. programme, the system of planning inquiries that The criteria were carefully modulated, provisional reached its procedural apotheosis at Sizewell was and discretionary, leading to such facile and replaced by the new system of ‘National Infrastructure inconclusive interpretations such as that provided Planning’ introduced to ‘streamline the decisionby the Environment Agency: making process for major infrastructure projects, ‘The Environment Agency has advised that it is making it fairer and faster for communities and reasonable to conclude that a nuclear power applicants alike’.11 Under the new system, Nationally station within the site could potentially be Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) such as protected against flood risks throughout its nuclear power stations would be examined by the lifetime, including potential effects of climate Planning Inspectorate according to a strict timetable change, storm surge and tsunami, taking into and set of procedures. A panel would conduct a public account possible countermeasures.’ 8 examination and make a report and recommendations The relatively permissive nature of the criteria for determination by the Secretary of State. was further illustrated by the potential application In the event, the nuclear programme stuttered and of ‘imperative reasons of overriding public interest’ then stalled, restrained by its persistent problems 116 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

GLASGOW

•

•• NORTHERN IRELAND Moorside

••

• • •

•• •••

••• •

Magnox Reactors Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors Pressurised Water Reactor Proposed sites for new reactors

Hartlepool

Heysham

MANCHESTER

Wylfa

• BIRMINGHAM

ENGLAND WALES

John Hunt at mapperou.com

Sizewell

• ••

LONDON

Oldbury

•••

••

Bradwell

••

Hinkley Point

0 0

of cost and delay. Only one of the projects, Hinkley Point C, has surmounted the various hurdles necessary to proceed. These included Generic Design Assessment (GDA) approval; ﬁnancial investment decision (FID) from EDF and its Chinese partner (CGN); planning permission from the Secretary of State on the recommendations of the Planning Inspectorate; and the necessary permits and licences from the regulators. Even so, Hinkley Point C became highly controversial as its costs mounted from £18 billion to an estimated £25–26 billion by the time it begins operation in 2027, a decade later than originally planned. Of the other sites put forward for development by 2025, Moorside and Oldbury, after initially attracting developer interest, fell by the wayside. Wylfa Newydd, on the Anglesey coast, was pulled by developer, Hitachi, in 2019 for ﬁnancial reasons; and it was also revealed that refusal of planning permission had been recommended by the Planning Inspectorate on several grounds, most notably the impact of the proposal on Arctic and Sandwich tern colonies near the plant. This left the two eastern coastal sites, Sizewell C and Bradwell B. In the case of Sizewell C, the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendation of refusal on grounds of lack of adequate water supply and lack

• ••

Miles Kilometres

50 100

Proposed sites for new reactors

of information concerning the Habitats Regulations was overruled by the Secretary of State, who concluded that ‘the very substantial and urgent need for the proposal outweighs the harms’.12 This decision was subjected to legal challenge by local environmental groups. Sizewell C still needs to find willing investors, in addition to the French state-owned EDF and the UK Government, who have each agreed to take a 20% stake in the project. It is expected that the additional 60% will be financed through the Regulated Asset Base (RAB) vehicle, intended to incentivise investment by enabling companies to take ownership of the assets and operating costs through the ability to raise up-front revenue through customer bills and government subsidies. Intended initially to finance Sizewell C, RAB was expected to reignite interest in the dormant Wylfa project and, perhaps, resuscitate Moorside (Sellafield) and stir interest among investors further down the line. Meanwhile, Bradwell B, having achieved GDA for its Chinese reactor, has faltered in the face of local opposition and security concerns over the Chinese State, with its developer, Chinese General Nuclear Power (CGN), declaring it was not ‘in a position to provide certainty on the project timeline or more details on our project proposals’.13 The project is Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

117

paused indefinitely and, to all intents and purposes, effectively dead in the water. All these projects were on existing ‘potentially suitable’ sites, and it had been assumed that development consent would not prove an obstacle since the siting criteria were largely unchanged since 2011. And, if the Planning Inspectorate had any reservations, such was the political enthusiasm for nuclear energy it was believed that the Secretary of State would grant approval anyway. After more than a decade, the ambitious nuclear renaissance had secured a very modest yield. By 2030, with the remaining AGR stations closed, only Sizewell B and, probably, Hinkley Point C, will be operating, with Sizewell C a distant prospect. The reduced ambitions were reflected by the National Infrastructure Commission, which argued that big new nuclear plants were expensive, slow to build, and risked delay and other obstacles. It therefore urged government to ‘take a one by one approach’, which the government duly did in its Energy White Paper,14 which essentially confirmed one biggigawatt plant (Sizewell) for final decision by 2024. Beyond that, there were no concrete plans, merely intentions to remain open to further large projects, and supporting the development of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Advanced Modular Reactors, with a specific commitment to achieving a commercially viable fusion plant by 2040. The White Paper commented that SMRs ‘are faster to build than large-scale nuclear plants and are potentially suitable for deployment in a wider number of sites across the country’.14 A last performance?

The White Paper set out a relatively modest and tentative role for new nuclear power. Within a year of its publication a far more ambitious programme was being put forward, promoting nuclear as a critical element in the energy mix in the mission to displace fossil fuels by low-carbon sources to meet climate objectives and provide domestic energy security. In the 2022 British Energy Security Strategy a truly enormous nuclear programme of 24 gigawatts was being talked up, progressing eight projects ‘so we improve our track record to deliver the equivalent of 1 reactor a year, rather than 1 a decade’.15 This also responded to the growing fears of energy shortage resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the consequent huge hike in energy costs. But deployment on such a scale, even if it could be achieved, could not conceivably be achieved before 2040 at the earliest, and would have little impact on the energy crisis of the 2020s. As to siting, the British Energy Security Strategy referred to the eight existing designated sites and promised an overall siting strategy for the long term. There had been no change in siting strategy since the National Policy Statement (NPS) for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6) was approved in 118 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

2011, beyond carrying the list of sites forward on the grounds that they were ‘likely to be [ … ] the only sites capable of deploying a nuclear power station by 2035’.16 There was clearly a need for a review of siting strategy. For one thing, circumstances had markedly changed in the decade since designation. Concern about climate change impacts had deepened. For another, a range of sites would be needed to accommodate the vastly expanded and mixed fleet of nuclear reactors envisaged in the strategy. Such a review had long been promised and, in 2021, draft NPSs for energy infrastructure were duly published. But the nuclear energy NPS was missing, although it was conceded that it was needed specifically ‘to reflect the changing policy and technology landscape for nuclear’.17 Opportunities for nuclear’s ‘flexible use may grow’ and be fulfilled by an array of large-scale, modular, advanced and fusion power plants.18 Crucially, the new NPS would present ‘a siting approach for new nuclear developments deployable post 2025’.17 So far, so good, but events appeared to be overtaking the glacial process of producing a new siting strategy for nuclear. In any event, it seemed unlikely that the existing geography would be disturbed. Hinkley Point C was under construction, and Sizewell C had been approved for development, despite the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendations for refusal. It still had financial hurdles to cross, although it was possibly made more attractive by the government (i.e. taxpayers) taking a direct share and consumers providing up-front finance through a supplement on electricity bills. The government expected the development of other projects, including a revived Wylfa, ‘as soon as possible’.15 It seemed unlikely that, borne along by a tidal wave of enthusiasm for nuclear, the government would let the small matter of planning approval stand in the way of the nuclear juggernaut. New big-gigawatt nuclear stations, if they ever came to pass, would simply occupy existing sites, making no significant impact on the geography of nuclear energy. But such stations are widely regarded as dinosaurs from the 20th century — too big, too complex, too inflexible, too costly and slow to build, altogether too much of a risk. Doubts were being cast on the viability of some of the sites, notably those on the east coast,19 with questions over whether they could (and should) secure planning permission and licensing. Attention was rapidly turning to SMRs, which promised more rapid factory construction and assembly on site, and the prospect of lower costs and shorter timescales. In principle, SMRs also offered greater flexibility in siting, with the possibility of not being tied to coasts and feasible in urban settings with distributed local grid networks and heat and power systems. In the UK, Rolls-Royce led a consortium, with some government financial

EDF Media Library

‘Big Carl’, the world’s biggest crane, does the heavy lifting during construction of Hinkley Point C

backing, to produce a series of its SMRs to make a major contribution to meeting the ambitious target of 16 gigawatts, or even the fantastical 24 gigawatts, of nuclear energy in the energy mix, so as to reach net zero by 2050. In early 2022 Rolls-Royce applied for GDA for its design. Its plans, supported by £200 million of government funding, were for 16 reactors, each of 440 megawatts, the ﬁrst to be ready for deployment by 2030. By the end of 2022 three sites — in Sunderland, Teesside, and Deeside — had been shortlisted for making the SMRs. As far as the siting of the reactors was concerned, there was an assumption that sites were already available. Indeed, EDF, which owns the existing AGR sites entering decommissioning, was urged to make its land available. Similarly, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority was prepared to offer land, where appropriate, for new build on its 17 sites in Great Britain, beginning with an agreement to help progress development of SMRs on land at Trawsfynydd in Wales. Other sites for SMRs were being promoted too, often with local community and political support, such as at Wylfa (Wales) and Moorside (Cumbria). Early momentum was building around some of the sites, all of it in advance of the new NPS, which was expected to lay out a siting strategy. It appears that SMRs would be sited in clusters rather than as stand-alone plant. Rolls-Royce SMRs are hardly small — at nearly 500 megawatt capacity one is nearly twice as big in capacity as an early Magnox

station such as Bradwell, and a cluster of four would amount to roughly the same capacity and footprint as the proposed Bradwell B. The locational flexibility that might attach to a single SMR is unavailable to SMRs in clusters. Rolls-Royce is a company clearly in a hurry to seize available sites. It undertook a siting assessment using basic criteria such as geotechnical data, adequate grid connection, and a large enough area to deploy multiple SMRs. This approach is remarkably similar to the rather basic approach used in siting the first-generation Magnox stations, 70 years ago. There is no mention of environmental impact, the legacy of wastes, or community concerns; rather there is a focus on sites that ‘maximise benefit to the taxpayer while enabling power to come online as close to 2030 as possible’.20 Unsurprisingly, Rolls-Royce plumped for the same sites that had been chosen long ago. Its assessment claimed that four sites —Trawsfynydd, Sellafield, Wylfa, and Oldbury — had potential for deployment of plant delivering 15 gigawatts in multiple units; Berkeley, with 3 gigawatt potential required further investigation; and three were deployable, EDF willing, at Hartlepool, Heysham and Bradwell, in total comprising clusters of SMRs with a combined capacity of 5.5 gigawatts. By the beginning of 2023 the field of SMRs was becoming crowded, with six designs claiming the possibility of early deployment of reactors noticeably smaller than the Rolls-Royce model. Despite the potential locational flexibility, the developers were Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

119

Steve Bateman / iStock

The Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations, with the site for Sizewell C to their right

opting for the existing sites, with Trawsfynydd, Heysham and Oldbury in the vanguard. The putative deployment of a variegated ﬂeet of SMRs in the UK may succeed in achieving some economies from the modular production of multiple reactors. But ﬂexibility in siting does not appear to be on offer, at least in the initial phase of deployment. The most likely siting outcome, if the programme continues, is for two or more SMRs located at existing sites.

First, the sites were individually selected on the basis of simple criteria of water and land availability and, in most cases, remoteness. This resulted in predominantly coastal and estuarine locations. There was no planned strategic site selection, although each station had to achieve planning and regulatory consent — a relatively straightforward and largely uncontested process until opposition began to emerge towards the end of the programme, notably at Torness in 1978/79. Second, by contrast, the putative ‘nuclear renaissance’ was framed by a strategic siting The criteria for site selection assessment process leading to an NPS in which, ultimately, eight of the existing sites were designated require revision, especially in as ‘potentially suitable’ for new nuclear stations to the light of the most recent dire be deployed by 2025. In the event, so far only one, Hinkley Point C, has forecasts for the long-term gained planning and regulatory consent and is impacts of climate change ... under construction. Two stations, Wylfa Newydd In short, the existing geography and Sizewell C, have passed through the Planning Inspectorate process for permission to develop. In of nuclear sites is increasingly both cases the Planning Inspectorate recommended refusal. At Wylfa the developer has withdrawn, unsustainable although the government has continued to support nuclear at the site. At Sizewell the Secretary of As with the ﬁrst generation, so now with the State has granted approval. Despite the elaborate latest proposals: developers are responding to strategic process, planning clearly is not considered criteria of availability of land, existing infrastructure an insuperable barrier in the face of overwhelming (transport, transmission), political promotion, and political pressure for new nuclear development. public acceptability. Third, the criteria for site selection require revision, especially in the light of the most recent dire forecasts Some concluding thoughts for the long-term impacts of climate change. In concluding, I make the following four observations In particular, the case for moving the criteria of about the persistence of the pattern of sites; a ‘Flooding, storm surge and tsunami’, ‘Coastal case of geographical inertia. processes’ and ‘Access to suitable sources of

‘

’

120 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

cooling’ from a ‘discretionary’ to an ‘exclusionary’ (exclude the site from consideration) category has become more compelling. Conditions at several sites, such as Sizewell, Bradwell, Hinkley Point, and Oldbury, would be at risk of becoming unviable in the unknowable conditions of the 22nd century. In short, the existing geography of nuclear sites is increasingly unsustainable. Fourth, strategic planning has so far proved to be no constraint on the persistence of sites selected long ago and in markedly different conditions. Existing sites are still being identified by potential developers on the assumption that they will prove acceptable. The strategic planning process has hitherto been little more than a retrospective legitimation of decisions founded on economic and political criteria. If and when a new NPS is forthcoming it will be largely irrelevant. It will come too late to arrest the few, if any, proposals for nuclear power stations that survive the economic and technical barriers to progress. The geography of nuclear power, which reflects the nuclear age of the last century, will survive as the geography of decommissioning and waste management into the next century. Truly a case of an industry frozen in aspic. Andrew Blowers OBE is Emeritus Professor of Social •Sciences at The Open University and the author of The Legacy of Nuclear Power (Routledge, 2017). The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 I Welsh: Mobilising Modernity: The Nuclear Moment. Routledge, 2000 2 S Openshaw: Nuclear Power, Safety and Siting. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p.87 3 H Herring: From Energy Dreams to Nuclear Nightmares, Lessons from the Anti-nuclear Power Movement in the 1970s. Jon Carpenter, 2005, p.74 4 Mobilising Modernity: The Nuclear Moment (see note 1), p.81 5 See J Armstrong: ‘Demoncracy and the Sizewell Inquiry’. In A Blowers and D Pepper (Eds): Nuclear Power in Crisis: Politics and Planning in the Nuclear State. Croom Helm, 1987 6 T O’Riordan, R Kemp and M Purdue: Sizewell B: An Anatomy of the Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan, 1988 7 The Energy Challenge. Energy Review Report. Cm 6887. Department of Trade and Industry, Jul. 2006, p.113. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/272376/6887.pdf 8 National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6). Vol. II of II — Annexes. Department of Energy and Climate Change, Jul. 2011, pp.28–29. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/47860/1943-nps-nuclear-power-annex-volII.pdf 9 National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6). Vol. I of II. Department of Energy and Climate Change, Jul. 2011, p.8. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/47859/2009-nps-for-nuclear-volumeI.pdf

10 The Government Response to Consultation on the Revised Draft National Policy Statements for Energy Infrastructure. Department of Energy and Climate Change, Jun. 2011, p.118. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/47861/1945-govt-resp-consultation-on-nps.pdf 11 ‘National Infrastructure Planning’. Webpage. Planning Inspectorate. https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/ application-process/the-process/ 12 Planning Act 2008: Application for Development Consent for the Sizewell Nuclear Power Station. Decision Letter. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Jul. 2022. https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/ wp-content/ipc/uploads/projects/EN010012/EN010012011164-SZC-Decision-Letter.pdf 13 Letter from the Senior Communications Manager, Bradwell Power Generation Company Ltd., to BRB Community Forum, 18 Nov. 2022 14 Powering Our Net Zero Future. Energy White Paper. CP 337. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Dec. 2020. www.gov.uk/government/ publications/energy-white-paper-powering-our-netzero-future 15 British Energy Security Strategy. Policy Paper. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Apr. 2022. www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energysecurity-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy 16 Government Response: Consultation on the Siting Criteria and Process for a New National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power with Single Reactor Capacity over 1 gigawatt beyond 2025. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Jul. 2018. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/727628/ NPS_Siting_Criteria_Consultation_-_Government_ Response.pdf 17 Planning for New Energy Infrastructure: Draft National Policy Statements for Energy Infrastructure. Consultataion. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Sept. 2021. www.gov.uk/ government/consultations/planning-for-new-energyinfrastructure-review-of-energy-national-policystatements 18 Draft Overarching National Policy Statement for Energy (EN-1). Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Sept. 2021. www.gov.uk/government/consultations/planning-fornew-energy-infrastructure-review-of-energy-nationalpolicy-statements 19 The issue of coastal sites in an age of climate change was discussed in an earlier article in this journal — see A Blowers: ‘Climate change — hubris or nemesis for nuclear power?’. Town & Country Planning, 2020, Vol. 89, Sept./Oct., 339–44 20 ‘Study identifies potential Rolls-Royce SMR sites’. World Nuclear News, 9 Nov. 2022. www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Study-identifiespotential-Rolls-Royce-SMR-sites

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

121

privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups —

should we be worried? The emerging trend of privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups — operating in the virtual and physical spheres and run by private companies and/or individuals (via social media), in what may be considered as a form of privatisation of neighbourhood management — should raise concerns over equality, inclusion, and roles and responsibilities in the shaping and transforming of neighbourhoods, says Rotem Shevchenko Neighbourhoods, or ‘the neighbourhood scale’, have been paid much attention by local and state governments, practitioners, and academia over the past decade, and in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic. Governments are attempting to optimise neighbourhood policy and re-think neighbourhood planning through various initiatives to address inequalities (for example through the UK’s Levelling Up White Paper).1 Even though the pandemic prompted a global crisis, its ramiﬁcations have been felt perhaps most starkly within the local setting. Lockdowns, closures of local businesses, citizens falling ill, a loss of public trust and growing uncertainty are only some of the challenges that neighbourhoods have had to face. Research has shown that the importance of local communities has increased as a result of growing socio-economic divisions, and the extensive use of social networks and social media platforms during the pandemic highlights the role that the neighbourhood plays in nurturing a sense of safety and familiarity.2 122 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

This article looks at privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups which operate in hybrid spaces (i.e. the virtual and physical spheres). Such groups have been emerging out of the private sector, created either by residents, primarily via platforms such as Facebook, or by private companies which provide services ostensibly for the development and the maintenance of community life. Neighbourhood groups are occasionally being referred to as ‘communities’, in what might be seen as an attempt to emphasise qualities of engagement, identity, and a sense of belonging.3 In these cases, neighbourhoods are being managed not only by public entities or communities themselves, but by third parties with a vested interest in particular behaviours and outcomes. The mechanisms of privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups raise questions such as ‘Who gets to decide which online content is being uploaded?’, ‘Which types of social events are taking place?’, and ‘Who are the group’s target members?’ These questions and others raise concerns regarding matters of

Venn: The Neighbourhood Company

The rise of social networks has led to the emergence of a new type of virtual community

equality, inclusion, and roles and responsibilities when dealing with local everyday life. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, three trends should be taken into consideration: • the evolution of virtual communities — or the physicality of (internal) social networks; • neighbourhood groups; and • the neoliberal citizen. These trends should then be examined together to consider the long-term impacts of ‘curated’ neighbourhoods on people and place. The physicality of (internal) social networks Virtual communities emerged in the late 1990s, as social networks of individuals acting within the virtual sphere alone, independently from the physical sphere. This was a new configuration of communities based on a mutual interest rather than relations that develop from geographical proximity. The early 2000s marked a significant increase in (internal) social network companies. A social network is a platform for individuals’ communication which is inclusive, open, and accessible to all. An internal social network (for example enterprise social networking) is exclusive and limited to members alone, as approved by the group’s administrator or moderator. The rise of social networks has led to the emergence of a new type of virtual community. While the older-established type operates in the virtual sphere alone, independently from the physical sphere and congregates around specific topics or interests, the new type represents communities that place a spotlight on individuals, their social relations,

and the ways that such interactions are experienced and manifested in physical space.4 The terms ‘social networks’ and ‘social media’ are often used interchangeably; however, they are not the same. A social network is a platform for individuals’ communication, and social media provides a platform for information. Nevertheless, social networks often provide the means of sharing information (for example texts, photos, and videos) and thus could sometimes be seen as social media platforms as well.5 The conceptualisation and theorisation of the hybrid spaces in which these communities operate may be best understood as a back-and-forth interplay between the virtual and the physical spheres. According to Tayebi, in localised social network groups: ‘members use, choose, produce, and reproduce places based on their lifestyles and purposes, and place plays an important role in deﬁning their identity, and in shaping how they live their lives [ … ] the distinction between identity of members in physical and online spaces is blurred. Members start their relations on physical spaces, and continue them on online spaces and vice versa.’ 6 Thus technology in general, and social networks in particular, should be seen as integral parts when thinking about, understanding, and approaching places and place dynamics.7-9 The literature reﬂecting on the physicality of social networks has two aspects. On the one hand, studies have clearly demonstrated their contributions — online interactions not only sustain offline relationships but foster new ones as well; communication and information are more accessible; and the connection Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

123

between institutions, organisations and residents is stronger.10 Moreover, social networks are proven to be a factor in increasing community engagement, co-operation, a sense of belonging, and trust.10 On the other hand, critics have pointed at issues of exclusion, bias, and privacy, and issues of control and ownership, as well as the risks of gentrification and segregation, potentially exacerbated by the sheer amount of localised social media interactions.11,12 In recent years there have been a variety of publications exploring the physicality of social networks. Studies have demonstrated the ways that social networks lead to the emergence of new types of urban lifestyles and experiences. Social networks affect residents’ decisions on matters such as which schools their children should attend, where to shop, and which parks to visit, among others.11,8 Scholars have looked at the relationships between social networks and neighbourhood communities, communal life, social relations, and a sense of belonging.3,6,12 Other studies have examined the impact of social networks on land values and real estate markets,11 the ways that such activities influence processes of gentrification and segregation,13 and matters of exclusions and inequality — i.e. the ‘digital divide’.3,8,12 Neighbourhood groups

Neighbourhood groups began to be formed by individual users via Facebook in 2010, and during the past decade several start-ups and other companies have identified the demand for such communities. These groups operate in hybrid spaces, and they contain both types of virtual communities: they are gathered around a specific interest (i.e. the neighbourhood), and they emphasise social relations, identity, and belonging. Neighbourhood groups have been defined as ‘platform urbanism’,14 and some scholars claim that such groups have become such an integral part of urban life that they should themselves be seen as infrastructure.3,12 In their study, ‘Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook’, Plantin et al. argue that the boundaries between platform and infrastructure have become blurred. The authors point at the ‘tensions arising when media environments increasingly essential to our daily lives (infrastructures) are dominated by corporate entities (platforms)’.15 We should be interested in two types of neighbourhood groups. The first are neighbourhood groups established by an individual resident or private company. These groups are operating on a neighbourhood scale and may be seen as an infrastructure of sorts. The largest social network that provides a platform for these types of neighbourhood groups is Facebook. The company has been focusing on the neighbourhood / local scale by promoting community-driven solutions, wherein members’ feed preferences are targeted for local information, 124 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

news, and initiatives — which may be perceived as an attempt on Facebook’s behalf to increase the trust of its members.9 In May 2021 Facebook launched Neighbourhoods, an app designed to connect neighbours and access local news. While Facebook users can create a separate sub-proﬁle for Neighbourhoods and populate it with interests and a custom biography, ultimately the company takes back control from the individual administrators. Neighbourhoods by Facebook competes directly with Nextdoor, which was established in 2010 and operates in the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and several countries within the EU.16 Other companies have joined the trend over recent years and provide similar services, with the mission of developing and maintaining community life. The second type of neighbourhood group is bound mostly to new developments, where often the community is being promoted as part of the marketing package. The concept of community has extended beyond geographical proximity over the past two decades; virtual communities represent ‘like-minded people’ gathered around common interests,9 while communities at the workplace appear as part of changes in production and the need to develop the employees’ engagement and sense of belonging. One such example is provided by WeWork, the co-working company, and the way it has based its ethos in the notion of community. In the cases of new developments, the community is seen more as an ecosystem, and operates differently in each context. In some instances, a (commercial) entity is put in charge, on behalf of the developer, while others hire external agents; and the involvement of local councils also varies between places (examples of companies providing community services to landlords and residents are Venn: The Neighbourhood Company, in the USA; Alfred (‘the future of living’), in the USA; and nineelms.org, in London). In both types of neighbourhood group the development and maintenance of community life include: • the gathering and displaying of local news and information; • the (dis)promotion of local business and services offered by residents; • taking care of safety issues; • organising social, cultural, and political events; and • establishing subgroups such as mothers on maternity leave, people who work from home, homework clubs for kids, singles, and so on. In social networks and social media platforms the boundaries between the public and the private spheres are becoming blurred. According to Rodgers and Moore, ‘social media are [ … ] providing a means through which private matters increasingly become public concerns, and public

Tera Vector/ iStock

‘The digital dynamics of interaction and the exchange of services, goods and information and their physicality suggest a new typology of gated communities bounded by the virtual sphere rather than spatial attributes or particular planning principles’

matters more frequently enter into private life’.17 This blurriness is contributing to the changes that have already been taking place as a result of neoliberalisation processes, in the form of privatisation and deregulation.18 The phenomenon of privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups may be considered as the privatisation of neighbourhood communities. These are not gated communities per se since the neighbourhoods in question were not planned as such. However, the digital dynamics of interaction and the exchange of services, goods and information and their physicality suggest a new typology of gated communities bounded by the virtual sphere rather than spatial attributes or particular planning principles. An important motive for municipal support for gated communities is the fact that, while their members keep paying taxes, many of the services and facilities that the city would have provided are being replaced those coming from the community itself.19 We should question whether the same could be claimed for the neighbourhood groups in question, at least when it comes to urban life, cultural events, safety issues, and the gathering and displaying of local news and information, etc.

Urban entrepreneurialism and the neoliberal citizen

Practices associated with privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups represent (new directions of) urban entrepreneurialism,20 along with neoliberalism agendas. Urban entrepreneurialism highlights the roles of local governments and local elites and their power to shape and transform urban spaces. It is characterised by the search for new ways to make the city more flexible and responsive to market trends, by seeking new entrepreneurial, speculative and innovative paths to search for capital circulation and capital accumulation.18,20,21 These trends have intensified in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, with market-driven regulations in planning and local governments pushing for economic growth.22 These practices have led to uneven spatial development, in which areas with a potential for higher returns are being prioritised, ending up with what might be defined as ‘prosperity clusters’.23 Entrepreneurial strategies push citizens to become ‘active’ — to take responsibility for themselves and for their communities, mobilising what is required for achieving their desired urban lifestyle.24 Such practices are leading to increased uncertainties and inequality between Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

125

and within cities, with only certain voices heard in the conversation about the development and maintenance of city life.25 Critics have pointed out that entrepreneurial practices may hinder diversity, sustainability, and the resilience of places.26 What could be seen as a reaction to such critics are the latest attempts of local governments and elites to search for other development trajectories, placing a spotlight on urban sustainability and urban resilience. These initiatives are conceptualised as ‘new directions of urban entrepreneurialism’27 or ‘urban entrepreneurialism 2.0’,28 and can be found in strategies with headings such as ‘the creative city’, ‘the sustainable city’, ‘the green city’, ‘the eco-city’, and ‘the inclusive city’. If practices of entrepreneurialism that are used for the articulation of cities’ imaginaries promote urban amenities, and are focused on recreational activities, then practices of new directions of urban entrepreneurialism highlight users’ experiences, resilience, and wellbeing. Conclusions

In order to gain a clearer picture of the emerging phenomenon of privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups and its potential ramiﬁcations, we should ﬁrst understand the ways in which entrepreneurial practices aimed at economic growth are shifting towards (consumers’) experiences.

‘Privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups ... drive stability, community interaction, and a sense of belonging and trust. However, their exclusive essence and (possible) neoliberal orientation should not be overlooked ... These groups prompt some serious questions about how places and behaviours or choices should be shaped in the future’ Here, neighbourhood groups represent a channel in which only certain voices are setting the tone in the conversation about the values and choices in contemporary urban lifestyles. It might be suggested that recent trends such as web 2.0 and urban entrepreneurialism 2.028 represent, in effect, a more advanced and sophisticated mode of capitalist consumption. These modes are practised within entrepreneurial urban settings, supported by local governments, elites, and private companies (including real-estate entrepreneurs). The idea that these 126 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

behaviours are accessible to a narrow group within the urban fabric implies the homogeneous nature of contemporary urban lifestyle, as well as its power mechanisms. Thus, in this sense, privately owned and managed neighbourhood groups should be nurtured and supported, as they drive stability, community interaction, and a sense of belonging and trust. However, their exclusive essence and (possible) neoliberal orientation should not be overlooked when thinking about the future of our neighbourhoods and cities. These groups prompt some serious questions about how places and behaviours or choices should be shaped in the future.

•

Rotem Shevchenko is an architect and a PhD researcher at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (rotem.shevchenko.19@ucl.ac.uk). The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 For further reading, see G Parker, J Sturzaker and M Wargent: ‘Levelling up neighbourhoods — back to the very local future’. Town & Country Planning, 2022, Vol. 91 (Mar.–Apr.), 101–103. Available at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/103952/ 2 For the potential and actual impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on neighbourhoods and cities, see M Batty: ‘The Coronavirus crisis: What will the post-pandemic city look like?’. Environment & Planning B: Urban Analytics & City Science, 2020, Vol. 47 (4), 547–52. Available at http://spatialcomplexity.blogweb.casa.ucl. ac.uk/ﬁles/2020/05/The-Post-Pandemic-City.pdf ; R Florida, A Rodríguez-Pose and M Storper: ‘Cities in a post-COVID world’. Urban Studies, published online 27 June 2021. doi: 10.1177/00420980211018072; M Nathan: ‘The city and the virus’. Medium.com, May 2020. https://medium.com/@maxnathan/ the-city-and-the-virus-db8f4a68e404; and C Waeterloos, J De Meulenaere, M Walrave and K Ponnet: ‘Tackling COVID-19 from below: civic participation among online neighbourhood network users during the COVID-19 pandemic’. Online Information Review, 2021, Vol. 45 (4), 777–94 3 G Mosconi, M Korn, C Reuter, et al.: ‘From Facebook to the neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of hybrid community engagement’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2017, Vol. 26 (4–6), 959–1003 4 D M Boyd and N B Ellison: ‘Social network sites: deﬁnition, history and scholarship’. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2007, Vol. 13 (1), 210–30. https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/ article/13/1/210/4583062; and G Oparaocha: ‘Towards building internal social network architecture that drives innovation: a social exchange theory perspective’. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2016, Vol. 20 (3), 534–56 5 On social network and social media, see A Froehlich: ‘What’s the difference between social media and social networking?’. TechTarget, 24 Sept. 2020. https://tinyurl.com/ms5dx6ra; and F Burke: ‘Social media vs social networking’. Blog Entry. Huffington Post, 2 Oct. 2013. www.huffpost.com/entry/socialmedia-vs-social-ne_b_4017305 6 A Tayebi: ‘ ‘Communihood:’ a less formal or more local form of community in the age of the internet’. Journal of Urban Technology, 2013, Vol. 20 (2), 77–91

7 S Moore and S Rodgers: ‘Researching urban life through social media’. In K Ward (Ed.): Researching the City: A Guide for Students. Sage Publications, 2020, Second Edition; and T Shelton, A Poorthuis and M Zook: ‘Social media and the city: rethinking urban sociospatial inequality using user-generated geographic information’. Landscape & Urban Planning, 2015, Vol. 142, 198–211 8 See M Hardey: ‘The city in the age of web 2.0: a new synergistic relationship between place and people’. Information, Communication & Society, 2007, Vol.10 (6), 867–84; and A Poorthuis: ‘How to draw a neighborhood? The potential of big data, regionalization, and community detection for understanding the heterogeneous nature of urban neighborhoods’. Geographical Analysis, 2018, Vol. 50 (2), 182–203 9 K H Kwon, C Shao and S Nah: ‘Localized social media and civic life: Motivations, trust, and civic participation in local community contexts’. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2021, Vol. 18 (1), 55–69 10 J Lane: The Digital Street. Oxford University Press, 2019; and J Gibbons: ‘ ‘Placing’ the relation of social media participation to neighbourhood community connection’. Journal of Urban Affairs, 2020, Vol. 42 (8), 1262–77 11 C E Kontokosta, L Freeman and Y Lai: ‘Up-and-coming or down-and-out? Social media popularity as an indicator of neighborhood change’. Journal of Planning Education & Research, published online 23 Mar. 2021 12 K Witten, R Kearns, S Opit and E Fergusson: ‘Facebook as soft infrastructure: producing and performing community in a mixed tenure housing development’. Housing Studies, 2021, Vol. 36 (9), 1345–63 13 S Zukin, S Lindeman and L Hurson: ‘The omnivore’s neighborhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentriﬁcation’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2017, Vol. 17 (3), 459–79 14 S Rodgers and S Moore: ‘Platform urbanism: An introduction’. Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities & Culture, 2018, Vol. 4 (3). Available at www.mediapolisjournal. com/2018/10/platform-urbanism-an-introduction/ 15 J C Plantin, C Lagoze, P N Edwards and C Sandvig: ‘Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook’. New Media & Society, 2018, Vol. 20 (1), 293–310. Available at https://eprints.lse. ac.uk/67571/1/plantin_Infrastructure_studies.pdf 16 T Hatmaker: ‘Facebook launches Neighborhoods, a Nextdoor clone’. TechCrunch, 5 May 2021. https://tinyurl.com/4t8feaww 17 S Rodgers and S Moore: ‘Platform phenomenologies: social media as experiential infrastructures of urban public life’. In M Hodson, J Kasmire, A McKeekin, J G Stehlin and K Ward (Eds): Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformations in Infrastructure, Knowledge, Governance and Everyday Life. Routledge, 2020 18 On neoliberalism and processes of privatisation, see D Harvey: ‘Neo-liberalism as creative destruction’. Geograﬁska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2006, Vol. 88 (2), 145–58; and L Lobao, M Gray, K Cox and M Kitson: ‘The shrinking state? Understanding the assault on the public sector’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy & Society, 2018, Vol. 11 (3), 389–408. https://academic.oup.com/cjres/article/11/3/389/5146445 19 On gated communities, see R Belk: ‘Sharing without caring’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy & Society, 2017, Vol.10 (2), 249–61

20 D Harvey: ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’. Geograﬁska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 1989, Vol. 71 (1), 3–17 21 J Lauermann: ‘Municipal statecraft: Revisiting the geographies of the entrepreneurial city’. Progress in Human Geography, 2018, Vol. 42 (2), 205–24 22 M Raco, F Brill and J Ferm: ‘Intermediary organisations and the liquid regulation of urban planning in England’. In Y Rydin, R Beauregard, M Cremaschi and L Lieto (Eds): Regulation and Planning: Practices, Institutions, Agency. Taylor & Francis, 2021 23 A Kemp and T Margalit: ‘Resisting neo-liberal skylines: social mobilisations and entrepreneurial urban development in Tel Aviv’. Revue internationale de politique de développement, 2017, Vol. 8 (8), 164–88. Available at https://journals.openedition.org/ poldev/2311 24 M Raco: State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism. Ashgate Publishing, 2013 25 See J Clark: Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities. Columbia University Press, 2020; and D Wilson: ‘Entrepreneurialism’. In M Jayne and K Ward (Eds): Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives. Routledge, 2017, pp.122–33 26 A Ersoy and W Larner: ‘Rethinking urban entrepreneurialism: Bristol Green Capital — in it for good?’. European Planning Studies, 2020, Vol. 28 (4), 790–808 27 J Peck and H Whiteside: ‘Financializing Detroit’. Economic Geography, 2016, Vol. 92 (3), 235–68 28 N A Phelps and J T Miao: ‘Varieties of urban entrepreneurialism’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020, Vol. 10 (3), 304–21

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

127

what progress in improving the natural environment in england? Peter Jones looks back at the main elements in the 25 Year Environment Plan in the light of the progress report issued by the Office for Environmental Protection and the government’s first revisions of the plan For over a decade, successive UK governments have emphasised their commitment to protecting and enhancing the natural environment. In 2011, for example, the then Conservative/Liberal coalition government made a commitment to ‘embed sustainability in all it does’ and to ‘be the greenest Government ever’.1 In Forward Together, the Conservative and Unionist manifesto for the 2017 general election,2 there was a ‘pledge to be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than we inherited it’ and a commitment to ‘produce a comprehensive 25 Year Environment Plan that will chart how we will improve our environment as we leave the European Union and take control of our environmental legislation again’. The following year the Conservative government published a 25-year plan, A Green Future, designed to ‘improve the environment’, and more specifically to: ‘champion sustainable development, lead in environmental science, innovate to achieve clean growth and increase resource efficiency to provide benefits to both our environment and economy, and keep our pledge to hand over our planet to the next generation in a better condition than when we inherited it’.3 However, a report published by the Office for Environmental Protection in January 20234 would 128 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

seem to call government commitment to the environment in England into question. This short article recalls the main elements in the Green Future 25 Year Environment Plan, summarises the contents of the report from the Office for Environmental Protection, and offers some wider concluding reﬂections. Our Green Future

In his Prime Ministerial foreword to the 25 Year Environment Plan,3 David Cameron recognised that: ‘Our natural environment is our most precious inheritance. The United Kingdom is blessed with a wonderful variety of natural landscapes and habitats and our 25 Year Environment Plan sets out our comprehensive and long-term approach to protecting and enhancing them in England for the next generation.’ The ambitious plan, described as ‘a living blueprint for the environment covering the next quarter of a century’, looked to set out ‘government action to help the natural world regain and retain good health’, and aimed to: ‘deliver cleaner air and water in our cities and rural landscapes, protect threatened species and provide richer wildlife habitats. It calls for an approach to agriculture, forestry, land use and ﬁshing that puts the environment ﬁrst.’

Jens Holm on Unsplash

As an aside, in late January 2023, the government announced details of its new Environmental Land Management scheme, as part of its ‘reform of agricultural policy and spending’ in England,5 but that is outside of the scope of this article. Underlying the 25 Year Environment Plan was the recognition that ‘the environment is life-giving’, that it ‘nourishes and nurtures all life, human, animal or plant’, that ‘we rely on our blue and green spaces for food, water and the air we breathe’, that the natural world also underpins our nation’s prosperity and wellbeing, and that the environment delivers ‘calculable economic beneﬁts’.3 The plan outlined ambitious ‘25-year goals’, namely: • ‘Clean air.’ • ‘Clean and plentiful water.’ • ‘Thriving plants and wildlife.’ • ‘A reduced risk of harm from environmental hazards such as ﬂooding and drought.’ • ‘Using resources from nature more sustainably and efficiently.’ • ‘Enhanced beauty, heritage and engagement with the natural environment.’ In addition, the plan looked to manage pressures on the environment by: • ‘Mitigating and adapting to climate change.’ • ‘Minimising waste.’ • ‘Managing exposure to chemicals.’ • ‘Enhancing biosecurity.’ More substantively, the plan addressed a wide range of policies. As such, it included the sustainable use and management of land; protecting nature and conserving the natural beauty of landscapes; connecting people and the environment to improve

health and wellbeing; increasing resource efficiency and reducing pollution and waste; securing and protecting clean, productive and biologically diverse seas and oceans; and protecting and improving the global environment. In addressing the sustainable use and management of land, for example, the first aim was to embed ‘an ‘environmental net gain’ principle for development including housing and infrastructure’, which essentially looked to leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than beforehand. As such, this recognised the government’s political commitment to a major increase in housebuilding and infrastructure development, as part of a pledge ‘to create better places for people to live and work’.3 In looking to achieve this aim, the 25 Year Environment Plan emphasised a number of themes, including net gain for biodiversity, stronger new standards for green infrastructure, exploring the potential for protected species licensing to be expanded and include more species, delivering better outcomes for wildlife, as well as a more streamlined process for development, and determining appropriate locations to pilot a revolving land bank for rural areas. There was also a focus on working to reduce costs to developers by expanding net gain approaches to embrace natural capital benefits such as flood protection, recreation, and improved air and water quality. In explicitly addressing the relationship between housing and planning in contributing to sustainable development, the plan stressed its commitments that ‘environmental protections already enshrined in national planning policy will be maintained and strengthened’, that ‘new development will happen Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

129

in the right places, delivering maximum economic benefit while taking into account the need to avoid environmental damage’, and that ‘new homes will be built in a way that reduces demands for water, energy and material resources, improves flood resilience, minimises overheating and encourages walking and cycling’.3 At the same time, the ‘environmental protections already enshrined in national planning policy’ were to be ‘maintained and strengthened’, while ‘enhancement of the Green Belt [would] make this land ‘breathing space’ for our urban populations to enjoy, and our diverse wildlife to flourish, while delivering the homes this country needs’ — in the wider belief that ‘positive environmental outcomes can help reduce local opposition to development, shorten the planning process, cut operating costs for infrastructure and increase the desirability of new homes’.3 Other aims under the sustainability umbrella included designing and delivering a new Environmental Land Management system, improving soil health and protecting and restoring peatlands, expanding woodland cover, and reducing the risk of harm from flooding and coastal erosion. The focus on restoring peatlands, for example, is rooted in the belief that peat bogs are important wildlife habitats, and that they can improve water quality and play an important role in flood management and climate regulation. The 25 Year Environment Plan also looked to increase tree planting through the creation of new forests and by incentivising planting on both private land and poor-quality agricultural land. Nature recovery and enhancing the natural beauty of landscapes were also important goals in the plan. Here, a number of elements were seen as being important in contributing to meeting these goals: a ‘strategy for nature’ designed to ‘tackle biodiversity loss’ and the development of a ‘Nature Recovery Network to complement and connect our best wildlife sites’, along with the provision of ‘opportunities for the reintroduction of native species’, ‘exploring how to give individuals and organisations the chance to deliver lasting conservation’, and ‘improving biosecurity to protect and conserve nature’.3 Greening towns and cities was recognised as an important element in connecting people with their environment. Here, green and blue spaces in the built environment were seen as essential to health and happiness, and the 25 Year Environment Plan claimed that the provision of more and better-quality green infrastructure would make towns and cities attractive places in which to live and work, and would help to promote local social interaction and a strong community network. In looking to create additional green infrastructure, the aim was to improve existing green infrastructure by encouraging more investment, to ensure that new developments included accessible green spaces, and to draw up a national framework of green infrastructure standards. 130 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

Progress report

A report published early in 2023 by the Office for Environmental Protection4 — a public body established in November 2021 to protect and improve the environment by holding the government and other public bodies to account — painted a bleak picture of progress in the initial delivery of the 25 Year Environment Plan. In her foreword to the report Dame Glenys Stacey, Chair of the Office for Environmental Protection, remarked that: ‘progress in protecting, restoring and improving the environment over the year under review falls far short of that required to meet Government’s stated, longer-term ambitions. We have little good news to report.’ In ‘assessing Government’s environmental stewardship’, the report argued that the 25 Year Environment Plan lacked ‘essential foundations’ but that the ‘exceptional challenges’ the government had faced in recent years had ‘exacerbated a lack of coherence in environmental strategy and policy’. Further, the Office for Environmental Protection stated that ‘our view is that the [25 Year Environment Plan] has so far failed to bring about the changes needed, at the pace and scale required, to meet Government’s stated ambitions for the environment in England’, and that — arguably much more tellingly — ‘the natural environment in England remains under serious threat’.4 The 25 Year Environment Plan does not specify measurable outcomes, and in summarising its findings on whether or not the government’s plans for the environment were working, the Office for Environmental Protection presented two sets of indicators. On the one hand, of ‘32 trends across the breadth of the natural environment; nine trends were improving, eleven were static, and eight were deteriorating’, while a lack of evidence made it impossible to make a sufficiently reliable assessment of trends in four areas.4 More specifically, while trends for clear air and climate change mitigation were seen to be encouraging, the decline in biodiversity was deeply discouraging. On the other hand, 23 environmental targets were assessed, and the Office for Environmental Protection found none where the government’s progress was demonstrably on track. More specifically, in 14 of the 23 targets progress was seen to be off track — for a variety of reasons, it proved impossible to assess the other nine targets. More generally, the report noted that targets relating to water quality, and to halting the decline in the abundance of species, were at significant risk of not being achieved. At the same time, it observed that progress towards climate change adaptation had been poor, and that many of the steps deemed necessary to adapt, and to improve resilience, had not been taken. Tellingly, the report noted that,

a new Environmental Improvement Plan should diagnose the cause of adverse trends and develop effective responses and assessment regimes.

Chris on Unsplash

Concluding reﬂections

While the Office for Environmental Protection reached what is essentially a damning verdict on progress on the 25 Year Environmental Plan for England, it also explicitly recognised that its recipe to secure significant environmental improvements was effectively a call for a new Environmental Improvement Plan. The government published its revised Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 6 at the end of January, looking to build on the original vision of the 25 Year Environmental Plan by ‘setting out how we will work The Office for Environmental Protection report found the with landowners, communities and businesses decline in biodiversity deeply discouraging to deliver each of our goals for improving the environment, matched with interim targets to while some two-thirds of the land in England is in measure progress’.7 The revised plan was welcomed agricultural use, it was particularly concerning that by Tony Juniper, Chair of Natural England, who climate change adaptation within this sector was described it as ‘an ambitious and integrated plan, consistently given the worst rating by the Climate setting out a package that is broad and geared Change Committee. towards hitting targets’, but he counselled caution The report cited a number of factors to help in advising ‘what is required now is a concerted explain why the 25 Year Environment Plan has effort across government and society to translate not yet delivered improvements. Here, the initial its intent into action’.8 It remains to be seen how the new plan is rolled out, and there are five wider failure to identify what could have been used as issues — namely sustainability, growth, the role of a comprehensive baseline for the state of the environment, or for the plan to specify clear targets technology, offsetting, and the role of the current planning process — that arguably should be more and changes in strategy and policy responsibilities fully recognised in drawing up a new plan. for the environment, were seen to be internal First, while the 25 Year Environmental Plan claimed factors. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic, that the government would ‘champion sustainable the war in Ukraine and the more recent cost of living crisis within the UK were identified as important development’, and Michael Gove, then Secretary external factors. Taken together, these factors were of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, concluded his foreword with the hope that it would seen to have contributed to a lack of coherence in, ‘ensure that this country is recognised as the and delays to, environmental strategy and policy. More positively, the report identified a number of leading global champion of a greener, healthier, more sustainable future for the next generation’,3 opportunities to secure significant environmental sustainability is not really at the heart of the plan. improvements. These opportunities include the development of a new Environmental Improvement Thus, while plan refers, for example, to managing Plan which would look to translate the government’s land sustainably, putting more sustainable drainage systems in place, a sustainable fisheries policy, original vision into wide-ranging environmental and supporting and protecting sustainable global commitments and policies. Such a plan would require clear governance arrangements and delivery agriculture, it is not anchored in a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of sustainable development. mechanisms, which would define outcomes, Such a vision must embrace economic development including targets and how such targets would be and social equity, as well as recognition of the finite delivered. nature of many natural resources and the management In arguing that the government’s published data of others, such as land, water, soil and plants, within on the natural environment is not adequate for boundaries that allow the resource to renew itself. monitoring progress across all 10 goal areas of the Without such a foundation, there is the danger that original 25 Year Environment Plan, the report the word sustainability is just being used as a emphasised the need to use robust current data and analysis that are clearly aligned with all targets. convenient catchphrase which, at best, pays lip service to the concept of sustainability and, at worst, At the same time, the report argued that a new is effectively used both to justify development and Environmental Improvement Plan should establish to conceal its impact. Here Mansfield’s argument an ‘evaluation framework and use it to generate that conventional approaches to sustainability fail to feedback on actions and progress, to learn and recognise ’the political nature of the socio-ecological improve delivery’.4 Further, the report argued that Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

131

processes that produce environmental degradation, poverty, and injustice’ 9 also resonates. Secondly, the Environment Plan explicitly acknowledged the inevitability of growth in that, for example, it ‘recognises the government’s ambitions for a major increase in housebuilding (300k extra homes a year by the middle of the next decade) and infrastructure investment, and the importance that these have for people’s lives and economic growth’.3 However, such continuing growth places demands on the Earth’s finite resource base, and as such can be seen to be incompatible with the concept of sustainability. That said, the emphasis within the plan appeared to be on ‘clean growth’.3 Clean growth, defined in the government’s Clean Growth Strategy as ‘growing our national income while cutting greenhouse gas emissions’,10 is seen to underpin the 25 Year Environment Plan’s commitment to ‘environmentally sustainable growth’.3 That said, Fankhauser11 has argued that while this strategy signalled a strong commitment to decarbonisation, ‘there are also many aspirations rather than tangible policy commitments’, and that there was little or no specific detail in the Environment Plan on how clean growth is to be achieved. Even less positively, in examining Canada’s climate commitments, Carroll et al. described clean growth as ‘an aspect of the integral state’ that benefited ‘dominant economic and business interests and [sidelined] the views of critical, transformative social-justice sectors of Canada’s environmental community’.12

gas emissions have received a mixed reception. For example, while arguing that ‘developing and deploying climate technologies is critical for the world’s net-zero agenda’, McKinsey and Company13 also suggested that ‘reaching net-zero emissions will require an immense effort to invent, refine, and deploy climate technologies’. Friends of the Earth Scotland14 has argued that many of the ‘speculative negative emission technologies’ are ‘politically and practically unfeasible, and are also likely to cause wider environmental damage and human rights abuses’. More generally, Schor15 suggested a note of caution, in that ‘the popularity of technological solutions is also attributable to the fact that they are apolitical, and do not challenge the macrostructures of production and consumption’. Fourthly, until suitable and affordable technological solutions are available, growing numbers of companies have employed natural solutions — principally offsetting — to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and biodiversity losses. Indeed, the 25 Year Environment Plan advised that listed companies can invest in tree planning and peatland restoration projects to offset their carbon emissions. Carbon Neutral Britain,16 which claims to be ‘helping British business and individuals make an impact on climate change’, funds projects in Britain and around the world to reduce the net amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere in the belief that ‘planting trees [is] the most sustainable way to do this, as forest projects absorb CO2, refract [the Earth’s] heat as well as having a positive impact on wildlife, ecology and biodiversity’. Despite the widespread popularity of offsetting, it The emphasis within the plan has its critics. Watt,17 for example, has talked of the ‘fantasy of carbon offsetting’, and claimed that the appeared to be on clean process has ‘been beset by problems and failures, growth ... That said, there was and relies on the mobilisation of supportive discourses to retain a sense of credibility’. little or no specific detail in the and knowledge-claims Dalsgaard18 has suggested that ‘the funding of Environment Plan on how clean emission-reducing projects [is] seen as donations of development aid, instead of being assumed to growth is to be achieved compensate for the donor’s emissions’. In dismissing carbon offsetting as ‘a dangerous distraction’, Friends Thirdly, technology is seen to have a vital role to of the Earth19 has argued that ‘carbon offsetting and play in the government’s Clean Growth Strategy. nature offsetting are both worsening the climate On the one hand, the Environment Plan reported, and nature emergencies. They can’t be made to for example, on the mobilisation of private capital work, at least not at scale, and trying to do so is [a] into sustainable technology in energy, water, dangerous distraction from the real job at hand, waste and air quality projects and on developing cutting carbon emissions and restoring nature.’ technologies to ensure that a higher proportion of In January 2023 the Guardian 20 newspaper reported that research by the Guardian, Die Zeit, plastics are re-usable — and, looking to the future, stated that the plan would be revised and refreshed and SourceMaterial into Verra — described as ‘the to take account of fast-moving changes in technology. world’s leading carbon standard’, and which is used Here, the focus was on using technology to enable by a number of leading global corporations — found profitable solutions to environmental problems that that more than 90% of its rainforest offset credits are ‘likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not also have a positive impact on environmental and represent genuine carbon reductions’. social challenges. Finally, in outlining how the government would More specifically, visions of technological solutions manage land sustainably, the 25 Year Environment promoting a transition to net-zero greenhouse

‘

’

132 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

Plan claimed that the government wants to ‘put the environment at the heart of planning and development’.3 Here, the role of planning is seen to be important — for example in strengthening the requirement for planning authorities to provide biodiversity net gains, and possibly to make such gains a mandatory requirement; in maintaining and strengthening environmental protections already enshrined in national planning policy; and in enabling local planning authorities to target the environmental enhancements that are most needed in their areas. In many ways, the environmental protections in the planning system are designed to prevent environmental harm, and there is a need to strengthen the statutory obligations to enable the planning system to deliver a wider range of environmental goals. That said, at a time when local planning authorities are increasingly expected to embrace a wide range of new initiatives, including digitalisation and design coding, whether they will have the specialist expertise, and the resources, to discharge such obligations remains an open question. Peter Jones is an Emeritus Professor in the School of •Business at the University of Gloucestershire. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 See The Greening Government Commitments: Annual Report on Government Departments’ Progress against 2015 Targets in 2011–12. HM Government, Dec. 2012. www.gov.uk/government/publications/greeninggovernment-commitments 2 Forward Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and Prosperous Future. General election manifesto. Conservative and Unionist Party, May 2017. https://general-election-2010.co.uk/2017-generalelection-manifestos/conservative-manifesto-2017.pdf 3 A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. HM Government, Jan. 2018. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ ﬁle/693158/25-year-environment-plan.pdf 4 Progress in Improving the Natural Environment in England, 2021/2022. Office for Environmental Protection, Jan. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/ publications/progress-in-improving-the-naturalenvironment-in-england-2021-to-2022 5 Environment Land Management Update: How Government Will Pay for Land-Based Environmental and Climate Goods and Services. Policy Paper. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Jan. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/publications/ environmental-land-management-update-howgovernment-will-pay-for-land-based-environment-andclimate-goods 6 Environmental Improvement Plan 2023: First Revision of the 25 Year Environment Plan. HM Government, Jan. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/publications/ environmental-improvement-plan 7 ‘Environmental Improvement Plan 2023’. Webpage. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 31 Jan. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/publications/ environmental-improvement-plan

8 T Juniper: ‘Vision for nature recovery launched’. Speech by the Chair of Natural England, Jan. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/speeches/vision-for-naturerecovery-launched?utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=govuk-notifications-topic&utm_ source=5d87ab5b-57e1-4b2f-8ced-fb88fd33b81d&utm_ content=daily 9 B Mansfield: ‘Sustainability’. In N Castree, D Demeriff, D Liverman and B Rhoads (Eds): A Companion to Environmental Geography. Wiley, 2009, pp.37–49. Available at https://tinyurl.com/mt3hfmas 10 The Clean Growth Strategy: Leading the Way to a Low Carbon Future. HM Government, Oct. 2017. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/700496/ clean-growth-strategy-correction-april-2018.pdf 11 S Fankhauser: ‘Clean Growth Strategy: Much to praise but many aspirations rather than tangible policy commitments’. Commentary. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE, Oct. 2017. www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/ clean-growth-strategy-much-to-praise-but-manyaspirations-rather-than-tangible-policy-commitments/ 12 W K Carroll, N Graham and M Shakespear: ‘Foundations, ENGOs, clean growth networks and the integral state’. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2020, Vol. 45 (2), 109–40. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ cjs/index.php/CJS/article/view/29638/21519 13 B Heid, M Linder and M Patel: ‘Delivering the climate technologies needed for net zero’. Website article. McKinsey Company, Apr. 2022. www.mckinsey.com/ capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/delivering-theclimate-technologies-needed-for-net-zero 14 ‘What are the solutions to climate change?’. Webpage. Friends of the Earth Scotland. https://foe.scot/ campaign/climate-action-2/un-climate-summitglasgow-2020-cop26/what-are-the-solutions-to-climatechange/ 15 J B Schor: ‘Prices and quantities: Unsustainable consumption and the global economy’. Ecological Economics, 2005, Vol. 55 (3), 309–20 16 ‘Saving the planet starts with you’. Webpage. Carbon Neutral Britain. https://tinyurl.com/yckkpw7w 17 R Watt: ‘The fantasy of carbon offsetting’. Environmental Politics, 2021, Vol. 30 (7), 1069–88. Available at https://tinyurl.com/y8kzbs8h 18 S Dalsgaard: ‘Tales of carbon offsets: between experiments and indulgences?’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 2021, Vol. 15 (1), 52–66. Available at https://pure.itu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/86249175/ Tales_of_Carbon_Offsets_final_for_web.pdf 19 M Childs and P de Zylva: ‘A dangerous distraction — the offsetting con’. Website article. Friends of the Earth, Oct. 2021. https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/ dangerous-distraction-offsetting-con 20 P Greenfield: ‘Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows’. The Guardian, 18 Jan. 2023. www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/ revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-providerworthless-verra-aoe

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

133

writeback

community wins from strategic spatial planning Based on her thorough analysis of the government’s current proposal’s for planning reform ‘More reform, but little chance of better delivery’ (Town & Country Planning, Jan.–Feb.), Catriona Riddell points out that the changes will result in a significant reduction in the number of new homes planned. 300,000 new homes a year, still the target, is, she says, therefore a pipedream unless intended changes to strategic planning deliver. These are, one, abolition of the duty to co-operate. Replaced with a new alignment policy. But there is no alignment. She is not convinced. Two, through the creation of new combined authority Spatial Development Strategy (SDS) frameworks. This is voluntary. Is this policy wishful thinking? Again, she is not convinced. And three, the +35% housing uplift for England’s 20 largest towns or cities. Reading is one of the 20 major urban centres noted in the article’s Table 1, and is a town I know very well. It has no land. To the north is South Oxfordshire. It is nearly all AONB. To the south and east is Wokingham, whose residents are fed up with three decades of short-term, non-spatial planning. To the south and west is West Berkshire, already struggling with their existing quota and limited unprotected land, and whose residents are equally fed up. Neither council is likely to be willing hosts for Reading’s overspill on current terms. What’s in it for them? Out of a bad bunch of choices, Riddell opts for more SDSs, making them mandatory. The theory may be right, but without the strong local leadership and enduring foundations SDSs will fail too. Take Reading as an example. To grow it has two choices. One is significant densification on brownfield sites in the existing suburbs. Is this possible? Last December in the London Borough of Barnet proposals approved by officers for 2,400 new homes in blocks of up to 13 storeys, on a previous employment site, were rejected unanimously by all political parties. Local leaders, local residents and local conservationists were all opposed. The other choice is finding a deal which Reading Borough Council can offer West Berkshire, or Wokingham or perhaps north Hampshire councils to build Reading’s overspill homes on unprotected, open countryside within their council areas. Spelt out in candid, open-market terms, what price do host authorities want, in return for hosting these new residents? 134 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

Needless to say, this sounds politically unrealistic. It is not, which may surprise. Provided these policies are introduced over a 10-20 year time cycle, and are protected from electoral U-terms, two community wins happen. First, residents and their leaders have time to get their heads around some new ways of thinking about the future. And, second, the existing private sector led, haphazard spatial system will end, and with its ending local communities will keep all the land value capture proceeds that control of spatial planning and delivery timeframes offers. In the meantime, landowners and speculators holding building land back will know the future trend in land values is downwards as a new supply of official building land, ready to build on, is on the horizon. How will they respond in the short term? By releasing land, fast. Ian Campbell Richmond upon Thames

going local David Boyle on the need for ﬁnancial instruments and institutions that enable towns and cities to tap into the money that ﬂows through them

alternatives to waiting patiently as supplicants

My great uncle was Rector of Hythe in Kent for many years in the middle of the last century. And when my children were little, we used to go for summer birthday parties on the smallest commuter railway in the world — with the tracks only 15 inches apart. I say that to make my affection for the place clear. So what am I to make of the new ‘garden town’, called Otterpool Park, which is scheduled to be built just next door and should eventually be even bigger than Hythe? Otterpool was given outline planning permission on 4 April by Folkestone & Hythe District Council, which was clever enough to buy most of the land on which it will be built back in 2015. You might even call the council’s ability to give itself permission to build a ‘licence to print money’. But there is no doubt that the ‘garden town’ — whatever that is — is in this case a genuine attempt to square the development circle that has so blighted rural areas in recent years. There will be enough money that half of the development will be green open space, with a huge new park around Westenhanger Castle — which is a classic case of one of the ruins that ‘Cromwell knocked about a bit’.Unfortunately, the generosity of the plan for the development is not really extended very far towards the homeless in the district. Only 22% of the new homes will be ‘affordable’ — to use the jargon, which actually means very little. The idea of a development like this — partly ‘garden’ city and partly new ‘town’ (a nod towards Ebenezer Howard) — remains pretty controversial locally. It only scraped through the planning committee by seven votes to ﬁve — but then, we can expect to see members of the PIISEBYI (‘Put it in someone else’s backyard instead’) brigade however enlightened a development is. Part of the problem — as the government has recognised — is that people who live near big

Rieselfeld, in Vauban, Germany

developments like this find their homes blighted and have to put up with a great deal of stress and discomfort. And they don’t get anything back. Unless, of course, the development is such a success that the cost of housing rises so much nearby that their children have to move elsewhere — in which case they are no better off than they were before. The alternative is to learn from the German university town of Freiburg, one of Europe’s leading eco-towns, with low car use and high levels of solar energy. The success of the town meant that they have had to build two large new settlements on land that the city acquired. One, called Vauban, is on the site of a former military barracks; the other is Rieselfeld, built on the site of a former sewage works. The city put in the infrastructure and then let sites to private builders or housing associations, including over 130 Baugruppen (building groups not managed by developers): self-build means more imaginative and affordable buildings. They were able to do this because they could, like the New Town Development Corporations in the UK (and maybe a little like Otterpool), buy land at existing-use value. They can also raise the finance they need through long-term, low-interest loans from regional savings banks (Sparkassen). Under German law, land values can be ‘frozen’ on sites identified for development in local plans, so that the uplift can fund the necessary local infrastructure. There have to be better ways that UK cities can tap into the money that flows through them, rather than waiting patiently as supplicants to government largesse. Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

135

going local

earth rights Martin Stott on a musical charting the rise, fall and regeneration of the Park Hill estate

At one stage, the government was committed to delivering 100% business rates retention for local authorities in England. The idea here is that it gives cities an incentive to grow their local tax bases. It should also give them more freedom to borrow against a predictable income stream and take effective long-term investment decisions. Some of these plans will need the kind of ﬁnancial support that continental State investment banks, like the German bank KfW or the Dutch BNG, are able to provide. We have had development trusts working successfully in the UK since the 1960s and we are beginning to develop community land trusts. But to capture the value inherent in land, in some cities we will need a range of other institutions, including community development corporations and municipal investment bonds, most of which exist in some parts of the world, but barely at all in the UK.

‘To capture the value inherent in land, in some cities we will need a range of other institutions, including community development corporations and municipal investment bonds, most of which exist in some parts of the world, but barely at all in the UK’ What we need is to take the wealth of our cities, tied up in their land and buildings, and create financial instruments that make it possible to innovate; and to learn from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France and Germany how to create financial institutions that could begin to make cities more independent and successful. But to really get buy-in from local people, we will need to implement some of Shann Turnbull’s ideas. The Australian former financier has put forward a number of proposals involving giving people tradeable shares in their own new developments — proposals that deserve more than a kind of cursory pay-off at the end of this column. So we will return to Turnbull at a later date... Boyle is co-author with Lesley Yarranton of Edge City •UK:David Abomination or New Urban Form? (The Real Press) and the author of Tickbox (Little, Brown). He is Co-director of the New Weather Institute and Policy Director of Radix Big Tent. The views expressed are personal.

136 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

standing at the sky’s edge

The programme for the musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which transferred from Sheffield Crucible Theatre to the National Theatre in London and ran until 25 March, featured a powerful and informative introductory essay by Sheffield urban planner Gordon Dabinet — not an everyday occurrence in National Theatre programmes. But Standing at the Sky’s Edge is no everyday work. The setting for the musical is the Park Hill housing estate, which has dominated the skyline to the east of Sheffield city centre for decades. The idea behind the show is that the walls of the buildings retain imprints of its inhabitants, past and present. Not such a novel idea for the setting of a theatrical production (think the Tower of London or Windsor Castle); but here the building in question is both more commonplace — a housing estate — and, equally, unique. The battlements and dungeons are replaced by the more quotidian — although a Le Corbusierinspired development is hardly the everyday. Opened in 1961, the estate was viewed as revolutionary at the time, for its ‘brutalist’ design, its innovative use of concrete, and its potential to provide large-scale municipal housing that could recreate a sense of community from the slums it replaced. The communal walkways were built wide enough for a milk ﬂoat to come by, or for children to ‘play out’ on — just like the streets they replaced. And the names of those streets were transferred too, along with their residents. When completed, the estate rose to 13 stories high and housed 3,000 people in 996 ﬂats. Shops, a school, a nursery, a police station, a pharmacy, a surgery and four pubs were included. This is the setting for Standing at the Sky’s Edge, performed in the appropriately brutalist setting of London’s South Bank Centre.

Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash

earth rights

Blocks in Sheffield’s Park Hill estate during refurbishment

Standing at the Sky’s Edge charts the lives of three fictitious generations of residents in one flat, set in 1961, 1989, and 2015 — and in doing so charts the rise, fall, and rise again of Park Hill estate and that of Sheffield as a whole. Their stories, told simultaneously, chart, through some pretty amazing choreography, what is both personal (love, hope, and loss) and political (Sheffield’s fall from steel industry greatness). Harry, the husband in a young couple who move into Park Hill in 1961 (played by Robert Lonsdale), is ‘the youngest foreman in the steel industry’ and rightly proud of his workingclass status. His story doesn’t turn out well as the de-industrialisation of the Thatcher era leaves him unemployed and hopeless, and the estate suddenly unattractive, as repairs get missed, security deteriorates, and the council finds it harder to place tenants. By the late 1980s a Liberian refugee family has been housed there — an absolutely stand-out performance by Faith Omole as Joy, a young teen arrival in a pretty hostile environment. Lives and storylines are knitted together in Chris Bush’s script, as steel-worker’s son Jimmy (Samuel Jordan) falls for her, probably the most fully realised relationship in the show. But hopelessness and aspiration are both shoved out by the needs of regeneration, and by 2015 Poppy (Alex Young) has moved into the newly refurbished (and now private-sector) flat in the now Grade II* listed building — ‘It has its own Wikipedia page you know.’ Poppy’s story features an escape from London and a broken relationship. The South Bank performance featured lots of beautiful songs, sublime singers, and striking music — it’s a musical after all. But it was also a production shot through with a strong thread of anger and

political expression. Just after they are rehoused from their slum dwelling, Harry and Rose reflect on their good fortune, but, trade union activist that he is, Harry soon reframes this ‘gratitude’, asking rhetorically why slum-dwellers should be grateful for being allowed to live in decent accommodation in one of the richest countries in the world — one in which he and his fellows are creating the wealth. There is no shortage of other political references, from Brexit (Poppy is anxious that she won’t find a leave-voting city to her liking), to strikes (the 1984–85 miners’ strike features and the contemporary references are obvious); there is a sense of this being a ‘state of the nation’ reflection. It is a political allegory which in its own way asks questions about the role of the State in relation to its citizens. Is it there to provide support for everybody, or just for the desperate? Articulating both the personal and the political, the message is really that the personal is political; and in Standing at the Sky’s Edge we have a musical that reflects the importance of community, of home, of dignity, and of belonging, in ways which the very different characters portrayed all relate to. Martin Stott is a member of the Arts of Place research •network, based at the University of Birmingham. The views expressed are personal.

Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

137

new leaves Danielle Sinnett looks at the long awaited Green Infrastructure Framework and ﬁnds, notwithstanding a few issues that could and should be addressed, a valuable suite of tools

a helpful set of tools — now to see them put to use many places it is generic, does not respond to the needs of the area, and is not what was initially promised in planning applications. Crucially, it often does not help to form a multi-functional network (and I would argue therefore cannot even be considered as green infrastructure), either within the development or at scale. What this means is that the key beneﬁts of green infrastructure for January 2023 saw the launch of Natural England’s health and wellbeing, nature conservation, climate Green Infrastructure Framework.1 A key commitment adaptation and resilience, and so on are not being of the 25 Year Environment Plan is ‘to deliver more realised in either new or existing green infrastructure. and better-quality green infrastructure to enhance Although not explicit in the framework, it does towns and cities, and create attractive, healthy and appear to have been developed with at least some of investable places’,2 and the Green Infrastructure these challenges in mind. These are hinted at in the Framework, which has taken several years to develop, stated purposes of the framework, which include to supports this endeavour. ‘help increase the amount of green cover to 40% There has been a long-standing set of challenges in urban residential areas’,2 to support ‘the greening associated with the delivery of green infrastructure — of our towns and cities and connections with the surrounding landscape as part of the Nature Recovery for example, our own research at UWE (University Network’, to ‘help local planning authorities and of the West of England) has found considerable uncertainty over ‘what good looks like’. This uncertainty developers meet requirements in the National is exacerbated by inconsistency in planning policies Planning Policy Framework’, and to ‘target the between local authorities, and even across different creation or improvement of GI’.1 Like many others I have been awaiting the planning policies within the same local authority (for example where policies have developed at different publication of the new framework to see how it addresses these challenges. So, how does it do? times, or address only a relatively narrow aspect of Taking these challenges in turn, let us ﬁrst consider green infrastructure, such as open space).3, 4 Even where policy is strong and consistent, additional the inconsistency in planning policies. The framework challenges come into play, including the following: should help to address this. It provides a set of 15 principles5 covering the ‘what, why and how’ of • The plethora of guidance and tools are timeconsuming and difficult to navigate, and each green infrastructure in terms of its purpose (the often prioritises one particular function. why), characteristics (the what), and process for • There is a lack of skills and knowledge in the built planning, design and delivery (the how) (see Fig. 1). environment sector. In addition to these high-level principles, there is The ‘champions’ of green infrastructure (GI) are also a suite of standards,6 including the updated • often involved in a scheme only for a relatively Accessible Greenspace Standards and the Urban short time in the development process, with the Greening Factor Standard, a design guide,7 and a process journey for local authorities wanting to result that aspirations are eroded between initial develop a green infrastructure strategy or policy. outline planning and delivery. Green infrastructure is seen as expensive and at Taking the suite of guidance into policies should • odds with the delivery of other priorities for help to counter the current inconsistency, particularly development, such as zero-carbon homes or with regards to the accessibility of green infrastructure affordable housing. and the amount of greening, as these numerical concern over maintenance standards provide a basis for policy. There is also a • There is uncertainty3, and and management. 4 suite of maps that present the progress towards some of the standards — for example, the areas The result is that the green infrastructure delivered meeting the different Accessible Greenspace in new developments is often disappointing. In too Standards. 138 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

new leaves

Multi-functional Managed, valued and evaluated

Varied

Why GI? The ﬁve beneﬁt principles

Design

Plan strategically

Connected

Nature-rich beautiful places Active and healthy places Thriving and prosperous places Improved water management Resilient and climate-positive places

Accessible

Responds to local character

Evidence Partnership and vision

How

What

How to do good GI The ﬁve process principles

What good GI looks like The ﬁve descriptive principles

Fig. 1 Fifteen green infrastructure principles Source: ‘Green infrastructure principles wheel’, from ‘Green Infrastructure Principles’. Webpage. Natural England. https://designatedsites.naturalengland.org.uk/GreenInfrastructure/Home.aspx

As ever, the more qualitative aspects are more difficult to prescribe, but adopting the principles and the examples for different ‘area types’ in the design guide could ensure some consistency here. The main challenge will be more dependent on whether local authorities use the framework in their policies. Here I see a few issues. First, it is voluntary. However, given that it does address many of the challenges we heard about from local authorities in our research, I would imagine that most would be keen to make use of it where possible. Second, planning policies are not updated frequently, and many local authorities already have Local Plans and other policies (including supplementary planning policies) in place, so it is likely to be some years before the details within the framework are mainstreamed. Related to this, I would like to know how frequently the framework itself will be updated — there are

references throughout to emerging evidence and technologies, and the extent of research and development under way in this area means that there is a danger of the documents being out of date before many places update their policies. Third, the under-resourcing of planning teams means that they are often unable to prioritise new policies or those associated with healthy places, as they are lower down the ‘to do list’ compared with others, such as affordable housing. Fourth, although some standards are provided, others require development by local authorities — for example, the Urban Tree Canopy Cover Standard needs to be developed locally, requiring further resourcing. However, the framework provides a useful set of principles, standards and guidance for those local authorities wishing to develop a green infrastructure strategy or policy, and the breadth of functions Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

139

new leaves

considered may mean that the resulting policy could replace several existing documents, thus improving consistency within an area. The different components of the framework also provide a helpful ‘one-stop shop’, which may also overcome the plethora of (sometimes overwhelming) guidance and tools available. However, there is a lot of it! Together, the principles, standards, design guide and process journeys amount to over 300 pages, in addition to the documents associated with the maps. But this is still far less reading material than the vast array of guidance currently available, and the design guide and the standards document provide handy links across to other tools (for example Green Flag Award criteria) where necessary — although this does mean more pages! The illustration of how green infrastructure integrates with the National Design Guide’s ten characteristics of well designed places is very helpful, and a signposting document to link to other tools is also planned, which I would imagine will also be useful. I particularly like the summaries of the different ‘building blocks’ of green infrastructure in the design guide and the examples of the different standards being applied to different area types (for example urban, suburban, linear features). The principles and the design guide provide a very helpful resource for use in tackling the lack of skills and knowledge in the sector, and training is planned for the future. They also provide important counters to the perception that green infrastructure is simply a ‘nice to have’, and the range of building blocks presented demonstrate the array of solutions available — making it very clear that we are not just talking about open space. There is also an opportunity for educators to use the principles and the design guide in teaching — which I will be doing in my urban greening module. But much of the information presented is not referenced, which hampers the ability to go and ﬁnd out more. This is particularly frustrating given that one of the principles is focused on using evidence. The shortcomings with many developments in terms of the green infrastructure that is provided responding to the needs of the area, the lack of a multi-functional network and the concerns over maintenance and management are tackled in three of the principles. The process documents, aimed at local authorities, developers and neighbourhood planning groups, along with the maps, provide guidance on how to ensure that the green infrastructure considers local priorities and context. One of the principles is focused on the creation of a multi-functional network, and the various functions of green infrastructure are returned to across the 140 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

standards, principles and design guide. However, I feel that an opportunity to illustrate how such networks might be achieved in the different area types has been missed — the illustrative examples could have indicated how the green infrastructure on site could contribute to the continuation of an existing network, or how a network is formed from the different building blocks depicted. Indeed, the importance of looking beyond the red-line boundary of a development site is implied rather than reinforced throughout. Similarly, the principle on working with multiple stakeholders is valuable, but an emphasis on identifying champions of green infrastructure and ensuring that they stay on project teams through to completion would be beneﬁcial. Overall, the framework provides a valuable suite of tools to tackle many of the challenges associated with the delivery of high-quality green infrastructure in England. I look forward to seeing it used in policy and practice. Danielle Sinnett is Professor in Sustainable Built •Environments and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments at the University of the West of England, Bristol. The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 See Natural England’s ‘Introduction to the Green Infrastructure Framework — Principles and Standards for England’ webpages, at https://designatedsites.naturalengland.org.uk/ GreenInfrastructure/Home.aspx; and ‘Natural England unveils new Green Infrastructure Framework’. Press Release. Natural England, 2 Feb. 2023. www.gov.uk/government/news/natural-englandunveils-new-green-infrastructure-framework 2 ‘Natural England unveils new Green Infrastructure Framework’ (see note1) 3 T Calvert, D Sinnett, N Smith, et al.: ‘Setting the standard for green infrastructure: the need for, and features of, a benchmark in England’. Planning Practice & Research, 2018, Vol. 33 (5), 558–73. www.tandfonline. com/doi/full/10.1080/02697459.2018.1531580 4 D Sinnett and T Calvert: ‘The translation and use of green infrastructure evidence’. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers —Water Management, 2018, Vol. 171 (2), 99–109. www.icevirtuallibrary.com/ doi/10.1680/jwama.16.00112 5 Natural England Green Infrastructure Principles (Detailed Version, Date January 2023). Natural England, Jan. 2023. https://designatedsites.naturalengland.org. uk/GreenInfrastructure/Principles/GIPrinciples.aspx 6 Green Infrastructure Standards for England — Summary: Green Infrastructure Framework — Principles and Standards for England. Natural England, Jan. 2023. https://designatedsites.naturalengland.org.uk/ GreenInfrastructure/GIStandards.aspx 7 Green Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide. Natural England, Feb. 2023. https://designatedsites.naturalengland.org.uk/ GreenInfrastructure/DesignGuide.aspx

design matters The true value of the objective of beauty in planning policy is to raise national ambition in urban design, says Matthew Carmona

beautiful places — aspiration or edict? exhortation to local planning authorities to insist on the submission of clear and accurate drawings that provide visual clarity about proposals. Drawing beauty out

The emphasis on beauty is not new, but in this iteration of the NPPF it is given rocket-boosters, beginning with a somewhat exalted perspective on In England, national planning policy represents a beauty articulated in the consultation document. moveable feast, with the consultation on the latest This deﬁnes beauty as ‘the benchmark that all proposed incarnation of the National Planning Policy new developments should meet’, encompassing Framework (NPPF) having closed early in March.1 ‘everything that promotes a healthy and happy life, As planning policy relates to design, this column everything that makes a collection of buildings has tracked the twists and turns over the years, into a place, everything that turns anywhere into design being a particularly twisty focus of national somewhere, and nowhere into home’. In sum, a concern! However, the latest incarnation continues much broader perspective than many would a more recent relatively consistent trajectory during associate with the term. which the design-related wording from the original Reﬂecting this, in the proposed revisions to the (2012) version of the NPPF was strengthened NPPF the terms ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ are repeatedly (slightly) in 2018 then again (quite substantially) in used in relation to the built environment, epithets 2021, and now again in 2023. that until 2021 were reserved exclusively for the Included in this latest edit are both big-picture and natural environment. Almost always this use occurs detailed changes, from bolstering the new beauty alongside the term ‘well-designed’, for example in objective introduced in 2018 (the focus of this article), the title of the dedicated design section, now to pragmatic changes to make the monitoring proposed to be re-titled ‘Achieving well-designed and enforcement of delivery easier — notably an and beautiful places’. Given that the visual quality

Ratcheting up design terminology — mentions in the NPPF Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

141

design matters

of the built environment has long been an integral part of the larger design quality agenda (central, for example, to the 10 characteristics of well designed places in the National Design Guide), this raises the question: why draw out and headline beauty in this way? Perhaps the most signiﬁcant recent change to the design wording of the NPPF was the 2021 change requiring that development ‘that is not well designed’ should be refused, replacing earlier wording that simply advocated refusing ‘development of poor design’. As Place Alliance research — Appealing Design 2 — revealed last year, this change had a signiﬁcant and immediate impact on how planning inspectors were evaluating schemes. So, will the liberal sprinkling of ‘beautiful’ in policy give local planning authorities and inspectors a new lever to pull to further ratchet up a squeeze on poor-quality development?

‘Whether evaluating appeal decisions, writing design codes or making other design-based planning decisions, the reluctance to use beauty as an everyday yardstick for quality is notable and widespread, but this does not nullify the value of drawing out the term’ In 2021 inspectors were clearly very comfortable constructing reasoned and objective design arguments, often referencing the governmental concern for beauty. They tended, however, to utilise established and objective design principles when evaluating schemes, and avoided attaching their own value judgements to them—for example by declaring that a proposal was likely to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’. As one inspector noted: ‘There is I believe something of a tension between identifying a building as an exemplary piece of design which is an objective ﬁnding based on established architectural principles, and adorning a building with the epithet ‘beautiful’, which is a subjective one. To my mind, my ﬁnding that the building would attain a very high (or exemplary) standard of design is sufficient to justify a conclusion that the proposal does not fall foul of Government advice on the subject…’ 3 142 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

Coding for beauty (or not)

The teams involved in the recent design code pilots tended to back this perspective. Most struggled with the notion of beauty as a decisionmaking measure, and few found it useful in their analysis, engagement, or coding. Instead, they tended to prioritise more tangible issues that, it was argued, define local character and which could be more readily defined in their design codes. For the pilots, these enduring qualities of places related to factors such as landscape, density, height, and building line. This reluctance to explicitly code for beauty is significant, given that a further major proposed addition to the NPPF seeks to bolster the use and status of design codes by establishing them as ‘the primary means’ of ‘assessing and improving the design of development’. The change builds upon a requirement in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, currently working its way through Parliament, which, when enacted, will require that all local planning authorities adopt authority-wide design codes (discussed in the last ‘Design Matters’ column4) as an integral part of their development plan. Whether evaluating appeal decisions, writing design codes or making other design-based planning decisions, the reluctance to use beauty as an everyday yardstick for quality is notable and widespread, but this does not nullify the value of drawing out the term. Instead, the potential justification lies in two grounds: • first, as an aspiration, upping the ante and establishing an ambition that unequivocally foregrounds design quality in planning decisionmaking; and • second, as the ultimate judgement against which an explicitly aesthetic assessment of design quality can be made (while bearing in mind that design quality amounts to so much more than this). The question of taste (or judgement)…

Taking the second ﬁrst. Here we come up against the problem that not everyone would agree that a conventional assessment of beauty should always be the ultimate milestone for good urbanism. Sometimes it might beneﬁt from being challenging or discordant or simply different. In his 1847 novel Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli took the opportunity to criticise the Georgian and Victorian expansions of London which today we revere. His protagonist labels them ‘very monotonous’, complaining ‘it is impossible to conceive anything more tame, more insipid, more uniform’ and recommending — with tongue in cheek (one assumes) — that hanging the architect would be

Matthew Carmona

design matters

‘All those flat, dull, spiritless streets, all resembling each other.’ Benjamin Disraeli — tastes change

the correct solution for dull architecture. While few would argue for such drastic sanctions today (I hope!), the extract demonstrates, ﬁrst, how tastes vary (perhaps more than we recognise) and, second, how they evolve through time. At this point the issue of taste rears its ugly head, reminding us that it wasn’t long ago that government policy explicitly warned local authorities not to ‘impose their tastes on developers simply because they believe them to be superior’. These words held sway from 1980 and the infamous Circular 22/80 until John Gummer’s re-write of Planning Policy Guidance Note 1 (PPG1) in 1997 swept them away. Yet while taste undoubtedly varies, and at any one time there are majority tastes as well as minority ones, using the taste card to simply shut down conversation about what is or is not aesthetically acceptable in different circumstances (as Circular 22/80 and its descendants did) is, arguably, more unacceptable than trying to understand and deal with the matter. Being able to balance such judgements, ideally in a pluralistic and inclusive manner, is one of the strengths of a discretionary planning system (when it works well), although at the cost of time and uncertainly, as such matters can never be coded in a manner that overcomes the need for careful judgement. … and mansard roofs

The argument can be illustrated by relating the issue to a further proposed design-related revision to the NPPF, this time the requirement for local

authorities to be much more positive about mansard roof extensions in the interests of encouraging ‘gentle densiﬁcation’. The consultation document unequivocally states: ‘all local planning authorities should take a positive approach towards well designed upward extension schemes, particularly mansard roofs’, while the proposed wording in the NPPF nuances this, suggesting that upward extensions should be allowed ‘where their external appearance harmonises with the original building’. In other words, there is an aesthetic judgement to be made rather than an automatic assumption. This was an issue tested in a further Appealing Design case,2 in which a single and narrowly aesthetic ground was used to refuse a scheme for the upward extension of a disused ex-industrial building to create apartments. In this case the inspector considered a wide range of design and planning matters, deeming them acceptable, but rejected the scheme based on the inclusion in the design of an ‘uncharacteristic, anti-contextual’ mansard roof. He noted that ‘the creation of beautiful buildings, rather than mostly beautiful buildings, is a fundamental aim of the planning process’, implying that buildings need to be beautiful in their totality, and that even a single discordant part can undermine the whole. Such a judgement might be dismissed as a matter of taste (the inspector’s versus the applicant’s) or applauded as the careful reasoned judgement of a dispassionate third party having duly considered the aesthetic impact and found it wanting. The Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

143

design matters

An ‘uncharacteristic, anti-contextual’ and ultimately ugly mansard roof

government’s new-found belief in mansard roofs needs implementing with care if we are to avoid an uglier built environment. Aspiration or edict? Returning to the first justification for eliciting the language of beauty, this reason implies that something better than competent design is required and instead that the aspiration should be for something that genuinely moves us emotionally, something that is beautiful in a deeper way. In other words, it is about attempting to raise the bar. Whether one agrees with this use of the term, it is interesting that, beyond the UK, the language of beauty has been increasingly elicited by governments internationally. Two examples from different sides of the Atlantic show how it has been deployed in quite different ways, one as an aspiration and the other as an edict. Taking the edict first, one of President Donald Trump’s last acts in office — Executive Order 13967: Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture — stipulated that all new Federal buildings should be ‘beautiful’. This, the Order narrowly defined as ‘traditional’ in style, and preferably classical (although Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial and other Mediterranean styles were also acceptable). The order lasted just 69 days into the Presidency of Joe Biden before it was revoked, but in that time amounted to a top-down command on what was beautiful, in this case eliciting the language 144 Town & Country Planning

March–April 2023

of classicism that has often been associated with the political right, and explicitly rejecting all forms of modernism which the Order directly linked to socialism. In the UK, the pronouncements of Ministers and their close association with certain lines of thought have sometimes sailed close to the wind of an outright endorsement of traditionalism, but, perhaps anticipating the inevitable style-wars backlash that would ensue, they have not, so far, crossed that line. The European Union has also embraced beauty, but in this case as a high-level aspiration as one leg of a tripartite statement of ‘inseparable values’ — beautiful, sustainable, together — to inform the work of the New European Bauhaus. With a title deliberately echoing the language of modernism, the New European Bauhaus encapsulates an ambitious attempt to capture and advance a very broad agenda that recognises the central role of the built environment if the European continent’s simultaneous climate change and quality of life ambitions are to be met. Beautiful, in this initiative, is deﬁned as ‘quality of experience and style, beyond functionality’. Thus, instead of a deﬁned set of principles that every project, policy or initiative should be somehow judged against, it is about eliciting a quality in new places that stirs the heart and offers a goal towards which developers, regulators and designers should strive.

design matters

Sustainable

New European Bauhaus Beautiful

Together

The three inseparable values of the New European Bauhaus

Beautiful, sustainable, inclusive design The collective embrace of beauty narratives by governments demonstrates a new-found conﬁdence to venture into one of the more intangible and thereby challenging areas of design policy-making, albeit just how this is interpreted varies hugely.

‘In this sense beauty exists as a possibility to be achieved through time as the ultimate result of good design (and good coding), and the language of beauty helps to set an aspiration that is higher than would be the case without it’ Returning to the emerging policy in England, while at one level the mention of beautiful every time ‘well-designed development’ is mentioned in the NPPF is entirely superﬂuous (the second encompasses the ﬁrst), if the intention is to raise the national ambition, rather than to set a new measurable criterion that could never be objectively coded for or assessed, then that is its true value. In this sense beauty exists as a possibility to be achieved through time as the ultimate result of good

design (and good coding), and the language of beauty helps to set an aspiration that is higher than would otherwise be the case without it. If, in the future, the aims of sustainable and inclusive design are added alongside it and garner equal attention from government, then we will be truly getting somewhere. Matthew Carmona is Professor of Planning and Urban •Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London e: m.carmona@ucl.ac.uk. Twitter @ProfMCarmona The views expressed are personal. Notes 1 Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill: Reforms to National Planning Policy; and National Planning Policy Framework: Showing Indicative Changes for Consultation. Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Dec. 2022. www.gov.uk/government/ consultations/levelling-up-and-regeneration-billreforms-to-national-planning-policy 2 M Carmona and V Giordano: Appealing Design: The Evidence of Planning Appeals and the Need to Reject Poor and Mediocre Housing Design. Place Alliance, Apr. 2022. https://placealliance.org.uk/research/ appealing-design/ 3 Appeal Decision. Appeal Ref: APP/A5270/W/21/3268157 51-56 Manor Road and 53-55 Drayton Green Road, West Ealing, London W13 0LJ. Planning Inspectorate, 29 Oct. 2021. https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/5e7e22fea84d1844d8d7b678/t/619e7c567a22fd60 bc5584f0/1637776470796/1635510750096.pdf 4 M Carmona: ‘Authority-wide design codes — four questions (and answers)’. Town & Country Planning, 2022, Vol. 91, Nov.–Dec., 425-IBC Town & Country Planning March–April 2023

designing new communities for the 21st century

new towns: the rise, fall and rebirth

New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth By Katy Lock and Hugh Ellis Published by RIBA Publishing, May 2020, HB, 192 pp ISBN 978 1859469286, £40

Often misunderstood, the New Towns story is a fascinating one of anarchists, artists, visionaries, and the promise of a new beginning for millions of people. New Towns: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth offers a new perspective on the New Towns record and uses case studies to address the myths and realities of the programme. It provides valuable lessons for the growth and renewal of the existing New Towns and post-war housing estates and town centres, including recommendations for practitioners, politicians and communities interested in the renewal of existing New Towns and the creation of new communities for the 21st century.

Available through the TCPA website £40 including postage & packing — 10% discount for TCPA members using the code MEMBER Visit www.tcpa.org.uk/shop/new-towns-the-rise-fall-and-rebirth