Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
TUESDAY 4 JULY 2000
MR EWEN
CAMERON, MR
RICHARD WAKEFORD
and MS PAM
WARHURST
80. You mean the National Park has been doing
that and you have been helping?
(Mr Wakeford) We have certainly been helping. The
nature of any partnership is that every partner wants to make
sure they can claim for their part that they are succeeding in
it, so I would hope we could actually claim success as well as
the Lake District and share that success. What we have not been
doing as a countryside agency is actually tackling those individual
hot-spots which you were talking about because that is very much
a matter for the individual authorities concerned.
81. But surely if you could just demonstrate
one example of somewhere in the country where you can balance
the interests of the tourists with the interests of local communities
and demonstrate it works, lots of other people would be keen to
copy.
(Mr Wakeford) You would think so but—
82. But you have not been able to do it, have
you?
(Mr Wakeford) The Purbeck example which my chairman
referred to is actually an outstanding example of a park-and-ride
scheme at Norden, using a tourist asset which is a preserved railway
to take numbers of tourists by train through Corfe Castle where
previously they went through by car, which is a rather dangerous
place. It has significantly reduced the car traffic to and from
Swanage whilst enhancing the tourism assets of both Corfe Castle
and Swanage, in that the day visitor enjoys the trip by train
that brings him into town. It is an outstanding example of a partnership
and there are local authorities up and down the country who are
inspired by that, but you have to work quite hard to—
83. There are not that many which have a spare
railway line, are there?
(Mr Wakeford)—take the general principles and
apply them to your own local circumstances. That must be the sort
of job which my officers have, as they go out, knowing what has
worked in different parts of the country and saying, "You
may not have a preserved railway line you can exploit here but
you do have another way of doing this". I think working in
partnership, giving the inspiration of what has happened elsewhere,
and helping people develop the solutions which are local solutions,
is the way forward.
Christine Butler
84. What is the timetable for the completion
of the National Access Database? This is not one of your headline
priorities as described here. Is it now? What do you mean by phase
one and phase two?
(Ms Warhurst) Phase one and phase two of the database
or phase two of the mapping exercise?
85. The National Access Database. You have been
helping with mapping exercises to do with the Countryside and
Rights of Way Bill, but perhaps you could deal the database question
first.
(Ms Warhurst) The work on the database is on-going
with the Ordnance Survey map and CCW and we are looking at where
it would be most appropriate to have access to that database.
86. Access to the database?
(Ms Warhurst) Yes. The whole point is that one needs
to engage in the exercise of understanding how access to the countryside
is going to work, mapping it appropriately and then putting information
on the database as to what is open and what is closed and so on
and so forth, and making sure that that information is accessible
to the general public and those who would have an interest, whether
it was from the landowning perspective or whatever. That work
is on-going at the moment.
87. Is that phase one then?
(Ms Warhurst) No. The situation with the access agenda
is that there are many strands to it which are on-going simultaneously.
There is the work that is on-going—
Chairman
88. Could you give us a timetable for each of
the bits then?
(Ms Warhurst) Sure, I can try and do that. It is extremely
complicated but I did jot down some notes in terms of—
Christine Butler
89. You describe phase one, whatever that includes,
as being ready by 2000-01, and then the rest in another two years.
(Ms Warhurst) Yes. We can actually let everybody have
copies of this, if that is helpful, but I can certainly read it
out. Phase two, as you refer to it, is to look at the two test
areas for mapping, one in the north and one in the south east.
We expect to be able to select the contractor by November 2000
on that. To manage the preparation then of England in terms of
the mapping exercise could take us as long as three years on top
of that, because it is an enormous exercise. The question is,
do you go with a discrete region of the country which is thoroughly
mapped, which we could go earlier with, or do you have to map
every single type of land for the whole of England, which commonsense
would tell you is going to take a heck of a lot longer? That is
a decision which is out of our hands and we are preparing ourselves
for both eventualities.
Chairman
90. Which do you prefer?
(Ms Warhurst) We would prefer to go on a pilot basis.
We would prefer to go, and have always preferred to go, region
by region, because it would make sense when you have actually
piloted and done the work for all types of access within a region.
If it were possible we would prefer we did that. But, as I say,
that is out of our hands because we understand there are some
legal debates going on as to whether that is an appropriate way
forward or it is not. If we want to go early, we need to go by
region. If we want to go for the whole country, it is going to
take at least three years. That is every single type. Then, of
course, when we have the two test areas we produce provisional
maps, we go out to consultation on those maps, that could be May
2001. The consultation then would lead us on to the access land
database which would be somewhere in the region of the year 2001-02
to 2003-04.
Christine Butler
91. That is all linked in with the Bill?
(Ms Warhurst) That is all linked in with the Bill
and it depends on some key decisions to be made by the Department
and indeed by ministers.
92. When have you been advised that those decisions
will be with you to guide your work?
(Ms Warhurst) We have asked repeatedly—
93. Not yet, in other words!
(Ms Warhurst)—for clarity on those key issues.
(Mr Wakeford) There are two things really. One is
legal clarity, and I guess that that could probably wait until
the Bill is a bit firmer than it is at the moment. The second
thing is the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review which
will determine whether the Agency actually has the resources to
do the mapping process at a reasonable speed, or a slower speed
or faster speed.
Mr Olner
94. How much co-operation are you getting from
the Ordnance Survey?
(Ms Warhurst) I understand there is a good relationship.
We are doing work on a database. Perhaps a slow start but going
well now.
95. No duplication?
(Ms Warhurst) No, it is an absolute partnership approach
to doing it. No duplication at all.
Christine Butler
96. On planning now, you have talked about this
in your review and you have talked about this in the operating
plan, can I push you a little on this one? What attitude do you
bring to the conflict between, on the one hand, the requirements
of the environment, the countryside itself, landscape issues and
so on and, on the other hand, social and economic factors for
development which would push a certain kind of development. Often
that gives rise to conflict and invariably it does. How does the
Countryside Agency see its role here? From that, how are you going—and
I know the guidance is not out yet—to use it and what will
be its core nature in trying to influence local planning authorities?
(Mr Wakeford) The guidance was an early product, what
some people call a "quick win", of the merger in that
the teams of the two commissions came together before the merger
to start work on what became an interim planning policy statement.
If you have not seen that, I can send you a copy. We consulted
on that and received a lot of views, mainly from practitioners
of planning. The board at its June meeting considered proposals
for taking that forward and approved a way forward and the document
is now being finalised. I will launch it in September at the summer
school of the Royal Town Planning Institute, which is one of the
most effective places to promote a new policy. It is along the
lines which my chairman and I identified earlier, that we are
looking for development that delivers an overall better society
in terms of the environment, in terms of social objectives and
economic objectives. The approach that says, "Is the development
good enough" is one which will help to ensure that future
generations will say, "They had a difficult decision here,
whether to develop on green belt next to Stevenage or not, but
the Countryside Agency helped to make that decision the right
one." That is really the approach we are pursuing.
97. How strong do you hope your influence will
be and can it be?
(Mr Wakeford) I hope our influence can be strong but
in a personal capacity I have also been involved in a number of
groups who have recently been looking at the future of the planning
system and how it can actually be made more effectively a planning
system, a positive planning system, to try and achieve a future
vision for society, putting that planning role more positively
rather than it being so much obsessed with development control
and nimby attitudes, which tend to tie it up a bit at the moment.
98. How sympathetic would all the people married
to town and country planning, and there are lots of them around
in all the local authorities, be to you?
(Mr Wakeford) I think the planning professionals I
have talked to are quite keen to get away from the kind of black-and-white—I
cannot quite think how to characterise it—hassle of development
control on a case by case basis, because in their training they
will have seen planning very much as asking, "What future
do we want for our community in ten years' time and how are we
going to get there?" and development control is only one
part of that. The other part of it is actually getting the investment
in place to ensure that that vision for the community of the future
can be delivered. The issue up and down the land, as you rightly
indicate, is that the majority of people when you say the word
"planning" think only about development control and
probably only about development control which is quite close to
where they live.
Chairman: I think we had better move on.
Christine Butler: Can I just say that the inspectors
will only be looking at this. What have you got in this bit of
paper which is called your development plan or the structure plan
or whatever? Let us relate all these issues to PPGs. However much
we might wish it, commonsense often does not prevail because it
cannot do under the present development plan—
Chairman: I am sorry, we are going to have to
move on.
Mr Cummings
99. Can you explain for the benefit of the Committee
your concept of environmental capital please, and what practical
applications do you expect this concept to have in your work?
(Mr Wakeford) That is a nice specific development
of the previous question. We have been working jointly with the
Environment Agency, with English Nature and English Heritage,
because we are conscious that there is a series of different elements
of what you might call environmental capital at stake now. We
felt that if we as experts could not come together and give some
advice about how one would reach a decision where there are differences
and potential conflicting aspects, then we could not expect planners
or anybody else to do this. So the methodology for anything from
an individual development control application right up to the
draft of regional planning guidance takes the issues at stake
and does an analysis of the environmental impacts of different
kinds, and then seeks to characterise them as to whether they
are replaceable. So to take a very simple example, if you have
a wood on your development site and you are going to lose that
and the public value that wood, if it is a relatively new wood
it can be planted elsewhere or perhaps another piece of woodland
can be opened up, but if it is ancient woodland it has a different
value because you cannot get ancient woodland back that quickly.
So what we have devised is a methodology which can be applied
in those circumstances to help decision-takers weigh the different
aspects and reach the right conclusions. It has been tested at
different levels looking at guidance, looking at development control,
and I made a presentation at an event at the Local Government
Association where we were trying to promote this as good practice
in the planning system. We are now, because of our new agency
remit, taking this forward and saying, "We should not only
be interested in the environment in these decisions, we have to
take a broader approach" and so we are testing whether one
can actually apply and put into the same formula issues of social
capital as well.
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