The planning inspector in charge of the T5 inquiry refuses to take the rap for its four embarrassing years. Instead, he has produced a report on major projects which concludes that government must get its act together. Piers Wehner reports
Roy Vandermeer has an albatross round his neck.
Once renowned as one of the country’s top planning QCs, Vandermeer is now better known as the planning inspector who presided over the notorious Heathrow terminal 5 planning inquiry. For four years, from May 1995 to March 1999, the inquiry covered issues as diverse as national air transport policy to the habitat of the great crested newt, at the eventual cost of £80m.
Some business figures – including Sir Christopher Benson, then chair of the Business for Terminal 5 group, and even members of the government – laid the blame for the overblown inquiry squarely on Vandermeer’s shoulders. The official line from the government – which then sat on the inquiry report for nearly a year – was that the outdated planning system was at fault.
However, according to a new, 30-page report handed to the House of Commons’ Procedure Committee last month and seen by EG, the failure was due neither to the planning system nor the individual inspectors. That report, written by Vandermeer, states that, if anyone was at fault, it was the government itself.
“You can’t go about making the system work better by assuming that everything is wrong with it,” he argues.
That, however, is just what the government tried to do. The T5 inquiry was one of the main spurs for the government’s overhaul of the planning system – a reform programme dubbed by former planning minister Lord Falconer as “the biggest shake-up in planning for 50 years”.
Reaction to green paper
In its planning green paper published in December 2001, the government laid out its proposals to take decisions on big projects out of the hands of public inquiries, and hand them over to parliament. Vandermeer is scathing. “The idea of parliament getting involved is ludicrous. But that idea came about as a direct result of the T5 inquiry,” he says. “There were a lot of silly knee-jerk reactions without any real understanding of what the problem actually was.”
Although the government has now caved in after enormous opposition from MPs, and is no longer seeking to pass decisions on major infrastructure projects to parliament, it is still determined to overhaul the system which caused so much embarrassment.
But that’s why Vandermeer thinks his recommendations should be followed. “You don’t have to radically change the system. If the government could understand exactly what happened with T5, they’d see that and maybe they wouldn’t be so jumpy.
“In reality, one of the biggest problems at Heathrow was that the White Paper on airports was a bit out of date,” says Vandermeer. That is putting it mildly. The policy had in fact been drafted in 1985, 10 years before the inquiry began.
Because the policy was so old, witnesses at the inquiry could easily challenge it, a problem only worsened when the then junior minister for transport, Viscount Goschen, described it as “yellow about the edges”. On top of that, the government’s policies on roads and pollution came out as the inquiry was in progress.
More delays were caused because the regional guidance was out of kilter with the national guidance. While the guidance for the South East said that more airport capacity should be provided in the east, national policy was pushing for more at Heathrow.
The inquiry was also upset by the new Labour government ripping up the plan to widen the M25, which had been an important background policy. “It was all made a complete mess. It meant that everyone had to rethink,” Vandermeer recalls.
“And then there was the problem with the local plan. Even though local authorities had been told to draft UDPs 10 years before, they didn’t have a proper UDP for Hillingdon until the last week of the inquiry. We had to go according to a county plan that had been drafted in the 1960s.”
According to Vandermeer’s report, had the appropriate policies been in place the inquiry would have been up to 18 months shorter. “A solution to much of the delay would be to make sure you have the central policies as up to date as possible and that they are clear.”
But his report also suggests that the inquiry was bogged down by an institutionalised obstructiveness within government departments.
“Any of the evidence from Department of Environment [later DETR, DTLR and ODPM] witnesses had to be cleared by civil servants in the department. That could take a long-time and seemed rather pedantic.”
But others suggest the civil servants had been even more obstructive. “We had a lot of pressure from, shall we say, high-level sources,” is all Vandermeer will say.
Clarifying the terms of reference
Before the inquiry even began, Vandermeer decided that the terms of reference, telling him what he should examine and what was deemed irrelevant, were too vague.
“One or two privy councillors said that I should see then Secretary of State John Gummer. I wrote to ask to see him regarding the terms of reference for the inquiry. But I was told that he wouldn’t see me. I had to speak all the time through third parties. So when things went wrong, as with Prescott scrapping the plans to widen the M25, it made life quite difficult.”
During and after the public inquiry, Vandermeer assumed it had been Gummer who had refused to see him. It was only last year that he found out that the former minister hadn’t known anything about his request for a meeting.
But the report also offers the government a ray of hope in Vandermeer’s suggestions for speeding up the inquiry process.
“Rather than making massive changes, a system could be devised whereby the Secretary of State brought the parties to a table before an inquiry even started, like diplomatic negotiation. The perfect moment for them all to talk to one another is the environmental impact assessment stage. Then you would save having to say at the inquiry ‘We don’t like what you have to say’. It would have already been discussed.”
If that had happened with T5, Vandermeer argues, then BAA would not have had to change its entire proposal halfway through the inquiry, after its initial Two Rivers proposal was binned.
“The chance of another T5 is very slim if the parties consult properly. I make no comment on whether they are doing that at the moment.”
Another controversial idea is to give the planning inspector the power to insist that technical detail is not discussed at the inquiry, but only appears in the written evidence. “At the T5 inquiry, we couldn’t say we didn’t want a full public debate on such and such an issue, which would have sped the whole thing up. Air safety, for example, was so technical and in depth that it would have been much better done in writing. Barely anyone was interested in those sessions, anyway.”
But Vandermeer may well be disappointed by the government’s reaction. Following the trouncing of the planning green paper by business and MPs, proposals for the handling of major infrastructure projects seem to have disappeared from the government’s agenda.
All that remains in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill of the proposals to “ensure that T5 will never happen again” is a proposal for a panel of several inspectors to hear evidence concurrently, which says it would be a recipe for disaster.
But with potentially controversial and expensive inquiries on the horizon – projects such as Crossrail, the proposed expansion of Stansted and Heathrow airports and the regeneration of the 42-mile-long Thames Gateway corridor – government sources say that there is still a commitment to a “comprehensive and radical review” of the inquiry system.
● Planning policies must be kept up to date, at a national regional and local level. He claims this could have shaved 18 months off the length of the T5 inquiry
● Inspectors should be permitted to discuss the inquiry with the Secretary of State, without the interference of civil servants
● The Secretary of State should bring relevant parties to the table at the Environmental Impact Assessment stage. This would remove the need for many issues to be discussed at an inquiry, and remove the danger of plans being scrapped midway through the process
● Proper consultation is vital. Vandermeer says that the chance of another T5 is very slim if the government and developers consult properly
● Technical matters should only be presented as written evidence, and not be discussed at the inquiry
