Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE 2004
DR HUGH
ELLIS
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, Dr Ellis.
I am sorry we have kept you waiting. Thank you very much for the
substantial memorandum which you sent in, for which we are grateful.
We have looked at that memorandum, and it is clear that you are
not happy with several important aspects of the Barker Review.
One of the issues you raised is that the review is based uncritically
on the "Treasury's macroeconomic idea of a `golden arc' of
growth" in the South East. Can you elaborate a little bit
about why you disapprove of the "golden arc of growth"
and the emphasis that the Treasury has placed on that?
Dr Ellis: Yes, I can. There has
always been, in planning terms, since the last war a major structural
inequality in the nation in terms of economic growth performance,
and that has had huge implications for social justice and for
the environment. The issue has come to the fore now again simply
because the Treasury "golden arc" model is a simplistic
idea that says essentially that the broader South East is our
economic driver, vital to ensuring our economic competitiveness
in the global economy. All of this, of course, is fine but it
begs important questions about environmental quality in the South
East and how that is to be sustained, and about quality of life.
Essentially, it delivers a vision of the nation which has a North
in "managed decline", which is a phrase which has been
used more and more in government policy, and a vision of the South
of "uncontrolled development", and Barker is, I suppose,
the final expression of that policy initiative. Ultimately, neither
economically, socially nor environmentally can that kind of policy
be sustained, and in fact I would go further to say that although
the nation faces many issues of sustainable development and challenges,
there is no greater issue in spatial terms than that regional
inequality. Unless we can sort it out, the environmental and social
costs for the South in terms of congestion will be overwhelming.
I do think, reading Barker, that in relation to urban policy,
the effective acknowledgement of the abandonment of some communities
which "no longer have an economic purpose" is a price
too high to pay in every possible terms: politically, socially
and environmentally. The fact that the Treasury persists with
that model, despite those other issues, makes it very difficult
to plan strategically for sustainable development, I think.
Q2 Chairman: There is also in Barker
a reference to unused open space having little social value, which
is the flipside of what you have been saying. Do you have thoughts
on that?
Dr Ellis: I think underpinning
Barker is a view that planning is no more than opportunity cost
of land and that all decisions can be boiled down essentially
to that cost/benefit question. One of the grave drawbacks of Barker
is that it is a report that does not understand planning history,
nor the planning system. That kind of cost/benefit analysis was
tried in the Sixties with the third London airport, for example,
and actually the nuclear programme, and what people discovered
was that it is impossible to place those kinds of costs on land,
because planning is a complex process of community, political,
environmental, social and economic views, that have to be discussed,
mediated and traded off. Putting those values on land is essentially
meaningless. It does not help us in policy terms to make good
decisions.
Q3 Chairman: I am a South East Member
of Parliament, and it will not surprise you to know that your
approach finds a lot of resonance with my constituents. But is
there not a case for looking more closely at the economic argument?
Is there not something of merit in the idea that you knock down
houses where people do not want to live and maybe create some
kind of environmental improvement as a result, and build houses
where they do want to live?
Dr Ellis: The planning system
has always been sensitive to those economic pressures broadly.
I think Barker has two layers of implications which are very negative.
One: as a nation, are we willing to accept what is in the Communities
Plan about the Pathfinder renewal project? We can take an urban
area in Liverpool or Newcastle, demolish high-density, terraced,
poor property and redevelop at low density, and we end up still
with a community, but there is a logic beyond that, a macro logic
in Barker, that says that when the economic purpose of communities
no longer exists, managed decline is what we will do. My question
is: what is the limit of managed decline for the North? Not only
is the logic of Barker that we do not plan, because it is a price-sensitive
issue, but that that decline will be prolonged. It will not be
a question of five to ten years; it will follow the structure
of the golden arc and be prolonged. All I can express is that,
in relation to the examples of the decline of coalfields, for
example, I think it is unacceptable to say to a community, "Since
your economic purpose has been removed, your social purpose is
also removed." In some ways, that is a point way beyond environment,
and goes to the heart of how we organise our nation. In relation
to the South East, the flipside of that is: how much land do you
think you can identify for how long for this growth to continue?
What is the limit of growth? That is a question which neither
Barker nor the Communities Plan nor the Government is willing
to answer, and it is a very difficult question, and fundamental.
The second tier in Barker which I think is important is this issue
of price sensitivity. Barker is suggesting that we do not plan.
While the Barker team has said many things after the report to
say "We should have thought more about the environment,"
the essential implication of a price-sensitive planning system
is that we release land over and above need in areas of high demand,
40% more than need in areas of high demand. That means we concentrate
development in the South East. That is the net effect of that.
Remembering that the Local Plan process now is a three-year review
process, so we go on allocating 40% more land on a three-year
cycle. Where does that leave us? Ultimately, where does it leave
the North? The report says we will not use this mechanism in the
North because there is relatively lower demand there. That is
a recipe for regional inequalities on a hitherto unseen scale,
not really since the 1930s, before we had planning. I think on
all of those levels we as a nation have to be able to strategically
plan so that the communities in the North have a future, so that
the communities in the South have sustainable development in a
way which upholds quality of life. That means biting the bullet
and saying we need a national spatial framework which in part
is redistributive, which is, again, a very hard question.
Q4 Joan Walley: The Chairman is an
MP for the South East; I am an MP from north of Watford. I would
just like to ask you about the strategic approach and whether
or not, turning it the other way round, you see the prospect or
the opportunities for the Treasury, having commissioned the Lyons
report jointly with ODPM, as a means of kick-starting economic
growth in areas where the economic basis of those communities
may already have disappeared. How do you see that linking to this
wider spatial issue about planning and the contents of the Barker
report?
Dr Ellis: I think the content
of the Lyons report is very positive. In fact, it takes us back,
it seems to me, to perhaps where we were in the 1960s, when the
last big decentralisation of public services took place. This
is a very crude generalisation, but some communities really would
not be there if it had not been for that decentralisation of public
services, such as Vehicle Licensing, for example. That decentralisation
can be very positive, and it provides, I suppose, an economic
purpose for these communities. I think decentralisation is very
positive. The question, of course, comes when you move from public
to private sector and how that is to be achieved. That is the
hard question. I think decentralisation of public services should
be seen as part of the national strategic framework, certainly
for England, as we stand at the moment. I do not think Barker
fits into that. Barker is working in the opposite direction.
Q5 Joan Walley: That was my point.
Could there not be an opportunity for the objectives of both to
be reinforcing each other in an ideal world? Should that not be
what is happening?
Dr Ellis: In an ideal world. I
think at the present they cross on the train at Watford, in the
sense that Barker is opening the gates for unrestrained growth
in the South East, and Lyons is attempting to say that we can
restore administrative purpose and social and economic purpose
to communities in the North. There is a myth going round that
the regional policy in the Sixties and Seventies was a complete
failure in this country and the attempt to redress the structural
imbalance was a disaster. I do not accept that. Much of the regional
policy did give communities in the North effective purpose for
some time, but if you turn the tap off in 1982-83, then you live
with the consequences of no regional policy for 20 years, and
that has caused a tremendous amount of damage. I think Barker
is a distraction from the Lyons Review; it is a distraction ultimately
actually from the Communities Plan and other major initiatives
because of the simplicity with which it approaches the problem.
Q6 Mr Challen: In your critique of
Barker's reforms, you have said that "they question the core
principles of democratic planning" but is it not really the
case that, at the local level at least, planning decisions are
a complete mystery to most people? I represent a seat in the south
of Leeds, the golden arc around the south of Leeds, I have to
say, and we have had a Unitary Development Plan recently adopted,
last year. It took 10-12 years for that plan to come to fruition,
and it reflects previous plans, and only the planning anoraks
really understand what the process is and where it is at. Would
it not make a lot of sense for some of these so-called democratic
principles to be looked at very seriously?
Dr Ellis: I see no problem at
all in making planning efficient and open and participative. In
fact, probably in the last two years of my work with ODPM, the
planning system has come into disrepute because of delay and complexity,
and you are absolutely right that it is a mystery to a lot of
communities, but I do not think that is a reason to dismantle
the core principles in the way that Barker is suggesting. I think
that is a different question. Making planning accessible is about
making anoraks like me speak in normal language, and making the
system easy, with real opportunities to participate in meaningful
ways. I think we can make plans more related to community needs
by engaging communities more, but at the end of the day, local
politicians are the absolute safeguard of public accountability.
That is their core function, and if you take them out of the system,
you are left with a major problem about who decides what the public
interest is for the south of Leeds or the South East in general.
Who is going to decide that?
Q7 Mr Challen: I was trying to bottom
that question of accountability really in my first question, whether
there was any accountability as such in this UDP process that
I have mentioned. The policy that everybody wanted actually was
what John Prescott announced in PPG3, protecting greenbelt, and
as a consequence of that national decision, a lot of local land
in my constituency was returned to the green belt, I think against
the wishes of many local politicians or their offices, more to
the point. So where is the accountability?
Dr Ellis: I can see the point.
It is a very complex question, because there are layers of it.
Clearly, central government retains very directive powers on planning
in relation to the way that it can or cannot endorse a plan or
set policy. In some ways, that question, which does need sorting
out, is in my mind separate to what Barker is talking about. Barker
is saying "Let's make planning non-planning; let's make it
price-sensitive." The system is imperfect at the moment.
There is no doubt about that, but at least you can object, at
least you can have your say, at least you can talk to a local
councillor, and ultimately at least you can lobby at higher levels
on planning issues, but if you take up Barker's suggestion by
saying that we start to locate and release and decide the amounts
of land purely on price, how will communities respond to that?
They are essentially being told "Your needs are the same
as price." If we get to that position in planning, which
is essentially the heart of Barker, we have put ourselves back
40 years, and we have said that sustainable development amounts
to no more than speculative desire for land prices. I would say
that the track of making planning more accountable to the local
level, which is the subject of an ODPM publication that came with
PPS1 on community involvement in planning—that paper was
very good and contained a lot of material that helped address
those questions, but I think it is separate from stripping away
those principles altogether. We should be trying to make them
work rather than removing them.
Q8 Mr Challen: Some people hold to
the view that markets are the most democratic things ever. An
estate agent who says, "Location, location, location"
is simply describing a democratic process whereby people choose
where they want to live, and it just happens that a lot of people
want to live in the same place and therefore the price goes up.
I am being the devil's advocate to a certain extent, but surely
you see some merit in that argument.
Dr Ellis: Am I allowed to say
no? No, for two reasons. Firstly, price is not a function of need.
Price is the result of, for example, people buying to let or speculating
in land, or not bringing forth housing units on land they have
planning permission for and therefore increasing unit prices and
therefore increasing land prices. Social need is what planning
deals with. In a funny way, I think that planning has always tried
to say, "How many houses do we need in an area? Let's plan
for that." It has never tried to say, "Let's not try
and plan for need." If we wanted to change the nature of
need, that would be fine, but let us be clear: that is not what
Barker is suggesting. Barker is suggesting "Let's have need
and then let's have price sensitive on top of need, over and above
that." What is so frustrating about Barker in relation to
the social justice question is that the report is written about
stabilising house price inflation and says virtually nothing new
about social housing need, certainly nothing new that is meaningful,
and that is an important question. I would say one thing more
on price, just because it could be the end of all anoraks. If
we accept that price is the core and only determinant of social
welfare, there is no logical basis for a planning system, which
is why Barker is so damaging. Barker may not want to think that
she has had that implication but the implication is absolutely
clear in the report.
Q9 Mr Challen: In the context of
simplifying the planning system, have you found anything of benefit
in her report?
Dr Ellis: On balance, you could
only say that of her discussion of some fiscal change to the way
that planning operates in relation to betterment tax and land
tax. Some of that is useful. Nothing else in the recommendations
has any merit as far as I am concerned because it would be so
damaging to the nature of the existing system and so contrary
to the ideas of delivering sustainable development.
Q10 Mr Challen: Do Friends of the
Earth propose a system which would ensure that there was a good
supply of affordable housing in the right locations?
Dr Ellis: We would begin by admitting,
as we have indeed admitted in front of this Committee before,
I think, that our sector has not been as socially responsible
as it needs to be on social housing need. We would go on from
there to say that social housing need should be met everywhere,
and there is no question about that. What we argue with is whether
general demand should be met everywhere at all times. The real
issue about delivering social needs housing is that at the moment
it is delivered very inefficiently through cross-subsidies from
the private sector, through s106 obligations, squeezing affordable
housing out of units of housing of higher value. If you want to
deliver social housing, it is very simple: you have to pay for
it. It is a financing issue, not a planning issue, that is restricting
the development of social housing. When local authorities controlled
social housing, it was integrated into the planning system. Land
was purchased and houses delivered and paid for by the state.
In sustainable development terms, in terms of land use, that is
the most effective way of delivering social housing. Our view
actually is an old-fashioned one, which is that we should return,
not solely but largely, to meeting social needs housing out of
public investment. The private sector may have a role to play
in that. The management of social housing had to change, and in
our view that was the flaw in it for many years.
Q11 Mr Challen: It would be a return
to council housing?
Dr Ellis: It would be a return
to the provision of housing by local authorities, but the management
of housing in a much more effective and participative way by tenants.
That is as far as we have got with the debate, but what we are
absolutely sure of is that you cannot efficiently deliver social
housing in the South East by saying to the private sector "Please
provide 10 units out of 100", because the amount of land
you have to allocate to effectively deliver social housing goes
up and up because you are only getting a small proportion of cross-subsidy
in any one go.
Q12 Mr Thomas: We know that we live
in a very unequal country where regional inequalities are greater
than they have been at any stage since the Second World War. We
can see the underlying problems with that, but in the answer you
just gave to Mr Challen you suggested that we can deal with social
housing, but that surely does leave a large number of people chasing
after scarce housing in the South East—nurses, teachers,
whoever—who would not traditionally have been thought of
as people in need of social housing, who are tied into the economic
system, who have to be here. You may want to change that system
in order that they do not have to be here in 20 years' time, but
they are now, and we are also facing this huge problem of affordability.
A report came out today again underlining that gap of affordability.
Surely there has to be some prescription that meets private housing
demand as well. That is what Barker tries to do, albeit she has
failed in your opinion. I do not think it is enough to rely on
social housing.
Dr Ellis: No, it is not, and I
do not think that we are arguing that we would not build in the
South East. What we are saying is that the scale of development
that Barker envisages is not sustainable in all sorts of terms.
We have a planning process which we can define need through, and
that is what we have been doing for 60 years, but the reason that
that has stopped working is because we go back to the golden arc
problem. I know what you are saying; it is inadequate for me to
say "Let's solve the golden arc, but what do people do now?"
and I am not sure I have a full answer for you. Ultimately, the
answer is that unless we get a grip on moving the drive to that
demand out of the South East, then nurses, doctors, police officers,
will be confronted with that problem, an unintended consequence,
if you like, of a Treasury macroeconomic idea.
Q13 Mr Thomas: What about the environmental
argument about what tends to happen now—and I am not a South
East MP, obviously—people who are actually commuting great
distances, having an environmental impact in having to live 100
miles from London and trying to do their jobs in that way? That
has to come into the picture as well, does it not?
Dr Ellis: It does. It is a complex
picture, but again, on balance, it would be more sustainable and
better if there were a more even pattern of development so those
commuting distances did not have to take place. The solution cannot
always be that we simply accommodate all that growth as a result
of that commuting pattern in the South East. This is a classic
wicked planning problem, in which it is difficult to see where
the winners are, but we return to that central point that all
of these are unintended consequences of that model. We have to
deal with those drivers, and we probably have to deal with them
urgently, in relation to making sure that we decentralise economic
activity in a way which is fairer for the nation and relieves
those pressures.
Q14 Joan Walley: You have been quite
scathing in some of the comments that you have made. I just wonder
whether or not you would look at the outcome of the Barker report
or at the remit that the Treasury gave for the Barker report.
Do you think there was a sufficient sustainable development
brief from the Treasury in the first instance, or do you see it
as wholly and solely arising out of the actual report that Barker
made?
Dr Ellis: There are a couple of
points there. Kate Barker has said since that the remit was very
tight, to discuss a particular defined issue about house price
inflation and housing supply in a particular area. My comment
on that would be that her remit was tight, but she strayed from
it in other areas to an incredible extent, particularly in questioning
the democratic basis of planning, which did not cause the review
team any problem. The issue of whether or not the remit was set
in the first place in the place it should have been—Barker
is in a long line of Treasury-inspired reports, beginning
with McKinsey, which are anti-planning, that see planning as a
brake to economic competitiveness, and that misunderstand the
fact that it is trying to do a very complicated social, economic
and environmental process. You could take a step back even from
there and again, speaking with my anorak firmly on, we approached
the regional issue of over-development in the South East through
the Communities Plan before we had ever decided what the environmental
limits of the South East were. The Defra report only arrived two
years after that point. So the process of strategic planning for
England has been to accept large-scale growth in the South East
as a political decision, then to begin to implement that in all
sorts of ways, then to commission an economic study from the Treasury
on Barker, which in fact doubles that growth, and then Defra come
along very belatedly and say that there might be one or two problems
with that. Then at the very end we might actually begin to think
about how transport infrastructure and various other things, which
should have been central to the planning process, might only be
delivered years after. Can I say that that is not in any way how
we should have approached the strategic planning of England or
the UK in any shape or form. What should have happened is that
the principles of the Sustainable Development Strategy should
have guided the process where those Departments worked together
collectively to deliver a plan that was much more balanced and
much more strategic.
Q15 Joan Walley: I think we will
come on to some of those points in a minute, but just before we
do, you say in your evidence that the building industry has been
let off the hook by Barker. I am not quite sure why you reached
that conclusion.
Dr Ellis: I think the interim
report, in tone at least, was quite a lot more critical of the
building industry than the final report. For example, in the interim
report, in my reading of it, there was a more balanced view that
planning was one element of the difficulty, but the industry bringing
forward development at the right place, delivering the right kind
of units, was also an issue. What has happened in Barker, perhaps
leaving tax aside for the moment, is that the final set of recommendations—there
are so many I just describe them as the ones in their late 30s—are
essentially a voluntarist approach to persuading the industry
to do what would be desirable, and unlike the planning system,
where major reforms, radical reforms, are suggested, there is
no such radicalism in relation to the building industry. Essentially,
we are still left with the problem of how to encourage an industry
which has skills shortages, which has some degree of interest
in not building low-cost units—it has an interest in delivering
units at the highest profitable value to themselves, and that
is not always socially desirable.
Q16 Joan Walley: So are you saying
that someone got at the report between the interim and the final?
Do you think there was intensive lobbying on that?
Dr Ellis: I am afraid to say Friends
of the Earth have no effective conspiracy theory to offer you.
All I can say is I find it very surprising that the tone of the
report changed so that the emphasis of the report was largely
aimed in recommendation terms on nailing the planning system and
a much more voluntarist approach in relation to the industry.
It may well be, of course, that it is simply easier to nail up
the planning system in relation to recommendations than to deal
with the private sector building industry.
Q17 Joan Walley: Do you agree with
the view of the Barker report that it is not a problem to have
stock market listed developers with landbanks from 2.8 to 6.8
years before that land is released for development? Do you think
that is a problem or not?
Dr Ellis: I believe it is a problem.
Q18 Joan Walley: Why do you believe
it is a problem?
Dr Ellis: Essentially, it has
to do with motivation. The industry's desires and motivations
do not coincide with the public interest all of the time, particularly
in relation to the release of land when it is most needed. At
the moment we have a housing crisis in terms of delivery. There
is land with granted planning permission out there. The question
is why could that not be delivered? In relation to the control
of that land, we have to find a way of drawing the private sector
much more into decisions about the numbers of houses and where
they are built than they are at the moment. Essentially, they
can get permission for land for a considerable amount of time
and sit on it, despite social need.
Q19 Joan Walley: Will private developers
release or build affordable homes unless there is some element
of compulsion?
Dr Ellis: No, they will not, and
I think that is why we are more and more convinced that the public
sector should do that job. If the public sector were to take a
stronger role in delivering social housing, these problems would
not be anything like as severe. It would also, of course, have
a positive effect on house price inflation.
|
