Examination of Witnesses (Questions 581
- 599)
WEDNESDAY 27 OCTOBER 2004
SIR JOHN
EGAN
Q581 Chairman: Welcome, Sir John,
and I am sorry that we have kept you waiting. We may be interrupted
by a further vote in due course but we hope to make some progress
before then. Thank you also for your memorandum. As you know,
we are looking at the whole question of housing policy particularly
in the light of the Sustainable Communities Plan and the Barker
Review and we were very interested therefore in the findings of
your report. Can you just tell us by way of introduction why your
review and its report were thought to be necessary.
Sir John Egan: I think there was
a general feeling within the construction and house building community
that there were not enough skills to allow the agenda to be delivered.
The general view was that it was lack of town planners and things
like this. We came to the conclusion that it was not lack of town
planners which had created the appalling mess of the last 40 years,
it was more to do with not town planning skills but general management
skills of achieving some kind of objective. If the end point of
the planning system had been just to create wealthy lawyers, then
that is what it did, but nobody set out to do that. The planning
system was there for another reason and that other reason was
never made very clear.
Q582 Chairman: To what extent did
you set out your own remit and to what extent was it defined by
the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister?
Sir John Egan: This is the second
report I have done for the Government and I have usually found
it better to look around the problem and then choose, in a way,
my own objectives. What I find is that you have to have a very
clear goal if you are going to achieve anything at all and I wanted
to make sure that the Government's goal in sustainable communities
was correct. I wanted to know who should be trying to carry it
out. I wanted to know what processes existed for carrying out
the goal. Then I wanted to know what skills therefore were needed.
So, I thought that if I just went straight to the skills part,
I would not know what the context for the skills agenda was going
to be. Therefore, I looked at it in a sort of process way of goal,
who was involved, what the processes were and thus what skills
were required.
Q583 Chairman: So you delivered your
own remit, so to speak. It was not one that was set out for you.
Sir John Egan: I developed a wider
remit. I think the only interesting thing for us is, as I said
the first time I made a public speech on the issue, that it is
not often that governments have any good ideas and it is not often
that they have any very big ideas, but here they have both a very
big and a very good idea in sustainable communities and we discovered
that our evidence very clearly demonstrated that the Government
were on the right track with their sustainable communities agenda
and it was more or less the kind of community that people wanted
for themselves.
Q584 Chairman: Although you kind
of invented your own definition of sustainable community.
Sir John Egan: No, we did not.
We used the Government's definition and tried to make it more
operational. If you are trying to create a goal that a number
of people are going to achieve, then you have to be very clear
about what it is and there were too many headings and too many
trails. We reduced it to about seven major areas of concern. We
would have preferred if we had had more time to reduce it to about
five. It is difficult to remember seven and if you were to ask
me right now what the magnificent seven were, I could probably
only remember six.
Q585 Chairman: We have a list.
Sir John Egan: I would have preferred
to get it down to about five. I think this goal concept is very,
very important for good management. One of the critical skills
I think is the skill of central government to delegate authority
to local authorities and I do not think they are satisfactorily
doing it today and I do not think any Government have over recent
years. If you are going to delegate authority, you need to have
a very clear remit and that clear remit is to achieve the goal
of sustainable communities. That is why it is very important to
operationalise it in order that that is what local government
is actually asked to achieve.
Q586 Chairman: One of the things
that this Committee has come up against time and time again is
the balance within the term "sustainable development"
between economic and ecological values. We have said in the past
and I suspect will say in the future that when there needs to
be a trade-off between these two things, almost invariably economic
values take priority. Is this something that you wrestled with?
Sir John Egan: Yes but I would
say that it is slightly more complicated than that. It is not
just ecological values that are important, it is actually what
the people themselves want. What is the way in which they want
to live? When, for example, we looked deeply into various communities
that we looked at and they were all pretty well the same, they
were very clear as to what they wanted. They wanted first of all
a place that was safe; secondly, was clean; thirdly, was friendly;
fourthly, had open spaces for their children; and then a wide
variety of services. Practically every community wanted these
things. If you are going to create safe and clean places, the
absolutely most important thing is governance. Who is going to
make sure that they remain safe and clean? Who is going to give
leadership? We often looked at communities of 10,000 or 15,000
people who have been dumped into a field with absolutely no thought
given to the future governance of their lives with architecture
which did not lead to friendliness and all kinds of things that
absolutely spelt the failure of this particular development. So,
ecological is not the only thing. We also should put in the needs
of the people which are very clearly spelt out when you ask.
Q587 Chairman: I have the list of
your magnificent seven here and, at least in this version of the
list, economic values come send to the bottom.
Sir John Egan: They are in a circle.
None of them is any more important than the other.
Q588 Chairman: That itself is a very
important statement.
Sir John Egan: Absolutely.
Q589 Chairman: Historically, when
push comes to shove, economics has always taken priority.
Sir John Egan: Well, can I point
to another problem and that is the efficiency with which things
are done. Our building industry is not particularly efficient.
I wrote a report on this about five or six years ago when we basically
pointed to the fact that the world cost of something was probably
half of what we could achieve with a reasonable project in the
UK. My worry is that everything is costing far more than it need
do because of the poor planning and management of the whole system.
Much of this has been improved in the private sector amongst repeat
clients but not much has yet been done, or the same big strides
have not been made in the public sector nor have they been made
in the housing sector. They have made good strides but not as
big strides as the big private clients in the construction industry.
So, the economics in a way could be very secondary if we could
improve the efficiency with which buildings are put up.
Q590 Chairman: You said that none
of the seven is more important than any of the others.
Sir John Egan: No.
Q591 Chairman: But where do you think
the greatest challenges lie? In which of the seven is the greatest
challenge? Is it governance that you have already mentioned?
Sir John Egan: I would have said
that really the most important one around which to balance the
rest is future prosperity and that is economics. That you should
be planning for the long-term prosperity of your community is
the, as it were, key idea, but that is only that if you do not
have prosperity, you cannot have any of the rest but I would not
actually say that any one was particularly more important than
the others apart from that.
Q592 Chairman: I was not really asking
that. I was asking where you thought the biggest challenge lay.
Sir John Egan: In the northern
cities, that is probably the biggest problem. In the southern
cities, possibly environmental challenges might be more difficult.
Q593 Chairman: Can I just come back
to my first question and ask you about the remit again. You have
told us helpfully about the way you took the remit and you developed
it and you created an agenda, if you like, of your own, but how
did that final agenda marry up to the original remit set by the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister?
Sir John Egan: We answered the
examination question as put, what skills were required and by
whom?
Q594 Chairman: Was that the only
question you were asked?
Sir John Egan: Fundamentally,
that was the question I was asked, yes.
Q595 Chairman: So, you took what
was a very narrow remit really and expanded it to something much
larger and I have to say as a result much more useful.
Sir John Egan: Yes, I thought
it was. I thought that it was very important to establish that
the Government were right in their sustainable community agenda.
It was such a big, bold step for them to make that I thought it
was very important that we actually supported that and then the
whole debate could move on. I also thought it was important for
us to say that local authorities were in the driving seat. A number
of people thought, for example, that any time you need a big job
doing, you should try and create a special vehicle to do it, but
my evidence is that every society in the whole of the UK has been
badly served for the last 30 or 40 years and every community has
to be retrofitted if we are going to create communities for people
to live in.
Q596 Joan Walley: Can I just press
you on that a little and ask you how what you have just said squares
with the current—I do not know what the word is—fashion
of having partnerships for all kinds of new projects and new initiatives,
so that in fact much of what was traditionally championed by the
local authorities when they were in the driving seat is now dispersed
across a whole plethora of different partnerships and then the
position between the regional development agencies, the local
authorities and various bodies linked to the housing renewal programme.
How does that fashion square with what you have said about local
authorities in your opinion having to be in the driving seat?
Sir John Egan: I think that the
local authority has to, as it were, chair the cabinet of interest
of national service givers. They, after all, have a remit from
the people; they are actually voted into their position. Secondly,
they have to give planning permission; it is in their hands. I
think they should chair a cabinet of national service givers:
obviously health, education, police, highways and so on should
also take a common cause. That is why the goal of sustainable
community is so important that everybody buys into the common
goal of what they are trying to do.
Q597 Joan Walley: What about special
delivery vehicles that are being put forward as solutions to various
problems?
Sir John Egan: They are a shortcut.
It is all right having big powers but I have noticed that, the
bigger the power, the less people listen. What you really do need
and I think the most important thing about this planning system
is that we learn to engage with the population. We learn how to
ask them what they require and we learn to deliver solutions that
answer those requirements. If you mention planning or expanding
any community to any community in the country, there is immediately
a moment of horror as though whatever is going to happen will
be not in their interests. We have to learn to listen to communities
and find out what it is they want. Very often, those things can
be developed through the planning system. For example, most communities
of, say, 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 people think they are very happy
and maybe they are. On the other hand, they have a lot of teenage
crime, they have a lot of missing services and so on and so on
and, if we wanted to give those people the services they required,
we would probably have to expand their neighbourhood but, right
now, I do not think anybody living in a small village would really
want to see their community expanded because they would assume
that it would be done badly. Looking at what we have done for
the last 30 or 40 years, I would have to agree with them.
Q598 Mr Francois: You talked about
the principle of asking people in local communities what they
want and then trying to respond to that within the planning system
and I think all of us around this table would have some sympathy
with that. In order for that to be valid and to be real, do you
not also need the power for local people to be able to say "no"
if they are offered something that they definitely do not want?
Sir John Egan: Saying "no"
is sometimes something that we cannot accept. There are national
reasons sometimes why only "yes" is possible. So, there
are national things that will overwhelm that. In the main, I would
agree with you that no should mean no, but no should only mean
if the issues have been properly described and the people have
been listened to and a proper solution has been offered to them.
Then, perhaps "no" is a reasonable word. If the national
interest overcomes that, my only point then is, let us recompense
them for the nuisance that they suffer. The problem with the British
system is that it goes into the law, the right thing is done,
as it were, according to the law and loser takes all as a general
rule. You get the nuisance and, generally speaking, you have to
pay for it as well. So that really is a pretty sore wound. That
is one of the reasons why people really are frightened of the
planning system.
Q599 Chairman: Can I explore another
angle of this. You said just a while back that economic prosperity
was really the key thing and, when you ask people what they want,
one of the things they clearly want is more economic prosperity
and yet, at the Johannesburg Summit, we signed up to an agenda
to do with sustainable consumption. To what extent do you factor
sustainable consumption ideas into your thinking about the sustainable
communities?
Sir John Egan: If we can look
at consumption in terms of CO2 emissions, then it is easier for
us to grasp, as it were, what we consider. It is relatively easy
to create a low CO2 emission community. From the engineering point
of view, the issues are not so incredibly difficult, they are
really relatively straightforward. The problem is that, to deliver
such a community, we have to build the new buildings for that
community. The supply chains that exist in the UK could not deliver;
they could only deliver bricks and mortar, cement and things that
are not, as it were, the sustainable products for the future community.
We thought that, within eight years they could, and so what we
should do with the environmental standards for buildings is slowly
tighten the screw to the point where, in eight years' time, only
sustainable components would be allowed into the building. For
example, I do not know if you know that to make a ton of cement
takes a ton-and-a-half of oil to create it. So, in using cement
in your building, you are going to be consuming huge amounts of
oil. If you are wasting half of it because most of what we build
is only built at half the world levels of construction, then you
are not sustainable to start with. So, what you have to do is
be immensely more efficient and allow the supply chain to slowly
get itself up to, say within eight years, achieving those sustainable
standards. The Government have set up a sustainable buildings
taskforce and we asked them if they could design the standards
that would eventually lead to a low emission community. By the
way, all kinds of other things are involved of course. We have
tended to zone things in the UK, we have tended to put business
parks in one place, we have tended to put houses in another, schools
and hospitals we have often tended to put in the green belt and
so on and so forth and the only thing that connects them all up,
apart from London, is cars, so people drive around them all and
it has become a nightmare in many small towns to find that you
can only get from one part of this community by car. That is not
sustainable either nor is it very friendly. These are points that
are really very important and, if we are going to create sustainable
communities, they will have to be mixed developments; they will
have to be mixed in terms of socio-economic groups but they are
also going to have to be mixed in terms of office blocks, shops
and so on. When I said that we have to retrofit the communities,
we have to start putting houses around retail centres and we have
to actually start asking retailers to become leaders of their
community and start turning their shops inside out and making
them far more part of the community and not just hiding behind
barbed wire fences.
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