Examination of witnesses (Questions 211
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER 1999
MR RICHARD
BUTT and MR
TONY FYSON
Chairman
211. Can I welcome you and ask you to introduce
yourselves, both for the benefit of the record and for our benefit?
(Mr Butt) Thank you, Chairman. My name is Richard
Butt. I am a Member of the Policy Council of the TCPA, and it
may be helpful if I say that I was previously Chief Executive
of the Rural Development Commission. Tony Fyson is with me. He
is also a Member of the Policy Council but a trustee as well of
the TCPA. With your permission, he would like to say two sentences
to clarify the status of the TCPA.
(Mr Fyson) I would just like to remind the Committee
that we are a voluntary body that is generally supportive of town
and country planning, but we do not sit here speaking on behalf
of the profession or, indeed, of the official plans.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Christine Butler
212. Is the trend you identify of more and more
people coming to live in the countryside and away from urban areas
a good thing or a bad thing?
(Mr Butt) Well, the trend of what is called "counter-urbanisation"
is a very strong—
Mrs Dunwoody
213. I beg your pardon?
(Mr Butt) The movement of people out of towns and
into the countryside.
214. "Counter-urbanisation"?
(Mr Butt) I am afraid it is terrible jargon—or
the "urban/rural shift". This process has been going
on since about 1960, it is very well established, very powerful
and forecasts suggest that it is set to continue. I think this
trend—and I will comment in a moment on the question of
its desirability—reflects very powerful underlying economic
and social forces, and I think it reflects people exercising choice
to move to areas that they find more desirable.
Christine Butler
215. Just interrupting you there, is it a good
thing or a bad thing—if you were to come down on one side?
(Mr Butt) I think, on the whole, it is a good thing
in the sense that people have been choosing to move progressively
out from urban areas; they do not jump from inner cities out into
the countryside, they tend to move out to suburbs and then, from
the suburbs, further out, and so on. I think that process, both
the dispersal of population and of jobs, has produced a lot of
benefits.
216. To?
(Mr Butt) To the people involved, in terms of better
quality of living, greater choice, greater job opportunity, and
we have also seen a lot of improved economic performance in rural
areas. However, there are costs as well, and that is why I think
a categoric answer to your question is difficult.
217. On the whole you think it has been a good
thing?
(Mr Butt) On balance, I think it is a good thing.
218. Is it a good thing to say that with fair
to larger houses—four bedrooms plus, with a nice garden—"If
you can afford it, there you are, you can attach yourself to the
outskirts of a village?"
(Mr Butt) A great deal of the development which has
taken place in the countryside has been in towns—medium
and small towns and in villages. Very little of it has actually
been in open countryside. A great deal of it has been in small
houses; houses which, for the people concerned, have been affordable—certainly
in the past—in a way that, very often, living closer in
has not been. There are costs and disadvantages to this as well.
You ask me for my overall assessment and there are costs, obviously,
in terms of travel, there are costs in terms of the impact on
the environment and the countryside and there are certain sorts
of development in the countryside which have much higher costs
than others. So what is critically important, I think, for the
TCPA is how we cope with the movement of population, the growth
of population and the dispersal that has been taking place. We
have some very clear views about that, which are set out in our
memorandum. We are not in favour of a random dispersal of people
out or urban areas and into the countryside, but we do think those
trends are powerful and they have to be managed, and, to some
degree, accommodated. They cannot easily be reversed.
219. Notwithstanding the problems that you have
outlined in this shift of population, and, also, your acceptance
or, even, approval of the fact that it is all down to choice and
that we should, therefore, be supporting individual choice, do
you still think that that outweighs the environmental and social
impact of any of the undesirable consequences?
(Mr Butt) If you ask me for a view on the net result
of the last 30 or 40 years of development I would say that it
has been positive, both for the people concerned and for the economy.
If one looks, for example, at the change in the economy of East
Anglia, the Thames Valley and areas within 20 miles of our major
conurbations, there have been enormous improvements.
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