Examination of Witnesses (Questions 63-79)
MR MIKE
HAYES AND
MS LOUISE
WARING
22 FEBRUARY 2005
Q63 Chairman: Can I welcome you to the
Committee, to the second session on local government consultation
and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?
Mr Hayes: My name is Mike Hayes,
I am the immediate past president of the Royal Town Planning Institute,
and on my left is Louise Waring who is planning policy officer
with the Institute. The Institute has around 16,000 members around
the world, mainly in the UK, and approximately half of those members
work in local government.
Q64 Chairman: Thank you very much. Do
you want to say anything more by way of introduction, or are you
happy for us to go straight to questions?
Mr Hayes: We are very happy to
go straight to questions.
Q65 Mr O'Brien: Your memorandum to the
Committee draws a strong distinction between consultation and
involvement; why is this distinction important and what forms
of involvement would not encompass an element of consultation?
Mr Hayes: It is very important
that local authorities in particular are clear about the purpose
of the exercise in which they are engaging with the public and
the wider community. It might simply be at the level of information,
it might be direct consultation leading to a decision. We need
to be working more generally to a process of more structured engagement
over time. One of the issues that we address constantly is that
planning hits people in quite a sudden way; suddenly someone wants
to carry out something, or maybe you want to carry out a proposal,
and I think that very often individuals and local communities
have no wider context for dealing with the planning issues that
they are being asked to address. They do not easily take on board
the notion of change, they do not easily understand actually that
managing change is fundamental to local government, and the more
we can enable people to participate in the process of thinking
about the business of managing change seems to me to be very important.
To go back to my first point, it is critical that people understand
the purpose of the exercise, the limits of the exercise and what
will be done with the evidence at the end of the exercise.
Q66 Mr O'Brien: The small business association
in their evidence do not believe you, they say that they do not
believe what the planners tell them or even what the developers
say. How do you get over that?
Mr Hayes: I am back in a sense
to the theme I have just begun to open up. It does seem to me
that we need at every level—nationally, regionally and locally—a
more continuous discussion or debate about the nature of our towns
and cities and our local communities. The Institute believes very
firmly that that ought to begin in schools, it ought to be part
of citizenship courses and it ought to open people up to the notion
that, in a sense, the only certainty in life is that things are
going to change. A fundamental issue for us all is how we manage
that process.
Q67 Mr Betts: You talk about the consultation
at local level and say that this happens in the context of wider
decisions that have been taken at national level, where the argument
is that there really is not much consultation, there is a democratic
deficit there. You then go on to say that that should be addressed
by a UK spatial development framework. I cannot think of anything
more likely to turn most people completely off than that sort
of description.
Mr Hayes: You may be right, but
Wales has a national spatial development framework, Scotland has
a spatial—
Q68 Chairman: Wales is only a relatively
little place, is it not?
Mr Hayes: It is. Scotland, another
relatively small place, has a national spatial framework; Northern
Ireland, another relatively small place, has one and indeed the
Republic of Ireland, another small place has one too. I do not
think anyone is suggesting that to carry out such an exercise
for, let's say, in the first instance, England, is easy, but I
think it is very clear—and some recent government policy
initiatives are beginning to address the issue—that there
is no forum for a debate about some of the key investment and
development decisions that take place at national level: airport
expansion; investment in rail infrastructure, in water supplies,
in the location of new communities. I think you could argue that
one of the reasons that some elements of the Sustainable Communities
Plan have been received with criticism is that there was no context
for that plan. It arrived, an announcement, which was portrayed
as 200,000 more homes in London and the South East of England.
Why? Where did that come from? Why did we not know about it? It
does seem to me that initiatives like the Northern Way, three
regions beginning to work together, are actually recognition of
the need for some very broad strategic thinking. At the very least,
while that sort of exercise might not lead to quicker or easier
decisions, I think it would lead to more information, to better
understanding, to this longer discussion about how we shape the
spatial dimension.
Q69 Mr Betts: I am still not quite sure
whether you are asking for elected people to be involved in that
process or for something that engages the wider public. I think
most members of the public switch off when presented with maps
of regions and things outside their immediate vicinity which do
not really excite them or interest them.
Mr Hayes: You are obviously right:
it is hard, except that on individual issues they clearly do get
engaged. We have seen that recently over runways, for example.
These things do excite people quite considerably.
Q70 Chairman: How far do runways excite
people? They want them, but most of them do not want them in their
back garden, do they?
Mr Hayes: Yes, but I am not sure—and
I used to work there—if Glasgow was asked whether it wanted
to expand its airport, or, if Manchester was asked if it wanted
to have further expansion. I am not sure where that debate took
place. I do think we need a great deal more work. The institute
is working with Dutch partners to develop some technical tools
to allow us to do regional analysis to try to predict the impact
of investment decisions and to try to understand the interrelationship
between regions. Getting back to Clive Betts' point just for a
moment, if I may: you are clearly right: it is much harder to
engage people at a broad level than it is at the local level,
but one of our continuing problems/issues is that engaging people
at the local level is often very painful, because people say,
"Who made that decision?" "Who decided that this
site would be a housing site?" or whatever. So I am pretty
clear in my own mind that, maybe starting locally, and then working
at the level of the local authority, and then maybe the level
of the sub-region, and then the level of the region and then ultimately
at perhaps a wider level, we need to engage people progressively
in the business of making plans as well as the business of making
decisions about individual development proposals. If they were
more engaged at that level, that might assist with the process
when it comes to making decisions about a specific development.
Q71 Christine Russell: How do you envisage
the measures in the recent Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act
improving or influencing the situation? I am assuming that you
think they will improve the consultation process, but do you think
they will improve it?
Mr Hayes: I think there is something
quite heroic about the new Act. It is a very brave attempt to
rebuild the planning system—we have not done that for half
a century—and to reinvent it in a rather different way.
The notion of—to use the jargon—"front-end loading"
and the notion of "statements of community involvement"—the
idea that you try to get the players together at the beginning
of the process, to understand what the individual agendas are,
to understand where people are coming from—seems to me to
be wholly right. That, then, aligned to the notion of—and
I think there is a huge test here on whether this can be delivered—a
quicker plan-making process, a sense almost of a rolling plan,
continually reviewed and updated, seems to me, in theory at least,
to offer the possibility of people becoming more easily engaged,
of being more aware of the issues and feeling that they have had
their say at the right point of the process, at the beginning
rather than at the end. One of the most disillusioned, almost
sad group of people I have ever met in my local government career
was a very, very active community in Waterloo in North Lambeth,
who had tracked the process of developing the Lambeth Unitary
Development Plan for all of its nine years of gestation and then
discovered that planning decisions were being made that did not
meet what they thought they had signed up to in the plan-making
process, because the planners said, quite rightly, "Decisions
are made on their merits."
Q72 Mr Clelland: You said "they
thought", who were they?
Mr Hayes: This was a community
group in Waterloo.
Q73 Mr Clelland: Obviously it cannot
be the whole community, but a group of active people.
Mr Hayes: Yes, a group of local
activists who had a particular agenda about protecting the local
residential community but who had dedicated themselves in a very
fine way to being engaged with the planners.
Q74 Mr Clelland: How do you know how
representative they were of the whole community?
Mr Hayes: Actually, they had quite
a lot of local community support amongst the residential community.
But that was not the point I was making. The point I was making
was that plan-making takes forever: it is bureaucratic; it is
easy to lose the plot; policies change. So I am all in favour
of trying to move towards a slightly more light-footed, faster,
more informed, up-to-date process of planning.
Q75 Christine Russell: Do you think the
members of your institute are as enthusiastic as you obviously
are personally about the new legislation?
Mr Hayes: I have just spent an
exhausting year trailing all around the UK and Southern Ireland
talking to lots and lots of them in lots of ways, and, yes, they
are. I think it would be foolish not to recognise that town planning
has been through a very, very difficult couple of decades—sadly,
most of my professional career. Marginalised, beaten up, told
at one stage that the developers were the people who knew best
and—
Q76 Chairman: I do need rather shorter
answers.
Mr Hayes: Okay. So there is a
morale issue, there is a resource issue, and there is a skill
issue, but there is absolutely no doubt that our members are up
for the new agenda.
Q77 Sir Paul Beresford: The Planning
and Compulsory Purchase Act took the decision-making on housing
matters away from county councils.
Mr Hayes: Yes.
Q78 Sir Paul Beresford: It has given
them to regional assemblies.
Mr Hayes: Yes.
Q79 Sir Paul Beresford: In the South
East there is a general feeling that the SEERA has no contact
with the local people. They do not know anything about it, it
does not appear to fit in with their idea of regions, and there
is considerable discontent. They are in the process of consulting
on numbers, and, apart from my argument that they have asked the
wrong questions, the typical reaction of the public is that they
do not know who they are, they have never heard of them, they
have got no interest in the consultation, and they would really
like it with their local county council because they have an attachment
to it. Would you agree with that?
Mr Hayes: I would agree with your
analysis of how people are reacting. If you are asking me to agree
that we should return to county structure planning and the like,
then I would not agree. This is very much a personal view—I
need to make that clear—but it is also the institute's view,
in truth. But I am aware that I work for a district council in
the East of England region, so I am engaged with some of these
issues with another hat on. It does seem to me that the county
council boundaries are a bit of a problem. They are historic;
they do not reflect the way the world works. It is also quite
clear that regions are huge, particularly the South East of England
and the East of England, and people do not easily identify with
them.
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