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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 549 House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS THE EGAN REVIEW: SKILLS FOR SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES
Monday 26 April 2004 SIR JOHN EGAN, MS MAUREEN HOLKHAM and MR DAVID LUNTS Evidence heard in Public Questions 1- 89
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Urban Affairs Sub-Committee on Monday 26 April 2004 Members present Mr Andrew Bennett, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts Chris Mole Mr Bill O'Brien Christine Russell ________________ Witnesses: Sir John Egan, Chairman, Ms Maureen Holkham, Secretary, Egan Skills Review and Mr David Lunts, Director Urban Policy Directorate, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, examined. Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the Committee and can I ask you to identify yourself and your team for the record? Sir John Egan: I am John Egan, I am the author of the Egan Report on Skills. I have with me David Lunts from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, he will be hoping to take the Report forward in terms of the centre we have recommended. I have Maureen Holkman with me who very much wrote the Report, she did more writing than I did, certainly any quality that there is in the writing Maureen put in there. Q2 Chairman: Thank you very much. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction or are you happy to go straight to questions? Sir John Egan: I thought it would be helpful to explain some of the background of the Report and some of the major steps and major ideas in the Report. Q3 Chairman: Go ahead. Sir John Egan: I had already done one Government Report for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on the construction industry which had been really quite successful in terms of improving the performance of the construction industry so when I was asked to, as it were, come in and have another go I really felt I had enjoyed the previous one and I thought I could perhaps bring a business view to what was a very difficult subject. Most of what I knew about the planning system came from the four and a half year long public inquiry into Terminal 5, I did know something about the minutiae of all of this. Certainly I felt that there were possible improvements to it all. When I was asked to simply look at skills, as a businessman you tend to look wider because if you have the wrong processes or the wrong goals, and so on, the right skills can simply be a waste of time, it can be throwing your troops over the trench to fight the machine guns. Generally speaking I like to look at the whole issue in its entirety. I started off with the goal and I was delighted to see that the Deputy Prime Minister's Office had actually created in their concept of sustainable communities something which I had support for, it made common sense to me. The first thing we did was to look at how closely the Government's objectives fitted in with the people. What did the people want? Where did they want to live? There was a very close correlation. Secondly, I was aware of the environmental problems that we are trying to overcome and the huge efforts which will have to be made if we are going to create a one planet world in terms of our emissions, and so on. I felt that the first thing was to look at the goal: Was it suitable in terms of the people? Would it be supported by their requirements and also to make sure that we brought in the environmental standards which would be necessary as we began to understand the problems of global warming. Once we looked at the goal the next best thing was to look at who is going to take the lead. We looked at the local authorities as the natural leader of the process, then we looked at the processes themselves. A lot of good work is being done by the Government and we did comment on a number of issues where we felt there were improvements, one of them was holding on to outline planning permission, which we agreed with ministers, and that has remained. We felt we had good dialogue going with the Government vis-à-vis the changes they had in mind. Finally we looked towards the skills. As we went deeper and deeper into the skills we began to realise they were typical of the kind of skills which create world class businesses, world class organisations: Communication, especially communication to the general public; the skills of partnering and creating partnerships; the skills of process improvement and project management. There is no question that the most important thing of all is to have high quality communication skills with the general public. The next thing we looked at was, what would we see as a way of carrying the skills agenda forward? From my experience of the Construction Report which I had done - where we had something we called the "movement for innovation", where things could be exchanged when people were trying to learn how to do their projects - I felt something similar to that had to be done. I also wanted to see the organisation having research capability so that the goal could be operationalised so that we have an attempt here but we could do better than the work we have done with more care and more time. I also felt that we needed to do research into the environmental standards which we were going to set. I felt that we had created a starting point and a set of logical processes and I felt that there was a good basis for them moving forward. Last of all, I was aware that the Government had a great deal of interest in developing the communities in the Thames Gateway and other places and I felt that that would be a wonderful training ground for the whole, as it were, system, if we tried to use the processes and ideas in the Report in the development of the Thames Gateway communities so that there was a way of learning right from the start Q4 Chairman: That is very helpful, thank you very much. I am a little puzzled, I must say, I assume you spoke to the Deputy Prime Minister at the very beginning when he asked you to do the inquiry and I would have thought you would have talked to him in a fair amount of detail about your terms of reference. He appears to have given you one set of terms of reference and you have very skilfully answered a different set of questions. Why were you not able to persuade the Deputy Prime Minister to set the terms of reference as you wanted them rather than he appears to have wanted them? Sir John Egan: I knew nothing about the subject at all when I started. It is only when you started getting into it that you realised and certainly my own instinct was to broaden it out into a wider set of ideas. It became absolutely obvious and it was certainly supported by him when I went back with that Q5 Chairman: Do you think that the terms of reference that you came up within the course of the inquiry were much more useful than the ones he set you originally? Sir John Egan: We were both of that opinion towards the end I think. Q6 Christine Russell: Good afternoon. I am sorry to appear negative at the beginning, the Report has not had a very good press, certainly not from the professionals, Planning Magazine calls it "a load of tired old codswallop". Can I ask you in particular about one of the criticisms, the public consultation period was a mere 12 weeks and there has been criticism about that. There has also been criticism about the opportunity that professionals had to make an input into the review. How would you answer or your colleagues answer the criticism? Sir John Egan: We gave ourselves six months to write the Report or to do our work on the Report, and that is what we took. We could not really put half of it over to public consultation so we put one month over to public consultation. We had a lot of replies, we had over 100 replies, and when we offered an extension people seemed content with the time that we gave them. There did not seem at the time any big problem. Incidentally, I am not at all deterred by people being negative when I write these reports, you heard nothing like the barrage when I produced the report on the construction industry, the fact that it was successful is another matter, but it produced a huge barrage of disagreement. I did ignore a great deal of the minutiae which was brought out by the professionals, typically their not seeing the wood for the trees, if you see what I mean. Q7 Christine Russell: You think they are too obsessed by the process rather than the outcome? Sir John Egan: I think so, yes. The reason why I think we got so much of our planning wrong over the last 30 or 40 years is we were not clear as to what we wanted. Do not forget these shopping centres and these houses dumped into fields did not occur accidentally, somebody deliberately decided to do them and somebody gave them planning permission. Q8 Christine Russell: Perhaps you should blame politicians who set the national framework rather than the planners who carried out the instructions from on high. Sir John Egan: What was absolutely clear to me is we were not producing places that people wanted to live in, this is the real acid test, and that is why we spent so much time on the goal. What did the people want? Let us create something which is fit for people to live in where they will be happy? When we did all of our work with the general public they were very clear about the kind of places they wanted to live in, these were not the places that we have been creating for 20 or 30 years. Q9 Chairman: Do you really think the general public are clear about what they want? Sir John Egan: Absolutely. Q10 Chairman: If you take Meadow Hall, if you take the Gateshead centre, if you take the Trafford Centre they are absolutely swarming with people every weekend, are they not? People want out of town shopping. It may be that you and I are appalled by such places but people seem to like them. Sir John Egan: Yes but people are very clear they want places to live which are clean, safe, friendly, prosperous and so on and so forth. What we should have done with these out of town shopping centres is made them the basis of a community. We could very easily have had houses and schools and all kinds of other things round them and made them the core of a high quality community. In the past we simply saw them as a shopping centre, which is only part of what people want. Q11 Chairman: Let us just take the question of housing, I see some of what I consider to be appalling bits of sprawl out into the countryside of new housing estates but people are rushing to buy those properties. Is the problem that the public are a bit schizophrenic? Sir John Egan: I do not think so. I think the public will buy what is available to them and they will do their very best. The fact is we could have done better and have created better places to live, more closely aligned to what people were looking for. Do not forget, many of the beautiful places we think are fantastic are failed communities 20 or 30 years later because we did not build in to them the concepts of a long-term sustainable community. Q12 Mr Betts: Can I follow up on the idea that somehow places like Meadow Hall can be the centre of new communities. I have to say I struggle to come to terms with that, Meadow Hall has been my constituency and there are some houses less than half a mile from it and people complain continually about the amount of traffic Meadow Hall generates and they do not want the centre there. The fact is it is there. The idea we should go and build more houses round it so more people can be affected by the incredible amount of traffic, particularly at weekends, I am not sure is the best idea I have ever heard. Sir John Egan: We have picked Meadow Hall and Merry Hill, maybe I would not have wanted them in the first place, maybe they were not absolutely brilliant but they could have been a great deal better if they had been designed as a mixed community right from the start. If you simply design what you have and then try and retro fit it - which is what I am suggesting that we do by the way - I am suggesting that in many of the places we built we could retro fit them and make them far more successful. I am particularly exercised by putting schools out into the green belt and putting hospitals out there as well, all of these things are essential parts of communities and there is absolutely no reason why we should not have a mixed development as our prime example because that seems to be the thing which fits most closely with where people want to live. Q13 Chris Mole: What do you think your review really adds to the ones which have gone before, the Urban Task Force in 1999 and the RTPIs review of schools in 2003? Sir John Egan: There was still a request to look to see what skills were required to make some of these things work. I think that the Government has a rational starting point here, and I think we have demonstrated that. I think we have picked up the key processes and I think we have been absolutely clear that it is the local authority which should give the lead and their Local Strategic Partnership is the kind of leader of the process. I do not think we should try and create new structures everywhere. What I would really like to see is every community in Britain planned, planning its own way to a more sustainable future. I think that we have looked at the processes and seen that you could have a far better approach if you did a lot of the pre application processes before the planning application to get absolute clarity in to the hands of the developer. I think we have spotted the fact that the skills are very much the same skills which create all successful organisations and there are not many particularly different skills to make a difference. Of course we have a lot of high quality town planners but they spend a lot of their time on wasted projects because it is so wasteful in terms of the way the planning system works. Q14 Chris Mole: You think you have identified generic and holistic skills rather than more or a dearth of technical skills? Sir John Egan: I would like to see high quality process being followed to a specific goal which is supported by the people as absolutely the key thing behind this. Q15 Chris Mole: You pointed to the Sector Skills Council as having a key role in ensuring that this gap, if that is the one you are identifying, is addressed, are you confident that they picked up that agenda? Have you any evidence they picked up that agenda and will be delivering on it? Sir John Egan: That I do not know. Mr Lunts: The Sector Skills Council along with colleagues in DfES and the local government sector more generally are going to be critical of the next stage of taking the Report's recommendations forward, the most significant of which in the short-term is trying to devise a strategy to set up a national centre. There has obviously been a lot of discussions with those groups and those interests during the course of the last 12 months' work here. We are now going to make sure those interests are now represented and properly consulted over the next six or seven months as we start to scope up the National Skills Initiative. Q16 Chris Mole: Is one of the intentions to ensure that a national centre is set up with a cultural approach which is different to the past? Mr Lunts: I think so. The intention is to do something which is distinctive and adds to the sum total of what is already out there. There is a lot going on: there is a lot happening in the local government sector; there is a lot happening in the education sector; there is a lot happening with the various professions which have been identified in this Report as the core professions; and there is quite a lot happening with regional skill centres, there is a lot happening with CABE. What we need to make sure is that the national centre is going to some extent want to coordinate and influence some of that activity but it certainly needs to add to the totality rather than replicating what others will be doing. Q17 Chris Mole: Are you confident that will extend to the existing body of practitioners rather than the new ones who are coming through training? If you want delivery at apace, which meets a sustainable communities agenda, it has to happen now with everyone and in all of the professions. Sir John Egan: My view was that there was urgency to all of this. Very many of the big communities' growths were happening now and they would be carried out by the people who were doing the job today. I think professional development is going to be one of the absolutely key parts of this process which we try to encourage and help the people who are already in these jobs. If we wait too long these things will all be built and we will be rueing the day again. Q18 Mr O'Brien: Sir John, you assembled a task group to assist with this Report and from that task group you set up five working parties, one was dealing with finance but there is no report to the committee in the publication, why is that? Sir John Egan: We did pick out some of the key parts of their work throughout the Report but we did not set that up right until the very end and we felt that we did not have enough evidence to make a separate chapter so we put its work into the other chapters. Q19 Mr O'Brien: Its remit was to consider the factors and encourage private developers to invest in particular areas and the acts that local authorities need to make an environment conducive to investment that delivers sustainable communities. It is really important. I would imagine that everything else in the Report depends on that remit and yet there is no report from the Committee? Sir John Egan: Perhaps I was stretching my terms of reference too far. In the end we did pick out the practical conclusions which they came to. In fact there is a response in item 2.19. Q20 Mr O'Brien: What page is that on? Sir John Egan: Page 37. You can see that it is not a complete report by any means but the one thing we did not think was there was any lack of willingness from the development industry to get involved if we could make their interest simpler. Unfortunately they are often asked to do far more than they can without the infrastructure being in place. One of the points we have made is that we would like to see the development led by the local authority, they must produce a plan for the future, they must have an idea of the infrastructure that they can rely on, particularly with transport, to be put into their development programme. It is at that point they can invite the developers to some work with them. We were often dismayed by the fact that the ideas were too immature to ask the development industry to become involved. We still felt that the onus was on the local authority to create the plan for the future within which developers can submit their ideas. This is one of the reasons why we noticed that cities have been so successful because, generally speaking, the big cities have found chief executives or leaders who have created a plan within which the development industry can perform. The prime mover here is the local authority giving leadership to the plan. Q21 Mr O'Brien: The common goal which you set was to define sustainable communities, which is a concept you wish to see adopted across the board. How did you decide on your definition and its seven components which, again, refer to the question of resources being made available? Sir John Egan: We selected them from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's Report, which is called the Sustainable Communities Plan. We tried to operationalise it down to a smaller number than seven, we would have liked to have seen as low as five the number of key components in it because you will find that people can remember those, it is rather a lot to remember seven, we could get people's minds working more quickly from the five keys to the 50 key performance indicators which we require. In the short period of time we gave ourselves we could not find any way of streamlining that group. I would like to see those ideas streamlined down to about five key components still carrying all of the 50 key performance indicators. The basic work here was done by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and their Sustainable Communities Plan and we have operationalised it slightly. Q22 Mr O'Brien: It was the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister who decided that? Sir John Egan: Yes and we agreed with it. Q23 Mr O'Brien: What contribution did you make to it? Did they set that down as the common goal. The contribution from the various committees should have improved on that, advanced on that? Sir John Egan: The first contribution we did was to make sure that is what the population wanted, that is what the people wanted. Once we found we had a complete congruence between the two we then simply tried to make it simpler, we tried to get all of the keys ideas into what we called the magnificent seven. We wanted to make sure that we had a goal which was quickly and easily understood and one which could be shared with the community. Q24 Mr O'Brien: You did say in your earlier remarks you wanted to see a business view, what did you mean by a business view? Sir John Egan: The way we run large companies today is that we make a clear goal which is often called the mission statement, or something like that, and then that is then the goal of everybody in the company and that is what they are trying to achieve, that is what I was trying to do here. Mr O'Brien: Okay. Q25 Chairman: Almost everyone will claim that anything they are doing is now going to be part of sustainable communities, it is sort of like motherhood and apple pie, it is something which everyone believes in and the more you squeeze down the definition of it the easier it is for everyone to claim they are doing what you want, is it not? Sir John Egan: The idea is to achieve them, the idea is not just to talk about it, the idea is to achieve something. I believe that we could operationalise this goal, and I think it still needs a slight bit of work. Let us talk about what we have today, with these seven areas and 50 key performance indicators you could delegate authority from national government to local government as long as people were improving their sustainable community score. That is the way that I would like to see it operationalised, it is the goal, it is what we are all trying to achieve. We will be trying to put some simplicity into what is a relatively large and difficult concept. Q26 Mr Betts: Let us move on to the indicators, at a time when there has been some change of heart in the public sector about whether we should be setting so many targets, even in the National Health Service for hospitals and trusts to manage to deliver on, are you in danger of simply following the same course which the Health Service now seems to be pulling back from, saying all of this will be alright as long as local authorities can show they are improving by a set of indicators? In other words, there is very little decentralisation at all, we are deciding at the centre what is going to happen and local authorities get on and deliver and show they are doing it. Sir John Egan: This is all, by the way, process management where you have a key goal to aim for. Your key performance indicators are demonstrating improvement towards the end point goal. What I would be looking for in terms of operationalising this goal is to create from communities which we know work and we know are absolutely supported by the people who live there altogether scores where we can then describe the capability of that community to satisfy the people who live there. If we have it right - and I am not saying at this stage we have, I think a little bit more work does need to be done - it becomes a very simple tool for us to judge how well a community is being organised but it also helps the leader of that community to create a route map from where he is to where he wants to get to. I think it is the starting point of the vision for improving the sustainability of their community. If we have it right those 50 key performance indicators will become the key ones and perhaps we do not need to do the other 1,400 because there are a huge number of things which we ask local authorities to report on. I am looking for a relatively small number of indicators which tell us we are moving in the right direction and they should be audited as a group and not, as it were, audited by different government audit offices so that we can actually judge the competence and performance of the community improvement programme as a whole and we can also keep checking it with the general public to see that they themselves agree that the community is improving in line with the plan created by the local authority. This is operationalising a very complex thing and trying to create performance. It is almost the same concept which we created within the construction industry, how do you create better buildings? How do you go about it? We had I think 40 or 50 key performance indicators in that and this is no different in reality to performing any complicated task. You can describe the route map on your way towards excellence. Q27 Mr Betts: The majority of it is quite ambitious for a local authority and having three stars rather than one star against moving towards achieving sustainable communities is down in the list for my local authority. Would it not be tempting in selecting the indicators - as I understand it all 50 are not going to be demanded of each authority, they are going to be able to select which ones these use. Sir John Egan: Only to start with. In the end they have to become obligatory. This is not quite finished with yet. To start with people can start getting used to this reporting system but as soon as they are operationalised lies and complete the final 50 package would all have to be reported on. Q28 Chairman: Does the Deputy Prime Minister agree with that? Sir John Egan: I believe so, yes. There was some controversy by the way, I was clear I wanted all 50 to be reported on. At this point in time I can not say with my hand on heart that all 50 are absolutely correct, I do not know. I think it needs a little bit more work before we can put that one to bed. Eventually there is no question you are right you have to report on all of them. Q29 Mr Betts: Another way of looking at it might be that 46 of these are already being used by local authorities, as I understand it. Sir John Egan: Yes. Q30 Mr Betts: What is new? Are you asking them to do what they are already doing? Sir John Egan: They have another 400 which is the problem, these are the key ones. They are there, the local authority have not been able to pick out the keys ones and these are the ones which tell you where you are going. I think we have picked out the key ones. We did a number of discussion groups with people in various kinds of communities, obviously successful ones and obviously ones which were not successful and we were able to hone down on to what we thought were the absolutely key ones. Q31 Mr Betts: Does everyone agree with that? Sir John Egan: We all thought they were the right ones, yes. Q32 Mr Betts: Have you any feedback from people who might disagree with you? Sir John Egan: We had a very high degree of agreement within our task force group that we got them right. You cannot tell you finally got them right until you have started using them and you have started to get a feel for them and then you actually settle them down. For the moment they are almost right but you would need to operate with them before you could be absolutely confident you have them right. Incidentally in the construction industry we had these key performance indicators, we thought we got them right but they did change somewhat and we added to the number before we had finished. Again this is a concept that I am used to. I ran the airport business, BAA for some number of years and there we had far more indicators than this. We improved the performance of our business via key performance indicators which basically reflected the quality of service we gave to the general public moving through our airports and to the airline customers we had. This is merely putting the general public into that same kind of position. Q33 Chairman: You think if the number creeps up to 60 that is not a bad thing? Sir John Egan: No, it would not be a bad thing at all. Q34 Chairman: Why not try and get it down to 20 or 30? Sir John Egan: If you could. Until you have got cracking you do not realise whether you have them exactly right. In construction we tried to keep them to a very low number but we then did see that we had to increase them. Maybe we would reduce them or increase them, I do not know quite, but quickly you would find whether you had got it right. Q35 Chris Mole: Your review makes the strong point that we must stop generating new developments that conflict with the overall goal of achieving sustainable development. In particular you said you rejected the use of land for single use development, does this mean zoning is dead? When I paint my LDF map will it be the same colour everywhere of marked mixed use? Sir John Egan: I think we have to have a special place for incinerators and places that are making a nuisance. It could be that there are some places with very heavy duty traffic going in and out of them that we also have to put in a special place. Apart from that I think the first thing we should attempt to do is to find a mixed use solution and only when we cannot do it that way would we go towards some single purpose. Q36 Chris Mole: That sounds like a qualified yes. Why? What is your thinking behind it? Instinctively I would tend to agree with you but it would be useful for the Committee to understand why you have reached that conclusion. Sir John Egan: I have the feeling that large groups of houses, for example, all with the same kind of socio-economic tenant with no other kind of organisation within miles of them do not actually have the leaders produced who can create the governance for the future. We do not automatically start looking after the open spaces that people have asked for. There is no question that people do want services easy to hand to their houses. If we follow the needs of the people and their wish for friendliness - friendliness is about number four on the list of things which people want, they want to be able to meet other people, we want to design our society so that they can meet other people. We cannot design them such that the only way of being a member of society is to have a car and to drive from one of these to another. If you slowly go through the list of requirements that the people have got then you are led to a mix development almost straightaway. What horrified me, and the reason that I wanted these things brought to a halt, is that we are still building places that we will have to pull down in 30 or 40 years' time because they will not satisfy the widespread requirements that the people have of them. Q37 Chris Mole: As I say I instinctively want to agree with you but do you have any evidence that is a justifiable argument given that there may be employment opportunities near where people live but they may work somewhere else? In my own town in Ipswich for historical reasons people go to doctors all over the town, not necessarily near where they life, how do you evidence the justification for more widespread and mixed use development? Sir John Egan: I think it is a matter of probabilities. We are not going to be able to create people's lives for them but we want to make a pretty high stab level of probability which they can carry out most of their activities within a relatively short distance. I do not think perversely we should design into it they cannot carry out their lives, which is basically what we have done. Q38 Christine Russell: You report calls for comprehensive master plans, again something I would support, did you have a look at the size? There is nothing in the Report but obviously you are not referring to little windfall sites which come up, did your experts give you any guidance as to the size of the site that it would be reasonable for the local authority to be producing their master plan or the owner's of the site or whatever? Sir John Egan: At the back of my mind I had the knowledge that we were probably building something like 100,000 homes too few to satisfy the requirements in the South East for example. I also knew there were going to be some very large sites we had available. The problem is we have an industry which is designed to do very small sights. For example the average plot size of our biggest house builder is only 75 so we have not even got the scale to do the big ones. We do not have the scale to do the big ones. What do we do about the little ones? Their in fills are often not bad because often they have not had a chance to get it all wrong because they only have a small site to work on. Are we adding to the difficulties of the community with our new 75 houses or are we ameliorating them? Have we given any thought to the community as a whole when we add our 75 houses there? I am hoping when the vision comes up, when the sustainable strategy is created by the local authority they can start from a common sense point of view working out what they are missing. Q39 Christine Russell: You are saying the need for the master plan should really depend on local circumstances. Sir John Egan: Yes. Q40 Christine Russell: What may be appropriate in a market town or a historic city, where it may be necessary, it would not necessarily be in a large conurbation? Sir John Egan: In some of these large areas like the Thames Gateway we have to do complete town planning, we have to build a new city, we have to create it in this way. What worried me is the way we are currently going at it is very piecemeal and we will probably still get poor outcomes. I am very worried about the environmental standards which will be created. I believe it is quite feasible for our industry to create very low emission buildings today but we could not do them cost effectively. If we set the standards very soon and demand that by eight years from now we are building environmentally suitable houses then we can do. We certainly will not do it unless we agree them, that is what we have to do and set the supply chains in operation to do it. It is very much horses for courses. It is a question of each local authority making its plan for the future, its plan to be sustainable, then first of all putting the infrastructure plan together and then bringing the development industry in to help them achieve the vision they have of the future. I think this vision should be shared by all of the members of the local authority. The councillors, everybody, should share a view of where they want to go in the future and that should be shared by all of the givers of national services and it is a view that they can then share with the development industry who can help them to achieve it. We saw that in places like Manchester and Birmingham, we saw very wholesome - answering an earlier question about what kind of developments worked - the development industry was always very happy when the local authority had a good high quality plan for the future and they knew what they wanted and then they could work in partnership together. Q41 Christine Russell: There is such a thing as local democracy and I am sure you would agree, maybe you have discovered, that it is far easier where you have overall political control, you have some clear vision, you have some strong civic leadership, it is rather more difficult in those area where there is not that consensus that you have said is necessary. Sir John Egan: The evidence we had was that where you try very hard to listen to the people and find out what they want and then sell to them solutions that answer those requirements, because you cannot expect people to automatically take them, you have to go out and really sell the solution you have on offer then the results were very good. I think one of the critical skills is the communication of talking to the people and delivering something which is going to fit their vision of the future. Q42 Chairman: This concept of mixed development seems to me an excellent one, with hindsight should Terminal 5 have had some residential accommodation in it? Sir John Egan: I said had to be special rules for incinerators! Q43 Chairman: Are you calling Terminal 5 an incinerator? Sir John Egan: Some things are not automatically good neighbours and those things have to be separated off. For example I would be advising the Government to take all of the land on the flight path of Stanstead away from development so that nobody started putting things down the flight path and creating the problems of Heathrow 20 years from now. It is still farm land, let us not let people develop housing on it, let us take it away from that possibility and then at least we have a good possibility that we can develop that airport without having the demerits of having a city all of the way round it. Q44 Mr O'Brien: How many elected members from local government were on the task group? Sir John Egan: How many elected members were on my task group? None. Q45 Mr O'Brien: None. Yet the whole thing is that it should be for local government to bring this to fruition. In chapter two where it says, "Responsibilities and processes for delivery", and you refer to local authorities being the lead. You confirm that with your comments. How can expect local authorities to co-operate when they are not involved with the work on the ground? Sir John Egan: We did have a lot of representatives from local government. We had Brian Briscoe who is Chief Executive of the Local Government Association, we had Howard Bernstein who is the Chief Executive of Manchester City Council and we also had a special meeting with local authorities, including the chief executives of cities and of rural areas, and so on and so forth. Yes, we did take our evidence through them. Of course do not forget we did have a lot of discussions with people themselves. Q46 Mr O'Brien: But not one on the task group. Sir John Egan: No, we did not. Q47 Mr O'Brien: Why was that? Sir John Egan: Interestingly enough I think we had two or three people who had had experience as local authority councillors but we certainly did not have anybody there who was a local authority councillor at the time. You ask me that question and I do not have any answer. I would have been happy to take people on if Brian Briscoe or Harry Bernstein had asked me to. Q48 Mr O'Brien: How many people from the former mining communities gave evidence to you? I represent a former mining area and one of the issues that the local authorities in those areas like to deal with is deprivation and the resources from Government into those areas have gone to ease the deprivation in those areas. A lot of work has been done but there is still a lot to be done. I would assume if we are going to look at the responsibilities of process for delivery we should look at it across the board. You refer to the core cities in here and you accept that a lot of local authorities have not yet come to look at an overall plan or an overall scheme. We are not looking at the real situations, we are not looking at the areas where there should be some sustainability in this Report and I consider that you have failed a lot of communities by not addressing that situation. I would put it to you had you had local elected representatives from the former industrial areas, who working hard to try and bring some sustainability back to their communities, you would have had a different Report because their input would have been grossly different to what we have at the present time. Sir John Egan: I think I was responding to the immediate requirements facing us which are to build some new communities of large size in the South East that I did not want to be built badly. I did not want to go through another 20 or 30 years building things which would not be adequate for the future. The thing which was foremost in my mind was that of coping with economic success rather than, as it were, economic failure. I have to say, and I will say this quite strongly to you, I would still say the same processes are there. The leaders of the community have to come up first with their ideas of what will lead to the future economic prosperity of their area, and that is the absolute key part of the programme. Then we have to be able to respond with the development of the community in line with what is going to be a prosperous community. I do not think the process is any different. Q49 Mr O'Brien: You have just inferred that the terms of reference that you accepted was to look at the development of the South East. Sir John Egan: No, I was aware of the pressures which were there. Indeed I was also asked whilst this process was going on if I could give the Government some advice in terms of their development of the Thames Gateway area. I was aware that one of the most pressing things to do was to cope with the problems of economic success, which is the fact that the South East is going to have to grow much more quickly than it has been recently. Q50 Mr O'Brien: Why? Sir John Egan: Because it has to. It has the business there. Q51 Mr O'Brien: That is the problem. If we follow your lead on that, Sir John, then the resources which should be distributed right across the regions will not be if it is channelled into the South East. Where do urban regeneration corporations and urban regeneration companies fit into your scheme? Sir John Egan: I am particularly anxious that we try to get all of the communities right and not just create special vehicles to get occasional places right. Q52 Mr O'Brien: These are in existence already. Sir John Egan: We can create special vehicles to get particular places right but why should we not try to get every community in the country right. Q53 Mr O'Brien: If you are saying the development of the South East is the prime objective then obviously the people in the North, the North East, North West and the Midlands will suffer. This has been pointed out on more than one occasion, the resources which should be channelled into the former industrial areas is going into the South East. I would have assumed that a Report like this would have mentioned that or given some support to the fact that there has to be a redistribution of resources. One of the problems we have in local government is the question of financing. Yet you are saying in your Report we need to have further financing for local government for this to be achieved. Sir John Egan: I am not sure whether your and my plans of creating future prosperity would actually jibe. I do not think just spending government money in areas is going to create future prosperity. I was brought up in a mill town and a mining area in Lancashire and there is not any unemployment there today because in the main they have jobs in Manchester which is only 20 miles away and there is a very fine motorway going from one to the other. That is the way that has been resolved and it has worked with the free market creating a solution. I do not think method of Government money poured into Rawtenstall would have made a longer term solution than has been found. I am not quite sure I would agree with you that pouring vast amounts of Government money into communities that were designed for the coal industry is necessarily the right approach overall for the country as a whole. I just do not think I agree with. Q54 Mr O'Brien: Have you checked the rate of pay for the jobs which have been created since the mines and the mills have closed, Sir John? Sir John Egan: I do not think I am going to be able to help you. On the other hand the one thing I will say is, if I were trying to create a future sustainable community in the North as well as I was doing for the South I would follow the same processes that I put in my Report. I just do not agree with you that you are right and I am wrong. Q55 Mr O'Brien: The question is that we have organisations in place, like I said the regeneration companies and corporations, could you explain the role of the existing local strategic partnerships and what will their role play in the process? Could they be broadened to ensure a more effective delivery mechanism? Sir John Egan: I think the local strategic partnership is the core way of delivering a sustainable community, yes. Q56 Chairman: There is this contradiction, you are saying give local authorities the power, are you not? Sir John Egan: Yes. Q57 Chairman: Then you are saying, do not bother to get elected on to a local council, just apply and you will be on the local strategic partnership where you can have your say that way. Sir John Egan: The local authority is going to give leadership. That partnership is going to include all of the service givers in the area. The leadership unquestionably should come from the local authority. Q58 Chairman: You are just there to rubber stamp what the local authority is saying. Sir John Egan: No. You have to work in partnership, and I think that is one of the critical skills. We are saying we have to learn to get out of our silos and work to get an optimum solution once given all of the issues and all of the problems that all of the members of the partnership have. One of the critical skills I would like to see developed is that of getting buy-in from various ideas and not just simply from those people who work for you. Q59 Christine Russell: I do not want to dampen your enthusiasm, Sir John, about partnership working but it is incredibly difficult to engage the private sector in these local strategic partnerships. All round the country they are now up and running and there is good engagement. People are generally getting out of their silos but the people who are getting out of their silos tend to be in the public services, you are now positively getting people from housing talking to people from health and talking to the police. It so difficult in most parts of the country there is a real struggle to get the private sector involved. Maybe the reason is, particularly in the construction industry, a lot of the companies do not have local bases, they have regional bases. Through the review and compiling your Report have you any tips or hints as to how better partners can work to engage the private sector? Sir John Egan: I think the natural partners will become the development industry who really want to develop in your area. I would like to see that very much more in the way of a partnership relationship. The reason we were not achieving world class construction was because people were failing to work as partners with each other within the construction industry. It does not come naturally but if you have a clear common cause and a clear objective and you have started to work on your processes together, yes, people will work together if they can see they are going to get results from it. The fact that it is the right thing to do and it is difficult does not mean to say you should not start with it. Q60 Chairman: If you are going to get local sustainable community strategies into place you have to engage local people in asking them what they want. Actually it is not the local people who are there now that you have to worry about, it is the local people who will be there in a few years' time. Do you think in looking at these sustainable communities you have enough people who are likely to live in them influencing them? Sir John Egan: That is an interesting question. One thing we have noticed of course are the ideal communities are very often those that have been built up over very long periods of time, they do work and people have a feel for the future. They feel a responsibility for the future. You have to have people having enough faith in themselves and their community to have a mind for the future, yes. I can see absolutely no reason why we cannot expect people living there today to have a mind for the future. Q61 Mr O'Brien: In the Report on page 35 at paragraph 2.10 you refer to delivery with regards to local government. Then you go on to say, "National departments operate and set priorities and has a major impact on the ability of local partnerships to deliver". Where do you believe they are currently falling down on a cross-departmental working? At the present time it is just the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister who seems to be involved with that kind of operation. If other departments have to take an interest where do you think they are falling down at the present time, Sir John? Sir John Egan: I have just started working with a Misch 22 Committee from the Cabinet where they are putting joined-up government into place for developing the Thames Gateway and there will be other projects as well. I am seeing that there they can take their common cause and they can put resources together at a time when the addition of those resources to the common cause will work. The problem that I see is that we have failed in trying to give national objectives to organisations we make them less than free agents to do an optimal job for their local community. Let me give you an example, it could be that we are obviously judging hospitals on a very small number of activities that they carry out. In reality I think the hospital is an absolutely key part for creating a health process for every one in their area and that might be their prime goal and not, as it were, how many hip operations they can do per hour or whatever or how successfully they do them. Very often national objectives have not allowed the local organisation to be a full partner in the development of their community. I would like to see as a legacy of Misch 22 each one of them put in place processes which allow each one of their responsibilities to be able to take part in developing their local community. I think, incidentally, there is a key role at regional level. There are three areas which will have to be done at regional level. I think most of the prosperity planning will have to be done on a regional level. I think most of the transport infrastructure planning will be done on a regional basis. We cannot all have an opera house, so where does that go? Where do the libraries go? Where do all of these services we can create go? That might have to be done on a larger scale than the individual community. I think there is very, very strong requirement for some kind of regional co-ordination. Q62 Christine Russell: ODPM intends to set up a planning advisory service in the autumn do you see that as the main vehicle for delivering what is in your Report? If not what do you see its role as being? Sir John Egan: It is going to be very important for those communities that have on them a once in a lifetime huge expansion and they just simply will not have the resources available to add a huge community to them. Looking at the communities in the Thames Gateway I am absolutely certain they will need a resource to call on that will allow them to do their jobs well. Q63 Christine Russell: Do you know or do the two officials with you know who is going to make up this planning advisory service? Ms Holkham: I know it is going to be run by IDEA, who is the local government skills and training advisers. I think that is as far as we know at the moment. Q64 Chairman: It is not very urgent if you are only thinking about setting it up in the autumn? Mr Lunts: I do not know, that is not that far away. Q65 Chairman: That is quick for Government, is it? Mr Lunts: Quick-ish. The Planning Advisory Service is going to be important but it is going to have a very specific role to play, I think it is likely to be a significant player with regard to the new National Skills Centre but I do not see it as being a substitute for it. Q66 Christine Russell: Can I ask you how you related to, had dialogues with or had no contact with Kate Barker and her review team? Sir John Egan: We did have some discussions with her and some of the process we agreed on. Far more work has to be done upfront before there is a planning application. Q67 Chairman: Which ones did you disagree with? Sir John Egan: I hate them talking about housing now, they need an extra 50,000 houses there and 20,000 here. I think we should never talk about that. We should talk about expanding communities and not talk about houses. Now when people talk about houses I just see these horrible jumbles of houses which sometimes get dumped in a field where you simply know this is a failure. I would just like them to stop talking about houses. Q68 Christine Russell: It is a bit difficult because she was commissioned to look at housing supply. Sir John Egan: I know. If we are going to create the houses we have to get people to believe in the planning system. People right now are terrified that their communities will be expanded beyond the resources they have. I think we have to be very clear that we are going to expand communities. Q69 Christine Russell: Is not what you are saying, people who are already adequately housed have stronger voices than those who are in housing need? Is that not a real problem facing Britain? Sir John Egan: Perhaps. I am also conscious of the fact that we do not want to expand communities beyond that which they can usefully absorb. We want them to be communities. We simply do not want to build just houses any more. How many of those housing developments which were built 20 or 30 years ago will we have to pull down? We do not want any more of that. What we do want is to develop communities. Q70 Christine Russell: Can I just ask you to elaborate on the comment you make where you say that you want to see a culture change for everyone involved in development control in particular? Sir John Egan: I think it is a very much legally directed process. I think you use the law to get what you want. The culture change I want is that we create places for people, to excite people, to interest people and to make wholesome lives for them. I believe if that is agreed as the objective the development industry will join in with that. Q71 Christine Russell: Who do you see as the prime obstacles at the moment? Do you see the professional planners or is it the elected members who serve on planning committees? Sir John Egan: I think everyone has contributed to this poor situation. I think we have to raise everyone's game. I do not think I want to blame anyone in particular. We have all fallen into the trap of allowing the process to take charge of us. Q72 Christine Russell: Awareness raising seminars and training for councillors, would that be a good thing? Sir John Egan: Yes. The big thing with the councillors is they own the sustainable development plan. They actually want to make a better community for everybody and so they will own the development processes that are necessary to achieve it. I think that is the absolute key. Q73 Chris Mole: Have local authorities adopted the local agenda 21 concept over the last decade or so in the majority of cases? Will that not have driven a sustainability agenda for some period of time? Sir John Egan: I think yes but I mean we are looking at a behaviour change for everybody. That is only one element of it. Q74 Chris Mole: It is a fairly all-encompassing, it is a pretty holistic approach. Mr Lunts: It is fair to say even though a lot of councillors wrongly or rightly have adopted local agenda 21 policies it is sometimes difficult to see how those policies are really translating in to the quality of development which would really underpin local agenda 21 credentials. I think it is that dissonance which is still an issue. Sir John Egan: The problem you have is many of the planning guidelines lead us to these single use developments, they are easier, they get done easier and it is easier to do it this way. I think you have to take a very deliberate set of steps if you want to create marvellous places for people to live in. I think you have to consciously do it. I think you have to think about it, you have to lay out your plan, and that is the way that you do it. To simply try to do your best with the processes which are in there right now is not necessarily going to get you there. You have to make these conscious changes. We were very impressed with a number of the leaders and chief executives that we met in the cities who have made some really good, big quality moves and they actually, as it were, gave the leadership and they had this view of where they wanted the city to go. I would like every local authority to have such a plan. Q75 Chris Mole: You have drawn attention to the modern local government agenda, the separation of responsibilities between executive scrutiny and indeed with development control sitting in a quasi judicial box at the end of the organisation, if you like. Do you think that should allow openly some parts of local authority to proactively support development whilst another part has to carry out its quasi judicial function? Do you think the public will ever understand that it is not just the council that is making the decision? Sir John Egan: I think they all have to share in their vision. I do not think you can have warring parties, some willing to go one way and some willing to go another, everyone has to share in the overall vision. Then, absolutely, you have to have some people making sure we have got quality controls. On the other hand I think they should all share in the vision as a whole. Q76 Mr Betts: Initially it seemed at the beginning your review was going to be about professional skills but in the end you decided not to do an audit of the skills available and where shortages might exist. Why was that? Sir John Egan: We did try to be honest but there was not enough evidence of shortages. We did commission some consultants to look at this and we did not get enough evidence to follow up. I have to say my own personal view is that until you see good process in place and a good goal and a good objective you see people wasting much of their time. I have to say I saw a number of developments where the planners, the developers had created at least a dozen plans and none of them had been accepted. There is an awful lot of waste into today's process. I think there is always going to be waste unless the local authority has got its vision in place and they have a plan to achieve it. The developers can then become partners. Unless we do it that way there will always be waste. Q77 Mr Betts: Is this why you think you may be getting a bit of a critical report in the planning press, you are really saying, we do not want more planners we simply which want to make sure the ones we have do a more effective job? Sir John Egan: Yes, at this stage. When we find out how far we can get that way then we will discover where our real shortages lie. Q78 Mr Betts: That change is pretty fundamental, how quickly do you think you can achieve that. Sir John Egan: We have this growth to take care of right now. If we are going to wait for planners to be trained we will be waiting five years before we get the new planners out into the job. To be frank we have to be tackling it now and we have to tackle it with the people we have. We are going to have to do that anyway. In the meantime we can find out where the shortages lie. When we start doing it properly and we do not waste a huge amount of resource, I think what we are doing today is extremely wasteful. Q79 Mr Betts: As well as having this vision which the planners can work to you are saying they have to themselves react differently. Is there a re-training for planners which you see? Sir John Egan: Yes I think they themselves have to learn to work out side their silo. They have to see and buy into the goal of creating places that are fit for people to live in. Do not forget they are the guys who that have accepted everything that has gone before us for the last 20 or 30 years. They have to accept change as well. I would like them all to have a people part in their hearts, where they try and be sensible and try to create places fit for people to live in. Q80 Mr Betts: The simple message is, you do not need more resources, you do not need more planners just use what you have more efficiently. Sir John Egan: Not yet. We might find later that we do have. For example in the construction industry we were using people very wastefully, productivity could easily be doubled. Where are your shortages there when you have doubled your productivity by work better and working smarter? I have a feeling the first thing we have to do is see the improved efficiency of the whole process and work our way through it. We have to train people as we go anyway, we have to retrain the people who are there and whilst all of this is going on we can then find out where the real shortages are. Q81 Mr Betts: What sort of time period are you looking at there? Sir John Egan: I would have thought inside two or three years we should understand where the shortages are. Q82 Christine Russell: Do you think in general local authority planners are simply too reactive and they need to be more proactive? Sir John Egan: That is part of the concept here. We want to see each local authority having a vision of the future of where they want to take their place. Yes, I want to see a positive view rather than simply reacting to everybody who comes in with an idea, because that is a pretty wasteful way of doing it. Q83 Chairman: We are going to wait a couple of years to see whether we are short of these skills. It takes a long time to train them, does it not? Sir John Egan: It does. Q84 Chairman: We could be ten years away from getting the people we need? Sir John Egan: That is why we have to concentrate on the people who are there doing the job today. Q85 Chairman: We are going to get the advisory body set up in the autumn, you want to have the skills centre set up when? Sir John Egan: I would like to see it set up as soon as we can. Ms Holkham: The Report says to try and get it operational in some way by early 2005. Q86 Chairman: Another move of speed from the Government! Ms Holkham: I think that is a very, very rapid agenda. Q87 Chairman: What are you going to do to make it attractive to 15 and 16 year olds to go into planning as a career where they are going to get good rewards? Sir John Egan: I think the natural chief executive of the council will be the chief planner. As soon as they can see this route leads to the top then I think they will want to be planners. Q88 Chairman: You just a degree, you do not bother with architecture or planning or anything like that, just get a good degree and you will be in charge. Sir John Egan: Get a good degree as a town planner, become a town planner and then become the chief executive. Q89 Christine Russell: Rogers in his Report said we needed a city architect. You are saying he is wrong, we need a city planner. Sir John Egan: You are going to need planners and we would like to see those planners become chief executives. Chairman: On that note can I thank you very much. |