Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
MR STUART
HYLTON, MS
LYNDA ADDISON
AND MR
LINDSAY FROST
28 APRIL 2008
Q40 Chair: Four or five—I cannot
remember?
Mr Hylton: Six unitaries. For
the last 10 years we have worked together to deliver the strategic
planning services that the County Council used to provide—minerals
and waste planning, structure planning previously, and now the
input to the South East Regional Plan. That included an element
of training on strategic planning matters. At this moment I am
preparing a planning training course for some of the leading councillors.
Mr Frost: The Surrey authorities
did a project under the auspices of the Planning Advisory Service,
and they looked at a whole range of county, district and borough
planning functions, everything from enforcement, sharing specialist
officers like tree and conservations officers, linking up IT,
shared evidence-base work on planning policy—and that was
the subject of a recent evaluation exercise by the Planning Advisory
Service. I think some of the recommendations are now being carried
through, so that project is into its second or third year now.
Ms Addison: Certainly the authorities
in the South East have done lots of joint training sessions in
terms of just skills development.
Q41 Mr Hands: I have a very quick
question on the quantitative side of this thing. My impression
is that the number of planning applications has increased significantly
in the last 10 or 15 years, which in turn obviously creates more
demand for planners; but how much of that is cyclical, due to
the growth of private sector housing, construction, and large
development, and actually might it solve itself over the next
few years? I am not asking you to forecast the economy.
Ms Addison: In broad principles,
in terms of planning applications and particularly major planning
applications as opposed to the minor and other applications, that
has tended over past history to go with the economy in terms of
it usually lagging behind; the numbers come down when the economy
has fallen. Given the Government's targets on things like housing
development and the local development framework issues, I am not
convinced personally that in effect it will follow the same pattern
in the future; and the growth has been very steady over a long
period of time, and all the projections would look as though the
application process will continue to give rise to some major applications
in order to meet the growth agenda in its broad sense, and the
renewal agenda also of course for those areas that are not growing.
Added to that, a lot of the work we are talking about is not just
derived from planning applications but from the local development
scheme as well, which is driving the demand for more staff and
more input.
Q42 Mr Betts: One way of coping with
the shortages you are talking about is consultants. Is that your
experience, that more consultants are being used at ever greater
expense; and are they being well used?
Ms Addison: One of the pieces
of work that I have done for the Government over the last few
years, which I completed last year, was the evaluation over four
years of the Planning Delivery Grant. I led the research on that
and produced a report for the Government. One of the pieces of
work we did as part of that research was look at where the Planning
Delivery Grant was going in terms of money, and how significant
it was in terms of the overall budgets of local authorities; and
the evidence from that was that there were significant parts of
that money going into us of consultants because of shortfalls
either in expertise or staff resources overall. So the local authorities
have made extremely extensive use of consultants by and large.
The problems they have got is that—I am from the consultancy
sector—the consultants have, by and large, the same problems
as the public sector; in other words there is a shortage of people
with the skills, so it is not necessarily a solution to use the
private sector because we have not got the skills and it is robbing
Peter to pay Paul quite often, with people swapping around, and
there is a gross shortage. Secondly, the private sector itself
is developing the new skills in the same way the public sector
has got to—so that is what it has been doing. Thirdly, one
of the problems that has really been experienced in the practical
skills issue is that the public sector is not good at using consultants.
They are not skilled at drawing up specifications, performance
managing them, ensuring they are delivered to cost time and making
sure they get effective use of the money and judging what the
amount of money is to do the piece of work they are asking for.
This is a new area of expertise.
Q43 Mr Betts: Looking at the range
of skills that are needed and given the Planning Bill will materialise
at some stage and come back in to the House, one of the major
components is the infrastructure levy. It should bring a whole
lot more demands, not merely in quantity but in difference in
nature, on planners' jobs.
Mr Hylton: With one of my other
hats, I am trying to advise colleagues in the Department for Communities
and Local Government on skills issues, and I am going to produce
a report on that particular subject very shortly. A lot of what
is identified in the evidence we have given you today is relevant
to the delivery of the community infrastructure levy.
Ms Addison: They do not have it.
Coming back to the diagnostics that we have done across over 80
authorities, the evidence we have got is the planners do not have
the skills, nor do their colleagues in other departments, whether
education, social services or transport, who need to have the
same skills; added to which, the other agencies that need to have
the skills, like the Environment Agency or the Highways Agency,
also do not have those skills, and they will need them to put
together the community infrastructure levy and the implementation
of that in the local development framework.
Q44 Chair: One of the ways in which
skills and labour gaps can sometimes be filled if there is a shortfall
is workers from abroad. Is that an option at all?
Mr Hylton: There is extensive
use already of planners particularly from Australia. There is
a strong Antipodean component.
Q45 Mr Hands: In my own local authority,
Hammersmith and Fulham in West London, it is astonishing the number
of Antipodean planners we have; it is four or five or six in the
department.
Ms Addison: If you took them away,
most authorities in the South East would collapse.
Q46 Chair: Is that because the Australian
planning system is similar to ours?
Mr Hylton: Yes.
Q47 Mr Betts: In major regeneration
projects it is traditional for the private sector to have a senior
manager for the developer who will have a team of people, including
accountants, lawyers and planners, and the lead officer in the
private sector may not always be a planner. When it comes to the
local authority, the person dealing with the project is assumed
will be a trained planner. Is that necessary, to have project
managers responsible in local authorities who are being advised
by trained planners—
Mr Hylton: I do not think that
is necessarily the case. You find in a lot of planning departments
now that planning is subsumed within wider technical services
or another directorate which could be managed by somebody from
any kind of discipline and who is chosen for generic management
skills rather than necessarily being a qualified planner. The
idea of a free-standing planning department with a chief planning
officer holding sway over it is in many cases a thing of the past.
Ms Addison: To add to that, depending
on what sort of project you are talking about—a big regeneration
project is quite often not led by a planner, but is quite often
led by a regeneration officer in a regeneration department who
may or may not be a planner—could be anything.
Q48 Mr Betts: Are there skills with
regeneration officers and the problem that people do not seem
to have those skills either?
Ms Addison: That is true. There
is a shortage of those skills as well as planner skills, but quite
often you have other people leading those particular projects;
it could be a project manager with project management training,
or a regeneration officer or something in another department.
If you are talking about major planning applications, then by
and large that is a planner that leads those, and increasingly
the view is that they should be led in the way of a project management
type approach, which has not been the situation in the past. That
is why the new planning performance agreements are being suggested
for major complex applications, so they do actually get project
managed as opposed to just dealing with it as an application going
through the system, and it is not managed in terms of the time
frame or the evidence that is needed at any point in time in the
discussions.
Q49 Andrew George: As professional
planners, can I ask you whether planning, as you see it, is an
art or a science; or is it an art trying to be a science?
Mr Hylton: It has elements of
both and several other things—it is also a branch of politics.
Q50 Andrew George: Do you believe
there are circumstances where, if you put all the inputs in, including
the legislative framework in which you operate the local development
framework, et cetera, there is a correct answer and it
is not a debating point?
Mr Hylton: There was a fashion
for what they called systems planning back in the seventies, where
the idea was that you put all the facts into the machine, turned
the handle and out came the right answer. I do not think there
is a right answer. Planning is about dealing with winners and
losers, and there is a judgment to be made about who should win
and who should lose and how the whole process should be managed.
That is what I mean about it being a branch of politics.
Q51 Chair: Mr Frost, you had a specific
point about local development frameworks.
Mr Frost: Yes. You touched upon
use of consultants. Like many other planning authorities, we had
to quite extensively use consultants in our LDF work. I thought
this might come up today, and to date, over the last three years,
we have spent £170,000 on external consultants for various
pieces of work. If I go back to Sir John Egan's point about generic—
Q52 Mr Betts: How does that compare
with your planning budget?
Mr Frost: Our planning budget
is over a million a year, but what we have spent over the last
three years has been far, far higher than we spent under the old
local planning system, just to meet these evidence-based requirements.
I think the key thing in use of consultants—and Lynda touched
upon it—was how you manage them. It is being an intelligent
client, if you like, knowing what questions to ask of a consultant.
I am not a river engineer, but I have recently had to commission
a strategic flood risk assessment, and in the process I had to
know sufficient about flood risk management in order to pose the
right sort of questions to the consultant to get that work done.
There is that element of planner skills in learning sufficient
about an area of work that comes to us now which did not come
in the past, sufficient to manage a project and get the right
sort of questions posed and answered as part of that work.
Q53 Andrew George: You said in your
evidence that the introduction of local development frameworks
resulted in writing off thirty years of planning skills.
Mr Frost: A lot of planning skills
were, yes; the old-fashioned land use planning has gone. It is
now spatial planning and it requires a much bigger canvas that
we are being asked to—
Q54 Chair: Is that a problem or is
that better?
Mr Hylton: It is better in terms
of practice, but it is problematic in the short term in terms
of delivery in that there is a huge learning curve to be gone
through.
Q55 Chair: I am going to move on
to the Academy for Sustainable Communities and ask where you think
the Academy needs to focus its attention, given with the scale
of the problem that it is not going to be able to do everything.
What is the top priority?
Ms Addison: I think it is client
focus, which is very much around the generic skills, is the right
one. I do not think it is possible for it to develop work around
the technical skills. They still need to happen but those can
probably be done elsewhere. I think that probably the priority,
certainly from the work we have done for the Planning Advisory
Service and in discussions with the Planning Officers' Society,
would indicate that it is around issues like negotiation, leadership
and project management, although the Planning Advisory Service
is doing a lot of work on project management now. It is about
understanding the management of resources and understanding the
management of contracts and consultants, which would be a very
useful set of skills for them to develop so that people could
use those.
Q56 John Cummings: Do you think it
is value for money?
Ms Addison: I do not think I am
in a position to make that judgment because I do not have the
evidence to say one way or the other.
Q57 Chair: Do the other two of you
roughly agree with that?
Mr Hylton: In terms of the major
skills, yes. Like Lynda, I do not have the evidence to make a
judgment on that.
Q58 Chair: Given the problems you
have outlined to us, what do you think would happen if these problems
are not sorted out, and does it matter?
Ms Addison: Yes, it matters extremely.
I think you could end up with the outcomes that the Government
is seeking in terms of sustainable communities—houses, viable
communities, attractive places to live—all that sort of
wide stuff will not be delivered. You will end up with the sort
of development that Sir John Egan was talking about with housing
estates that you do not want, which are not sustainable and badly
designed; or you will get a lot of aggro growing in terms of dissatisfaction
by the community and by the private sector in terms that the authority
is not delivering in terms of the planning system; and you will
get a totally demoralised planning system, which will get worse
and worse as people disappear under the weight of what they are
trying to do and the complexity of what they are trying to do,
because they are trying to combine art and science. You need science
to get the evidence; to understand the evidence then you need
the art to negotiate the solutions with the community, with politicians
or the private sector or whoever; so you need a combination of
art and science.
Mr Hylton: The development of
these new areas of skills, for example in coordinating different
streams of investment in order to make the infrastructure happen
that needs to support development—if we cannot get that
right, we will end up with the kinds of problems that Sir John
talked about in terms of uncoordinated development. We are now
bringing a whole load of new players into the planning system
in a more active way—Network Rail, the statutory undertakers,
the emergency services—they are all going to be looking
for a share of the community infrastructure levy. They will need
the kind of skills we are talking about here today in order to
make their case because they are going to compete with each other
for that resource. If we cannot get those skills right, in the
right numbers, then we will have a problem of uncoordinated development,
which will further alienate the public, as Lynda said, and make
it more difficult to deliver the Government's agenda.
Mr Frost: I cannot really add
to that.
Q59 Mr Betts: There is another area
of development that the Government is now looking at, and that
is the whole sub-national review agenda, the development of city
regions, the identification I suppose that the planning will be
an absolutely key element of success in the regions with the transport
element, the skills element and how you make a sub-regional economy
work. Is that simply adding more problems on top of the existing
ones; is that changing the nature of the problem; is the planning
profession up for it and can it respond?
Mr Hylton: We are up for it, but
from 10 years of experience of trying to make sub-regional joint
arrangements work, I can tell you that it is no soft option. If
you ask me what the training needs for somebody in my job are,
I suggest you look at the manual for Kamikaze pilots! It can be
done, but do not assume it is the quickest, cheapest or easiest
way. It has real benefits in terms of coordination, economy of
use of resources and so on, but the difficulty is getting six
very diverse authorities in the case of Berkshire to work together
should not be underestimated.
Ms Addison: It is yet another
change in the planning system, which is affecting people's ability
to focus on the job today because they are worried about what
is going to happen. For example, some authorities are already
starting—some regional bodies are starting to lose staff
because of the threat of a sub-regional review, sub-national review.
It is again about different skills and problems of staff morale
and change that are affecting delivery.
| 
