With planning reform in the hands of the man who is failing to sort out the railways, John Gummer calls for ministerial change
There is such a thing as a losing streak and clearly Stephen Byers is off and away down one. I’ve never been as critical of him as others have been but even my goodwill won’t save him now. As I learned the painful way, when things start to go wrong, a Secretary of State has to grab the situation by the throat and fight or the press and the politicians will push him under. There are always enough old scores to be settled and bruised egos to be massaged for the pressures to become intolerable. That is the process we are now watching and, although the chosen battleground is the railways, the present situation cannot be restricted to that part of Byers’ portfolio.
For the property industry, the danger is that it will affect the government’s programme for planning reform. John Prescott sensed the dangers in the whole project and kicked it into touch. Now the green paper is issued, there is no way that his successor can dodge doing something.
I do not, therefore, blame Byers and Falconer for taking up the cause of reform. The timing was pre-ordained by Prescott. The problem is that both are damaged goods. Byers can now do nothing right and that nice man Lord Falconer is still working his passage back after being dumped with the Dome. So, what the prime minister called the most radical change in planning since the 1947 Act is being debated against a background characterised by ineptitude and failure. That is not the best context in which to present what was already a very controversial programme.
Why the fuss?
Of course, there is nothing surprising about it being controversial. Debate and argument is par for the course in any planning application. There is bound to be opposition to large-scale developments such as power stations and airports. Indeed, even a house extension can excite real angst in a neighbour who fears he might lose out.
Sadly, disputes that accompany individual applications are inevitable under any system. We are, after all, trying to make a judgment between all the different uses for a piece of land in a nation where land is in particularly short supply. Planners therefore can’t expect to be popular, not least because they are further restricting what is already a scarce commodity. If that is true in each individual case, it is even more true of the system itself. Entire classes of people are affected by the proposed changes – county councillors and officials, developers, builders, contractors, environmentalists and campaigners, politicians and planners. This is primarily because of the scale of the proposals. Byers has come to the conclusion that he has to reform the whole system simply because it takes too long, is not predictable and is a serious impediment to business.
And no wonder! Britain’s present planning system is slow and cumbersome and, upsettingly, is the most expensive in the European Union. Few dispute that reform is long overdue. I knew that when I first became Secretary of State at the DOE. My problem was that the “plan-led” system had just been introduced by my predecessor and there was no way I could get agreement for further changes until we had seen how the new structure worked. Now we do see. And some of what is before our eyes is truly awful.
The awful truth
This year, nearly 10 years after they were asked for their strategic approach to local development, some 13% of English councils have yet to produce an agreement designed to help developers identify new building sites. We have an impossible plethora of guidance so that every decision reached by a council committee is supposed to take into account 850 pages in 25 government planning policy guidance notes, on subjects as diverse as preserving archaeology to telecommunications. Business complains that the process is too lengthy, environmentalists that it is all too biased. Local people say they don’t get a look in, housebuilders that land has dried up, and campaigners that it’s all being covered in concrete.
No proposal will satisfy everyone, but the trouble with Mr Byers’ suggestions is that they won’t satisfy anyone. Too conservative for the radical, too extreme for the conventional, and altogether too centralist for everybody, these proposals will be picked apart and argued out by all the myriad interest groups involved. That means that real reform is not achievable without a tough minister who has success written all over him.
Byers clearly hasn’t got what it takes, and that’s why he’s not the man for the job.
