Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 30)
WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE 2004
DR HUGH
ELLIS
Q20 Gregory Barker: You have said
it is easy to nail the planning system. Part of the reason why
people are critical of it is the plethora of public documents
that contribute to it, and also the guide to how sustainability
is incorporated into planning policy and construction. Can you
give us your views on the principal documents that I refer to,
mainly the Sustainable Communities Plan, the Draft Planning Policy
Statement 1 and the Sustainable Development Strategy? Is there
enough in these to ensure that we generally build houses in a
way that is compatible with the principles of sustainable development?
Dr Ellis: There certainly is not
enough in any of those documents to deliver the step change in
where we build and what we build to deliver sustainable development.
In the order in which you took them, the Communities Plan is a
very difficult beast because it has emerged in several parts,
dealing primarily with the housing crisis in the South East and
then turning to the Northern Way, which is part of the Communities
Plan, obviously much later. It is a piecemeal approach to a housing
crisis and, as I said, it makes political judgments about growth
and where it will take place before any effective assessment of
environmental limits has been made. But the effect of the Communities
Plan has been very interesting in relation to sustainable development.
If you examine PPS1, particularly the drafts before the one that
was issued . . .
Q21 Gregory Barker: Before you leave
the Communities Plan, I think it actually mentions environment
in one place, where it says "A safe and healthy local environment."
What do you think that says about the Government's commitment
to practical measures?
Dr Ellis: That they are not serious,
and the reason I would say that is that the Communities Plan definition
of sustainable communities is beginning to replace the objective
of sustainable development. That is vitally important in planning.
PPS1 in the opening paragraph talks about the importance of sustainable
communities, and, from memory, in paragraph 7 or 8 it talks about
the importance of sustainable development, without ever telling
us the relationship of those two ideas. If you go to Annex A of
PPS1, "sustainable communities" is defined without any
reference, for example, to nature conservation. That is just an
example. Already, in some local plans that I have seen in the
North, the objective of the plan, sustainable communities and
sustainable development, does not actually feature in the policy
at all. What the Government has done is confused two distinct
ideas. I think the way it should run is this. Sustainable development
is our objective, and sustainable communities might be one sub-agenda
of the way we want to achieve sustainable development, but because
PPS1 is not clear about that anywhere, what you get is a confused
mess in which people take "sustainable communities"
to mean a very pro-development agenda, particularly in the South
East, and that sustainable development has been put on the back
foot. The Government has not made those linkages, and without
those linkages, planning in policy terms is in a real mess. We
have to sort that out, I think, by saying the core objective and
purpose of planning must be delivering sustainable development.
Q22 Gregory Barker: Perhaps you could
give us your views on the powers that planners actually have to
insist on sustainable construction methods, for example.
Dr Ellis: I do not think that
they have those effective powers. My colleagues who are giving
evidence later will give you more detail. Our view is that we
have to deliver a huge step change in construction quality and
design quality. That is about design and layout, what we build
and how we build, building small-scale renewables and energy efficiency
into our housing. The only way you can do that is to be very,
very prescriptive, and in fact, I would go further and say you
have to be mandatory to persuade the industry to deliver the kind
of change that we need.
Q23 Gregory Barker: Do you think
the planners themselves would want that role?
Dr Ellis: I think the planners
themselves must have that role. It seems to me that the whole
purpose of planning must be to deliver sustainable development,
and if these houses, wherever they are, have to be builtand
we do not dispute need; it is about where, how and when and whatthen
we have to build to those high standards.
Q24 Gregory Barker: Do you think
the planners, the individuals, who currently make up the profession
of town planning, actually have the qualities and the capabilities
to do that job properly?
Dr Ellis: You are asking me to
be critical of my profession?
Q25 Gregory Barker: Yes. For example,
in your average town hall.
Dr Ellis: No. I do not believe
we have alwaysthis is a generalisationhad the quality
in planning that we need, because planning has been run down as
a profession, run down as an activity, considered to be the sort
of thing that you can clear a bar by announcing that you are one.
That may be a generalisation, but it is really a profound problem,
and it is profound in two ways: what is the purpose of planning,
and therefore what is the purpose of the profession? It is true
to say that there are a lot of highly skilled planners out there
with important things to say, and the discretionary nature of
our planning system, which Barker would undermine, means that
those planning professionals' role is really key. But we have
to find ways of making it clear what their purpose is and educating
them properly for that.
Q26 Gregory Barker: I think it is
also the fact that they are not paid anything. It is a relatively
low-grade, civil service job in the scheme of things, although
it has the potential to be incredibly creative. If you compare
the planner's role to a well paid architect or private sector
job, it is light years away, yet their impact on the system could
be huge.
Dr Ellis: Yes. That is certainly
a very big issue. I think ODPM in the culture change programme
have tried to address some of those issues, but it is not helped
by this confusion of purpose about what planning is for.
Q27 Gregory Barker: If we did have
a national strategy for housing, would that be on its own a strong
enough driver to ensure sustainability? Would it be of help to
those local authorities that do not have the calibre of people?
Dr Ellis: I think a national strategy
for housing would have to be part of what we have called in our
evidence a national spatial framework, which many organisations
have called for, and that is a framework which sets out firmly
the regional inequalities agenda and tries to seek sustainable
solutions to it. That strategy, as I said, would deal with decentralisation
and relocation perhaps of public and possibly private sector measures.
I would say this about the detail of what planners need to know
about sustainable development: ODPM is pushing for much slimmer
national guidance in many areas in the PPS series that it is producing
now. Planners actually benefit from more prescription almost always
rather than less, in my experience. We need to be clear what that
framework is. After all, PPSs are not something that they are
forced to follow; they are guidance, but that kind of guidance,
in detail, is really important. For example, if we want to build
a sustainable village on a brownfield site, issues of design and
layout are as critical as building techniques. So building regs
can deal with part of this agenda, but PPS3 on housing needs to
have much more content on sustainable construction and design
in it than it has at present.
Q28 Mr Francois: On a related point,
there has been major legislation going through Parliament precisely
on this, the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill, and a lot
of these new documents flow from that. What is the view of Friends
of the Earth about that Bill?
Dr Ellis: There are two questions
really. The relation of the Communities Plan to the Bill is difficult
to see. I do not see any relationship to national policy to the
Bill. The Bill itself was always desperately flawed. It was not
based on an evidenced view of what was wrong with the existing
planning system, and as a result of it has delivered a system
which is highly complicated, highly fragmented, difficult to administer
and a barrier to sustainable development.
Q29 Joan Walley: If I could pick
up one aspect of the replies you gave to Mr Barker, and that is
the ability of planners locally to have the capacity to actually
deliver what is needed in terms of sustainable communities, however
that is defined, I would define it in relation to sustainable
development, but do we not need a step change too in respect of
education in sustainable development? It is not just about the
ability of the planners to deliver and the capacity that they
have and the way of bringing all this together, but it is their
understanding, or maybe even in some places their lack of understanding
of sustainable development. I just wonder, in terms of the review
that is going on within the Department of Education and Science,
how we can be training planners to have this whole understanding
of sustainable development integral in the work that they do.
Dr Ellis: I think that is really
key. It is so important that that education on all levels takes
place. The education of planning has become very procedural, very
"staring at your boots", very legalistic, whereas it
needed to be much more visionary and to understand sustainable
development, I think. However, there is another dimension to this,
which is that when people want to engage in planning, the language
of sustainable development is fairly meaningless to them at the
moment, but 30 years ago there were many projects which were putting
planning into schools and higher education, taking plans for local
towns to teenagers and saying "What will we do with this?
What would your vision be?" A lot of that has fallen away,
and so it is not surprising that the understanding of what a sustainable
community might be and how we might contribute to it has also
diminished. That is key about political controversy, because if
there were a shared understanding in the body politic at large
in places like the South East, that there are times and places
that we can build sustainably for environmental benefit, then
it is not simply a NIMBY, no everywhere; it is about what planning
should be, which is the right type of houses in the right place,
meeting the right kinds of needs. That depends on education in
the widest sense.
Q30 Mr Francois: You have made some
candid comments about the planning profession and about some of
the challenges that it faces. In your view, do our planners need
to be reinforced? What often happens practically when you have
a controversial planning application is that you have an under-resourced
planning department at the local authority, which is being taken
on by a well-off housing developer, usually with a battery of
very expensive lawyers, waiting to go to appeal, and the implication
to the planning department is "If you say no, we will appeal
anyway and you will pay the costs" and it goes on the council
tax. So very often it is not actually a fair fight. Do you think
our planners need to be reinforced in order to balance the equation?
Dr Ellis: Yes, I do. I would have
been extremely unfair to suggest that planners are not capable
of this vision, but they are essentially a browbeaten bunch at
the moment, for the reasons that you very accurately describe.
Planning has been shoved around in many local authorities, re-titled,
and certainly chief officer representation in the hierarchy of
local authorities has been diminished. Planning has sometimes
been called "economic development", and all of those
things have contributed to the planning function in local authorities
becoming a solely target-driven, procedural activity, which is
in fact what the effect of ODPM setting targets so rigorously
in planning contributed to. If you want people to think creatively,
then you have to give them time and space and the political backing
to do it. That is crucial. So we do need to support them, and
supporting them is based on the idea of supporting the principles
of planning that we have had for 60 years. We are always being
undermined; we are always in an environment where we are being
told we are anti-competitive, we are dull and we are slowing down
the system, rather than a mechanism which mostly, on a good day,
has been delivering some really positive public sector outcomes,
in the public interest, for a very long time.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
That has been most helpful.
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