The Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) has lashed out at the Government following rumours that a planning shake-up could lead to the end of public inquiries for controversial schemes.
Gideon Amos, director of TCPA, said that scrapping public inquiries would lead to a “potential disaster for community involvement and a retrograde step for quality decision making”.
The Government is currently looking for ways to speed up the planning process, in order to avoid delays such as those that dogged Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Labour’s election manifesto pledged: “We will streamline the planning process, particularly for infrastructure projects. For larger projects, public inquiry procedures will be improved by stricter timetabling.”
The proposals have been interpreted by TCPA and by some action groups as a covert threat to scrap public inquiries.
Amos said: “The lack of explicit and detailed national policies and investment programmes on big infrastructure is the real cause of delays, rather than the public inquiry system.”
A source within the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions said that it was unlikely that the proposed overhaul of the planning system would put an end to public inquiry, but would introduce national policy statements that would restrict inquiries to the detail and not the initial proposals.
EGi News 20/06/01
