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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 517-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL government COMMITTEE
PLANNING SKILLS
MONday 28 APRIL 2008 SIR JOHN EGAN MR STUART HYLTON, MS LYNDA ADDISON and MR LINDSAY FROST
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 69
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee on Monday 28 April 2008 Members present Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts John Cummings Andrew George Mr Greg Hands ________________
Witness: Sir John Egan gave evidence. Q1 Chair: The issue of planning skills shortages seems to have been suggested for at least a decade, and there have been other reports before you: do you think the situation had changed when you made your report or have things changed subsequently, or have things stayed the same? Sir John Egan: I cannot talk about what has happened since the report. I can talk about the situation as we saw it when we wrote the report. We were asked to look at the skills required to create sustainable communities. We first tried to understand what the Government meant by "sustainable communities" and then looked to see whether that was indeed what people wanted. We used the huge amount of evidence there was from Mori polls and polls that we did ourselves to check what it was that people wanted. The nice thing about it was that there was very close similarity between what the Government had in mind and what people wanted. Indeed, we thought that the creation of sustainable communities was a very good end point for the planning process. Instead of trying to make lawyers rich, we should try to create communities fit for people to live and work in, and we thought that the goal that the Government had created in its definition of "sustainable community" was that these were communities that people would like to live in. Q2 Chair: I am interested in the view that you seem to have that planners should have much more generic skills training in project management and partnership working. Sir John Egan: Yes. Q3 Chair: That is not an obvious skill to a lay person that a planner should have. Sir John Egan: When we looked at the situation that we inherit today in most towns, the problem is that I am sure no rational planner would have planned to have the things that are there"! Typically, you will have retail developments here and housing developments here, and schools in the green belt there, and hospitals in the green belt there, and no sense of community and no sense of place. The new things that we have been doing over the last thirty or forty years have not been sustainable communities; they have been something quite different. It might be very convenient to fit everybody's guidelines into these single purpose developments, and we thought the biggest single contribution we could make was to say that what we are doing now is not what people want, and these are not sustainable communities; we should be trying very much harder to create something closer to what people wanted, and these tend to be much more mixed developments than indeed what we have been creating. We thought it was more important to be very clear on what we were trying to achieve, rather than trying to achieve more of what we were doing today. Generic skills: indeed, the whole planning process itself is very wasteful, with loads and loads of misused effort and time, with often the planning application going backwards and forwards between the developer and the planning committee, with planning committees not clear about what they were trying to achieve, with the communities getting things they did not want. The whole idea of planning makes most normal communities very unhappy because they assume this new plan will be against their best interests. We were suggesting that it was very important to have much more cohesion in the pre-planning of a community. We needed a vision, a way of describing that vision, processes to achieve it and processes to engage the community and all the elements of central government in a common cause, working together. We were struck, for example, by what people wanted in their lives. It was extremely interesting. The thing that people wanted more than anything else was to be safe. The second thing they wanted was for it to be clean; the third was for it to be friendly, and the fourth was that they wanted some open spaces for their children to play in, and other things after that: but nobody was attempting to do these things. The police were certainly not involved in the development of any new community. If we were going to plan places for people to live in, there had to be far more cohesion between all the elements of local government, with local government, before we could start to pre-plan the kind of communities that people wanted to live in, and perhaps go back and overcome some of the mistakes we had been making over the previous thirty or forty years - so lots of skills required here. Q4 Chair: Do these same issues apply equally to where you are doing relatively small developments in a pre-existing, largely developed urban environment? Is it the same thing for that as where you are building a wholly new development? Sir John Egan: The committee's view was that we should use the planning process to improve the sustainability of a neighbourhood, and not just dump houses into a field; put houses where they will have the best productivity between retailing and business and so on - try to cut down the car journeys. We were also thinking about CO2 emissions: how do we really get environmental sustainability? Simply adding communities and dumping them into a field and not worrying about their governance - who is going to be in charge; who will give leadership; how will this community work - we have to think about all of these things if we are going to make each development an improvement on a neighbourhood and not simply an annoyance to it. Q5 Mr Betts: Are the terms "planning" and "planners" trying to cover too much? On one level you have skills about the visual environment, almost akin to architectural type skills; and at the other end, on complicated projects say in the city centre like regeneration schemes, you need skills that are more financial, project-management related or even legal. Can individuals encompass that enormous range of skills that would make a planner capable of delivering? Sir John Egan: To be honest with you, these are skills that every business person should have. They are the same skills that make businesses successful: communication skills and project-management skills are all generic skills to all successful businesses, and there is no reason why our planners should not have these skills as well. Some of these planners are planning huge projects that do require stages in them to make them successful. They need pre-planning. They need the same kind of cohesion of effort and thought as any complicated project. I would say that the more complicated it is, the more skills these people require. They are the normal skills of normal business and are not really very complicated. Q6 Mr Hands: On which of your key recommendations in 2004 do you think little progress has been made on? Sir John Egan: Has some progress been made? I am saying I simply do not know the nature of the progress that has been made, although since you asked me to give evidence you said it was more in terms of the thinking behind the report you were interested in rather than the progress, but I have checked on some of the progress that has been made. One of the things we did suggest, amongst all the skills, was skills in central government to delegate to local authorities. We suggested that communities that people wanted to live in were not going to be designed here in Westminster; they were more likely to be designed in local places. The skills to delegate to local authorities were very important. I am delighted to see that some of those skills are appearing. It is very important that we do not try and do it all from Whitehall; that local authorities give leadership to their communities. I am delighted to see that progress has been made there. Q7 Mr Hands: What about a council of training, one of the things you talked about - unskilled councillors or committees making decisions? I recall in the local authority that I recently served on going on a training course for members of the planning committee probably in 2002, quite some time ago; but I cannot recall whether this is compulsory now or recommended. I wonder if you can comment about how far you think that is important and your impression as to how far that has permeated down! Sir John Egan: We thought it was more important that councillors bought in to the vision for the future and the strategy of development than it was for them to do particular planning courses themselves. What we did not like was the idea of councillors sitting on a planning programme who did not agree with the general direction that the plan was going to go in; so we wanted to see informed people agreeing with the general vision and strategy of the community. We thought it was important that they did have some planning background, but it was more important that they bought in to the general plan, and, secondly, that they represented the plan to the community they served. That was more important than trying to become an amateur planner. Q8 Mr Hands: How much does that give rise to a conflict for a councillor, if you are talking about the need to communicate the plan and the vision for the community on the one hand, and on the other to avoid any sense of predetermination of planning application that might be given rise to if you are talking about the general regeneration of an area? Sir John Egan: I think you are going to have to have some predetermined ideas as to the kind of community you want to create. I think we have to be quite bold here. We have done an awful lot of awful planning over the last thirty or forty years - dreadful retail parks with barbed wire around them, business parks with beautiful fountains in them but barbed wire fences around them. The business communities, which can give leadership to communities, are separated off by these barbed wire fences. The person who is probably more likely to be able to keep a neighbourhood clean is the guy who runs the Tesco store; he knows how to keep places clean, so why should he not be helping to keep the general neighbourhood clean? He is the expert on getting sub-contractors to deliver to their contracts. There is loads and loads of expertise in the business community that is not being used to give leadership to their communities. When you are starting to think about the governance of an area, often the business people or the school leaders or the hospitals could be giving leadership, but they are often split off from the community they serve. Governance is an extremely important concept for us to have at the back of our minds when we are looking at the places people live in. It really is not satisfactory to put 20,000 people into a huge field with houses of all the same kind and expect somehow or other some governance to fall into place. These huge housing estates that were built after the second world war simply have not worked, and we need to retro-fit them all, make them places fit for people to live in and put some leaders in there who will help to keep the place clean and help to make it work. These are simply things we have not done or even thought about. Q9 Andrew George: Sir John, would you not agree that there are some "Emperor's Clothes" which your review failed to identify or even acknowledge? Sir John Egan: I am certain there would be. Q10 Andrew George: That is that the planning system is fuelled by greed rather than by need; and that if the process is driven by developers that want to maximise the value of the planning permission secured, how are you ever going to achieve sustainable communities? Sir John Egan: Well, the planning system also builds hospitals and schools. Do we need to put the school into the green belt and have everybody drive there by car? Do we need to have single-purpose retail developments? Do we need to allow any of them? The one thing we did say in the report is that we should stop creating any more of these awful places; just do not allow them to be built. I agree with you entirely. I have got no problem with what you have said. Q11 Andrew George: If land is identified for housing and the community needs affordable housing, how do you achieve that under the present system? What skills are required? Sir John Egan: There are two or three things that we have to do. First, why should we necessarily sell the land - if the Government has developed the land from a brownfield site, we could quite easily split the ownership of the house into the land perhaps and concentrate on getting high-quality, low-cost housing on to this land. Q12 Chair: Can I just take you back, Sir John, to what this inquiry is about? In the context of Mr George's question, what skills would planners need in order to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing within any development? Sir John Egan: Affordable housing is more complicated. Let us say good-quality housing is relatively easy. We have to make sure they are part of mixed developments, and not simply houses dumped into fields. We have considered the governance of those houses and the nature of the community they have gone into, and we have understood that these are places to live, work and live proper lives with open spaces and so on; and it is a little bit complicated but not over complicated. Certainly the one thing we did see was that wherever you put huge numbers of people of the same social class into one area, and do not think about leadership and governance of that area, it will not work. For example, we notice that whenever you have anything more than, say, 30 per cent of affordable housing, it becomes difficult to create the open spaces and keep them clean and get the proper leadership in there to keep it. Q13 Andrew George: What skills are required amongst planners to ensure that the local authorities are not railroaded by the power of large businesses and developers? Sir John Egan: I think what they have to do is understand the nature of the sustainable community as defined by the Government and make that their goal. Chair: That takes us very nicely to John. Q14 John Cummings: The Committee has been told in evidence that the ASC has received to date some £13 million from the Department of Communities and local Government, and that is since it was set up in 2005; and yet there has been immense criticism that the result of that sum has been influencing the learning of only 1.3 per cent of its target workforce. To what extent do you believe that the Academy has filled the gaps identified in practical, technical and generic skills? Sir John Egan: I am afraid I was asked to write a report and we made some recommendations, but I have not been asked to speak to the performance of the Academy at all. If I were running the Academy it might be different to the way it is being currently run, but I do not know anything about that, I am afraid. Nobody has kept me up to speed with its performance. Q15 John Cummings: It did not figure in any of your investigations or inquiries at all? Sir John Egan: It was not in existence. It was brought into existence after this report, and I was not asked ----- Q16 Chair: But you did recommend that the Government should set up a national centre for sustainable communities. Sir John Egan: Yes. Q17 Chair: It could be argued that the Academy for Sustainable Communities is what the Government did to fulfil that particular recommendation, so I guess the question would be: how do you think it is different from what you recommended? Sir John Egan: It was not part of my remit to keep in touch with it. I think I should have done! I personally was not asked to keep any further contact in it at all. Q18 John Cummings: Having said that, how do you think that the ASC could improve its operations? Do you believe that we are getting good value for the £13 million it has spent so far? Sir John Egan: I think I made it clear I was not able to give any evidence about what happened after my report was written. We were asked to write a report, and that is what we have done. I was hoping to keep contact with it through the work I was asked to do on the Thames Gateway, but that soon petered out. The committee did not meet very often, I have to say. Q19 John Cummings: Have you any personal observations? Sir John Egan: I cannot give you any personal observations about the work of the Academy, no. Q20 John Cummings: What do you believe is further required by the Government in order to improve the situation? Sir John Egan: I can only tell you of the things that I thought the Academy should do. Whether they have done them or not, I simply do not know. I simply would not know whether they have been done. Q21 Chair: Can I ask you about the group that was under your chairmanship that wrote the report: how often did you meet, as a matter of interest; roughly how many times did you meet? Sir John Egan: We met many times over about a six-month period. Q22 Chair: Then of course you wrote the report. Sir John Egan: Yes. Q23 Chair: Then nothing? Sir John Egan: I was on a committee that the Prime Minster was chairing, which was to develop the Thames Gateway, and I rather hoped that I would be able to keep contact with the happenings of the report through that; but that particular committee only met two or three times within the year following the report, and then it seems to have been disbanded. I do not know anything much beyond that. Chair: I must say it seems a slightly odd way of doing it, something I am sure we will wish to pursue with the Minister when we finally getting round to hearing the evidence. Q24 Mr Betts: Do you think that once you produce a report like that you should be asked to do maybe an evaluation of progress a year or two years after it? Sir John Egan: I think that is absolutely the case. If somebody has written a report like this, I would have thought it automatic that I should have had some contact with it over time, yes. That seems not to have been the case. Chair: I think we are all feeling that. We do not necessarily need you to explore that point any further, so we will certainly explore it in due course with Ministers, but not now. Are there any additional points that Members wanted to ask Sir John? Q25 Andrew George: It does follow from that; when you took on the brief to undertake the review, were you reassured that all of the efforts that you and your review team would be making in this regard would be followed through? To what extent were you reassured by the Department that all of the efforts you had gone to in producing an extremely comprehensive and well thought-through report would be followed through? Sir John Egan: I was somewhat mollified by the idea of being on the Prime Minister's committee to advise on the development of the Thames Gateway, so I thought that there seemed to be an almost automatic system for me to keep contact with a real life development of the ideas that we produced here. We were hoping that the major hope for the Academy was that it could help in the process of (a) delegating authority from central government, that they could produce a system of checking that could see that progress was being made towards creative, sustainable communities; and also in making sure that the generic skills that we were looking for were being taught to the various professionals that are involved in the planning process. By the way, when it comes to planning, if you try to see a comprehensive planning system under development and being developed, you will see there are literally dozens and dozens of different kinds of people involved in the planning process itself. It is too simplistic just to think of them as people planning by drawing lines on pieces of paper; that is not necessarily the key part of the planning process. We wanted to make sure that all of the people in the planning process were indeed receiving these generic skill trainings. Memoranda submitted by the Planning Officers' Society and Mr Lindsay Frost Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Stuart Hylton, Director of Strategic Planning and Transport, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and Convenor, South-East Region, and Ms Lynda Addison, Consultant, Planning Officers' Society, and Mr Lindsay Frost, Director of Planning and Environmental Services, Lewes District Council, gave evidence. Q26 Chair: I know we can see your names, but can you tell us who you are? Mr Frost: I am Lindsay Frost, Director of Planning and Environmental Services, Lewes District Council in Sussex. Mr Hylton: I am Stuart Hylton; I am head of a joint unit which provides strategic planning services for the Berkshire local authorities, and I am also Chairman of the South East Region of the Planning Officers' Society. Ms Addison: I am Lynda Addison; I am Director of a consultancy called Addison Associates. I am here on behalf of the Planning Officers' society because I sit on the management committee. I am an ex-director of planning and transport from the London Borough of Hounslow. I am a planner. We are all planners in that sense. Chair: You are all from the South East. Mr Hands: Nothing wrong with that necessarily! Q27 Chair: You were obviously here during Sir John's evidence, and I would like to ask each of you to say briefly whether what Sir John matches your experience as planning officers. Mr Hylton: It is struck me that in some respects Sir John was talking about the problems that resulted from planning process that went on some years ago - post World War II housing estates. If we look at the development that is going on today, the majority of housing, for example, is being built on brownfield sites within existing communities rather than stuck out on big fields miles away from anywhere. The development process - he was describing the comprehensive planning that he had aspired to - is very much along the lines of the kinds of development plans that were produced by local authorities just after the Second World War. If you look at something like the City of Manchester plan back in the 1940s, there was absolutely no shortage of vision there, both on a grand strategic scale down to the detailed design of the houses. In that respect, the problems he was describing were not necessarily the result of a lack of planning so much as from a different approach to planning, which is to some extent part of a bygone era. Mr Frost: I would go along with a lot of what Sir John said. I think there has been some progress since his report in 2004, for example on project management through the local development scheme system, and increasingly large applications and planning performance agreements are starting to come in. I think also there is a wider understanding in the profession of what sustainable development means; it is not simply the physical environment, it is also resource use, social cohesion and economic prosperity. We are also getting a clearer idea in the profession on some financial management, financial appraisal issues, which particularly crop up in big, complex, mixed-use developments, particularly where the local authority is seeking development contributions. We need to look very carefully at the viability of development of brownfield sites as to whether they can provide the usual range of requirements. Those are areas where I think there is progress. There are some difficult areas, and Sir John mentioned several. The ones I would add are the leadership role, which is proving very difficult in terms of local authorities and local authority partners producing visions of the sort of place they want to be in fifteen or twenty years' time. It is very easy, in my experience, for that sort of work to be hijacked by the very simple "no" message that one can get from campaigning groups. The sort of breakthrough thinking that was discussed in the Egan report - so we are thinking out of the box - is getting difficult with the sort of tick-box mentality there is in the LDF process, reinforced by the tests of soundness when you get to an examination. I think that is making creativity in planning harder, as there is a sort of audit accountancy mentality that is there. I think that upskilling staff in terms of the generic skills that Sir John is advocating is very difficult in terms of the target culture; it is very much a nose to the grindstone approach - churn the stuff out, hit the targets - and also there are resource problems in many local authorities, to some extent met by planning delivery grant - but that is variable and unpredictable and does not allow you to plan long-term; and the new housing and planning delivery grant will be even more problematic, particularly as it looks as though we are entering a period where the housing market may not be as active as it has been in the past. Most of all, the area where difficulties are coming is that despite some of the advances that have been made on the supply side in terms of bursaries and training to bring more people into the profession, the demand requirements of the planning system are increasing, and the gap, if anything, is widening. Part of that is a fairly unstable policy of legislative background; we are having yet another review of the planning system after several bites over recent years. I think that the perpetual atmosphere of reform does make progress on some of the delivery of sustainable development objectives a bit more difficult. Ms Addison: I think there has been significant progress on some of the aspects that Sir John Egan talked about in terms of the issue around vision and building sustainable communities in the context of the local development framework process. I think that also has moved on. However, because it has moved on, I think it has left real skills gaps with local authorities. One of the pieces of work me and my colleagues have been doing on behalf of the Planning Advisory Service is doing what is called a diagnostic of local authorities. We have done over 80 local authorities now, looking at how they are doing their local development framework process, which is about the vision process, et cetera. I can confirm that we found, as part of that concern in that work, that the generic skills are missing. They are required and they are missing. We have listed them in the POS submission. Also, there are significant technical skills missing in the work that we did as well. There is not very much progress being made in helping those authorities to develop skills, but it is starting to come in to play through work like the Academy for Sustainable Communities, and also the Planning Advisory Service; but there is a lead-in time, and it is a very slow process. Then you have to get those officers and the members - who I will come back to - to attend the training session, which is voluntary - and absorb it and use it. There is a long process time leading in to that. Progress has been made but there are still enormous gaps. Lindsay is right: the gap is getting bigger, and it will get bigger. It is being reinforced because of perfectly valid and appropriate changes to the planning system, but that means a lot of cultural and skill behaviour change, which is going to be very slow to implement. I think that the Academy of Sustainable Communities is now starting to do some of the right work but, again, it is a long lead-in time, so it is not starting to deliver at the moment. There is further to go. Q28 Mr Betts: Is the immediate problem quality or quantity? Ms Addison: In terms of skill, I think it is both. If we do not have within the profession - and it is not just the profession in the whole area because, as our evidence has said, and the Planning Advisory Service, this is not just planners having these skills; this is the wider environmental community having these skills - the private sector and the other agencies that one has to deal with. They all need the skills. It is a problem of the skills not being present, both generic and technical, but also the quantity not being there as well: it is both - given the scale of demand. Q29 Mr Betts: There is a problem, is there not, with this? It was explained to us about the age profile - there are many people about to retire and there is not much in the middle. Mr Hylton: There was a report published last week which said that two-thirds of local government employees generally were over forty, and a third of them were due to retire within the next ten years, and with the demographic generally there is a time bomb in terms of skills building up, which will only compound the problem we have got at the moment. Ms Addison: If you put that in the context of the demand for the skills that was in the Arup Report for the Academy, you have this major problem growing. There is a time issue. Q30 Mr Betts: What are authorities doing to cope, given the ideal solution, which would be lots of highly qualified, newly trained and experienced people, which is ----- Mr Hylton: It is a variety of things. They can try and de-skill the jobs in some cases, and this can potentially solve problems in the short term but can lead to other problems such as a lack of creativity and the good design and negotiation skills. They can grow their own. Q31 Chair: Can you explain that? How can you solve a problem by deskilling? Mr Hylton: In the same way that Henry Ford solved the problem of building cars, by breaking it down into very simple components and pursuing it with more of a tick-box approach. It is a way of processing applications more efficiently. The point I was making is that you can have associated problems with it in terms of the negotiation and design skills that can go into it. Mr Frost: It is essentially less skilled, less experienced people doing the simpler applications, and using your more skilled, more experienced people to do the more complex things. Q32 Mr Betts: Are there other ways that authorities are trying to cope? Ms Addison: There is a major problem in most local authorities that they are short of resources and overloaded with work, which means that they do not have the time to get people to get to the training that they need to do and then start to use it. The other thing they are trying to do is grow their own: they are training up people who have come through this process of bringing in non-qualified people to do basic work, which is fine. Growing their own is one of the ways they are doing it. They are also trying to make better use of other skills - not planner skills - for doing some of the work; and they are also trying to work with their neighbours, adjacent authorities or groupings of authorities, in order to put fewer resources into doing work across boundaries, which in principle is extremely good. However, having party to some of the work they are trying to do in some local authorities on behalf of the Planning Advisory Service - the collaborative work - it is quite time-consuming and it needs particular skills in terms of conflict resolution, partnership development, getting over political issues as well as officer issues. That demands different negotiation skills that you might have had if you were just trying to do things in-house. That is one of the other ways that authorities try to deal with a basic shortage of skills. Q33 John Cummings: Are there examples of local authorities coming together to provide these sorts of educational courses to assist each other? Ms Addison: Yes. Q34 John Cummings: Are they successful? Is it national? Ms Addison: There are groups of authorities that are getting together to work together. Q35 John Cummings: You say they are getting together: are there any examples where such an exercise has been carried out over a number of years? According to your comments this afternoon, this is not a problem that has suddenly descended upon us; it has been there for a number of years. Ms Addison: The current examples I can give you at the present moment are Hampshire getting together to try and work on looking at IT in planning. They are ----- Q36 John Cummings: You say ------ Ms Addison: Sorry, am I missing the point? Q37 Chair: Yes. John is asking whether you have any specific examples where authorities have already been working in partnership so that one could see whether it worked or not, as opposed to people deciding to do it. Ms Addison: Hampshire has. Q38 Chair: How long, roughly? Ms Addison: For at least two or three, if not three years. Also, a group of authorities in Norfolk have. They have been working together on a whole series of things probably for at least three years. There are groups of authorities in London that work together, for example when I was Director of Planning and Transport - so we are talking rather a long time ago, at least fifteen years ago when the authorities in West London were working together to do joint work, and they are now doing also in other authorities in parts of London. Those are just some of the examples I could give you, so it is happening, I am sure. Mr Hylton: I am a living example of it! For the last ten years the Berkshire local authorities have worked together to provide strategic planning. That is included ----- Q39 Chair: For those Members who are not necessarily familiar with Berkshire; Berkshire is entirely unitary. Mr Hylton: Yes. Q40 Chair: Four or five - I cannot remember. Mr Hylton: Six unitaries. For the last ten years we have worked together to deliver the strategic planning services that the County Council used to provide - minerals and waste planning, structural 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 district and borough functions, everything from enforcement, sharing specialist officers like tree and conservations officers, linking up IT, shared evidence-based 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 ten or fifteen 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 short 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 in 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 an 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 of 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 bunch 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 bunch 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 John Egan's point about generic ----- Q52 Mr Betts: How does that compare with your planning budget? Mr Frost: Our planning budget is about 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 managed 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 interaction 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 would 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 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 agro 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 co‑ordinating different stream 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 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 ten 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 co-ordination, 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 under estimated. 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. Q60 Mr Betts: Can I ask whether there is a more optimistic way? There are a lot of immediate pressures, but in terms of the future and attracting young people into the profession, if you are saying, "Do not come and judge somebody's dormer window application but come and help frame a city region and develop a sustainable community, is there not potentially something quite exciting there and should you not encourage more people to come into ----- Mr Hylton: Can I speak from personal experience again? My son has just entered the profession and is now working for a planning consultancy and doing a post-grad part-time; and he has certainly found it quite an exciting career to come into. Despite what I say about being a Kamikaze pilot, I still get a kick out of doing the job and I try to communicate that. Q61 Mr Betts: You have survived so far! Mr Hylton: So far! I am only nineteen, mind! Ms Addison: I am a visiting professor at the University of Westminster and the figures are going up enormously, so it is reflecting exactly what you are saying. The profession in terms of people's interest in going into the profession is growing enormously. The courses are full. Q62 Mr Betts: Have they been expanded as well? Ms Addison: There has been some expansion, yes, correct; but question mark - we have been through this phase before in planning. Like Stuart, I would not want to be anything else but a planner, but we have been through periods where courses have been full but then within a few years they have closed down because there have not been enough people. It is back to the cyclical issue. At the moment they are more than full. They are overloaded and lots of people want to do it, and the quality of people going in to planning has got better, because that went down the pan too. It is positive, absolutely positive. Mr Frost: There is a new course starting up very close to me in Brighton University this year, which will be an enormous boon for planning authorities in my part of the world. Q63 Mr Hands: I have a final couple of questions on the role of elected members and their training and skills needs, whether you think that elected members involved in planning - which is in itself all kinds of possible roles - whether they definitely need training. Should training be compulsory, or are the existing arrangements satisfactory? Ms Addison: On behalf of the Planning Advisory Service, we have done a lot of diagnostic work and we have done member training across the country, and what is very evident is that there is a tremendous desire by members to be trained and there is a real gap in terms of training provision so far. Most of them agree they need it because an awful lot of members still think of the planning system as it was ten or fifteen years ago. Even when you get new members coming in to the system, they come in to the same sort of culture because the planning system has not changed within the authority; and then they are re-introduced to the old system, not the new system. So it is essential, and in my view, from our experience in doing member training and as an ex chief planning officer, it should be compulsory. There should be a programme, and not only just around development control, but the need to understand the local development framework system, because spatial planning is so different. They need to be an active player in it, and that is what we are training them in doing. Q64 Mr Hands: If you made such training compulsory, why should planning be any different from any other set of skills that a local authority member needs, for example licensing or doing any of the other roles? Can you get to a point where, if you make training compulsory for members of particular fields, those fields would inevitably expand and you would reach a position where your members are effectively becoming more and more like council officers and less and less like elected members? Ms Addison: There is a real difference in terms of planning and licensing or other areas of activity that members get involved in. Both planning and licensing are quasi legal and therefore there is a need to understand the system in a totally different way than there is in other aspects of work within the local authority. In my experience, a number of authorities are making planning and licensing compulsory training for members because they believe it is so important, and it is built in to their code of conduct, the standing orders within the local authority. There are others that do not do that. A lot of authorities have a very good programme of regular training and bringing members up to date on licensing, on local development framework information, government guidance, on these sorts of issues. Planning, even more than licensing, engages with the public, day in and day out; it is the most heavily customer-focused activity that the authority does. Therefore, the members need to understand what they can and cannot say and what the current law is, in order to talk to the community effectively. Q65 Mr Hands: I can see where you are coming from, and I do not mean this disrespectfully, but as a planning consultant you are almost bound to want to propose there should be more training for elected members. You are saying it is a quasi-judicial function, which of course it is, but there are a lot of other quasi-judicial functions out there, and a lot of other important functions of elected members where training might be helpful, such as for example officer recruitment and all kinds of other things. I was merely raising the point as to whether at some point you load on so much compulsory training that you might make becoming an elected member unattractive and potentially time-consuming. One of the points that was made is how difficult it is to get elected members to go on the training courses. Obviously, if you pile more and more training courses on, I think it will get harder and harder to get them to go. Mr Hylton: One of the challenges there would be to manage the time you devote to training efficiently. You need to be very carefully focused. You are quite right about the concerns, not so much about going native, but the pressures on members. Simple things like trying to get committee meetings set up can be a major challenge with their diaries being so full; but provided the training is absolutely focused, that will help also to get them to come along to it because they will see that their time is being well spent. Q66 Chair: Would you make a distinction between members of a development control committee, who are deciding applications where you could argue it is quasi judicial, and the wider membership of the council being able to understand the local development framework? If the local development frameworks are truly to reflect the division of elected members, whichever group it is, how will they input to that if they do not understand the way it works? Ms Addison: I would agree with that wholeheartedly, which is why I think all members need to understand spatial planning at a generic level; and then obviously you have got much more specific training requirements, which are not necessarily very frequent, maybe once or twice a year on specific issues around development control as such - but, yes, I think all members need to understand the local development framework, and then the cabinet or the local development framework's steering group, which some authorities have got, need to understand in more detail how you go through the process. Q67 Mr Hands: How much cost benefit analysis has been done on the merits of providing training as a way of reducing the number of successful appeals against an authority? Has anybody ever linked that? Ms Addison: I am not aware of any research on that basis. The only research that I am aware of is that there has been an evaluation through the Planning Advisory Service that Data ... have done on the value of the member training that has been carried out; and that has been very successful. Q68 Chair: How do they measure its success? Ms Addison: Feedback from the events. Q69 Chair: So the members thought it was worthwhile! Ms Addison: Yes, the members thought it was worthwhile, and the local authority has been contacted, and the local authority thought it was worthwhile, but I am not aware of any other evaluations being done - not linked to appeals or anything. Chair: Thank you very much indeed. |