Supplementary memorandum from Friends
of the Earth
Response to specific questions from the Environmental
Committee following Friends of the Earth's Oral Evidence Session,
16 July 2004
INTRODUCTION
Your letter of 23 June posed two additional
questions surrounding the contribution of the new Planning and
Compulsory Purchase Act and the draft PPS 1 (Creating Sustainable
Communities) to the achievement of sustainable development. Specifically
you were interested in how the new Planning Act could be a barrier
to sustainable development and how the new PPS 1 could adequately
contribute to the effectiveness of the planning system to the
achievement of sustainable development.
THE DELIVERY
OF SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT THROUGH
THE NEW
PLANNING ACT
Our principal concern surrounds the way the
new Planning Act empowers and defines sustainable development
and how this then relates to the content of PPS 1. Superficially
the new Planning Act contains a new duty for the planning system
to promote sustainable development. In fact the position and weight
of sustainable development throughout the Planning system remains
confused.
Clause 39 of the Act requires that those with
planning responsibilities under the new system must exercise the
function "with the objective of contributing to the achievement
of sustainable development" (Cl39 (2)). This is clearly a
substantially qualified duty suggesting that decisions must contribute
to, rather than necessarily directly achieve, sustainable development.
In addition the Act itself provides no definition for sustainable
development, instead Clause 39 (c) suggests that such a definition
will be contained in national guidance. Crucially decision-makers
only have to "have regard" to national guidance. This
weak formulation has a number of effects:
— It means that there is no ultimately
binding definition of sustainable development enshrined in planning
law. We believe this should have been a crucial step to setting
coherent policy.
— It places very great responsibility
on PPS 1 to provide a robust definition of sustainable development
since this will be the principal guidance provided for the planning
system.
— Whatever the content of the guidance
in PPS 1 the Act limits its influence by creating a weak legislative
construction to define how much status such guidance has in decision-making.
(Having "regard to" national guidance clearly implies
that such guidance is only one of many considerations and not
necessarily the principal one).
The important question to consider is if sustainable
development is at the heart of the planning system why has the
government gone to such lengths to weaken the Clause 39 duty so
as to render the obligation to achieve sustainable development
as well as its definition in guidance so ineffectual?
THE DRAFT
PPS 1
Notwithstanding the concerns expressed above
it would still have been possible to make a robust and directive
definition of sustainable development in the Draft PPS 1 so as
to make clear the core purpose and objectives of planning. Instead
PPS 1, while containing much policy which is welcome, fails to
deliver a clear view of where sustainable development fits the
decision-making process and what it might mean. A detailed description
of these concerns is contained at Annex A in Friends of the Earth's
submission to ODPM on Draft PPS 1. In summary our concerns are:
— PPS 1 confuses the objectives of
sustainable development with those of sustainable communities
as defined in the Communities Plan (ODPM 2002). These two ideas
have distinctive rationale and differing objectives. It is not
clear in PPS 1 what relationship these two ideas have to each
other and which has primacy.
— PPS 1 simply omits important aspects
of the sustainable development ideal which are expressed in the
UK Strategy and other policy documents.
— PPS 1 fails to give a clear direction
on the need to integrate the four pillars of sustainable development
rather than trade them off against each other.
— PPS 1 places far higher emphasis
on house building and economic activity than it does, for example,
on climate change or other key environmental issues.
STRUCTURAL CONCERNS
The Planning Act makes radical structural changes
to the existing planning system by abolishing all current development
plans and replacing them with legally-binding regional plans and
new local development frameworks at the local level. This new
framework is extremely complex and it is not clear how this complexity
will help implement sustainable development.
Instead of one plan with policies and a map,
England will have a series of documents known collectively as
a Local Development Framework (LDF). This will include: A Local
Development Plan Scheme (LDS), Development Plan Documents (DPD's)
including core policy and action plans, Local Development Documents
(LDDs) which will include Statements of Community Involvement
(SCI). These documents are intended to have differing legal weight
in decision-making and may be adopted separately. Each document
will be replaced every three years and reviewed annually.
It is not clear what problem the Government
is trying to solve through this new framework but the result is
a confusing mess which is a barrier to the implementation of clear,
strategic, sustainable development. A prerequisite for any effective
planning system is structural simplicity. Ironically the Act contains
just a system in Part 6 which applies only to Wales and includes
the retention of one simple local plan document with one adoption
process. It is also illustrative of the cultural challenge to
get the planning system to deliver sustainable development, that
the word sustainable appears nowhere in the description of this
vitally important suite of new documents.
July 2004
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